The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe, 1970-2005

The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood

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The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood Western Europe, 1970–2005

Fatima Naqvi

THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL RHETORIC OF VICTIMHOOD

© Fatima Naqvi, 2007. This work includes material adapted from “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007); from “The Abandoned Victim: Cosmology and History in Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer” in German Life and Letters 57:2 (2004): 219–35; and from “Elfriede Jelinek’s PostDramatic Stress Disorder: Analysis of a Programmatic Aggression” in Gegenwartsliteratur (2006): 1–28.All images from Anselm Kiefer are Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery; stills from Michael Haneke are courtesy of WegaFilm; drawings from Friederike Mayröcker are courtesy of the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7570–6 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7570–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Naqvi, Fatima. The literary and cultural rhetoric of victimhood : Western Europe, 1970–2005 / by Fatima Naqvi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7570–1 (alk. paper) 1. Social perception—Europe, Western. 2. Victims. 3. Victims in literature. 4. Social psychology—Europe, Western. I. Title. HN373.5.N36 2006 302.12—dc22

2006050185

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Content s

A Prefatory Note on Translations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Sacrificial Victims: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer

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1 Politics of Indifference: René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk

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2 Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke

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3 Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer

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4 Mourning is Moot: A Brief Reprise of Freud

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5 Feminization and Impoverishment: Friederike Mayröcker

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6 The Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq

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7 Cognitive Dissonances: Elfriede Jelinek

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index of Names

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A Prefatory Note on Transl ations

After long consideration, I have made the following choices regarding translations, and I would like to explain my decisions before beginning. For the reader’s ease and the text’s fluency, I have generally offered English translations of all French, German, and Italian titles in the body of my text, including books where no translation is yet available (one can always hope). I have indicated the foreign language title in parentheses the first time the name appears and thereafter only use my translation in the main text. In the endnotes, I have also translated those titles to which I wanted to call attention. From the bibliography, the reader can glean which texts are actually available in English. For the film titles in the chapter on Michael Haneke, I have used the same method, giving either my own or the accepted translation and placing the original in parentheses. The film Caché is an exception. Since it was released in England and the United States under the French title, I wanted to preserve the defamiliarization that the American distributors thought worth keeping. For quotations, I give the translation followed by the original language text. I did this because I often highlight a peculiarity or multivalence inherent in the original, especially in German. When I discuss the authors Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayröcker, and Elfriede Jelinek in particular, I also felt I should always include their very poetic and hermetic prose in the original for two reasons. First, I want to give polyglot readers who might be unacquainted with their works a sense of the writers’ idiosyncratic German. Second, I seek in this way to compensate for my inadequacies as a translator. In the cases of Sigmund Freud, René Girard, and Giorgio Agamben, I rely largely on James Strachey, Patrick Gregory, and Daniel Heller-Roazen respectively. I only rarely diverge from their translations. When I reference Freud’s, Girard’s, and Agamben’s texts in my own explications without quoting directly, the page numbers refer to the English editions. If readers are curious as to why I use Strachey’s translation—with which I so often take exception—the answer is quite simple. Strachey’s is the best-known and most widely used English version. I also rely on the Concordance to his Standard Edition of Freud’s works in my introduction.

Ac knowled gment s

I would like to thank my colleagues at Rutgers University, especially Richard Serrano and Michael G. Levine, for their insightful comments on portions of the manuscript. My students, both undergraduate and graduate, have been crucial accomplices: their critical questions often led my thinking on the subjects broached here to take new directions. To the University— in particular to Deans Holly Smith and Barry Qualls—I am grateful for an extended sabbatical and family leave, during which I was able to do research in Vienna and have a daughter. I am indebted to the Austrian government (which in an exemplary manner fosters international relations between Germanists of the West and, more importantly, the East) for a Franz-Werfel-Fellowship in 2003–04. Professor Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler demonstrated unflagging enthusiasm for my work during each of my research stays in the country. His sources of energy are still a bit of a mystery to me, and I will, in vain, aspire to his vast erudition in matters literary. In Vienna, Karin Schiefer at the Austrian Film Commission has been an invaluable resource. Christoph Holzhey’s generosity and consummate skill as an analytical reader deserve special mention—he has profoundly influenced the way I think and write. Thanks also go to Elisa Primavera for commenting on chapter 2, to Klaus Kastberger for his remarks on chapter 5, to Rayd Abu-Ayyash for his analysis of chapter 6, and to Daniela Strigl for committing her scarce time to various parts of the manuscript. This book has profited very much from our conversations during her stay at Rutgers in the fall of 2005; with her presence, this was truly a halcyon semester. Significant gratitude is my anonymous reader’s due; the detailed suggestions for improvement accompanied me over the last year as an unusually benign super-ego. For his advice during the pre-publication process, I am thankful to my friend, mentor, and advisor, Professor Eric Rentschler. Finally, I would like to thank my editor Farideh Koohi-Kamali and her assistant Julia Cohen at Palgrave for answering myriad questions during the publication process itself. Some of the ideas expressed here have seen the light of the academic day, albeit in a different form than in this book. Here I would like to thank Lutz Koepnick and the University of Michigan Press for the rights to include material adapted from a chapter on Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (2006). I am grateful to Blackwell Publishers for the rights to include material from my article on Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer that appeared in German Life and Letters 57.2 (2004): 219–35. A version of chapter 7 on Elfriede Jelinek came out in Gegenwartsliteratur (2006): 1–28; I would like to thank Paul Michael Lützeler for suggesting I write on Jelinek in the first place. I very much appreciate Friederike Mayröcker’s interest in this project. She has kindly allowed me to reprint some of her drawings here. Gratitude is owed to Dr. Veit Heiduschka and Wega-Film for granting permission to use stills from Michael Haneke’s film, Benny’s Video. The Gagosian Gallery has generously supplied stills from Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre; Valentina Castellani and Brad Kaye have been a great help. Without my mother’s unflagging efforts this book would never have come into being. She has been reader, library support, and most importantly, grandmother. She earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees with me, as well as my Ph.D. This book is for her. It is also for Chris, who found moments in his inordinately dense schedule to help edit and collate (and whose judicious mind quashed unnecessary flights of poetic fancy). Malena, the next book will be for you: I’m sure you will be an immense help as soon as you can talk.

Introd uction Sacrificial Victims: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer

To say that we have been living in and as a “victim society” (“société victimale”) in the West for the last few decades is, by any measure, a bold assertion.1 The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who uses this audacious phrase off-handedly, does not really specify what it means in his interview in Paroxysm (Le Paroxyste indifférent, 1997). This is, however, not just an ageing philosophe’s curmudgeonly ratiocination or a vacuous, millennial slogan. A persistent anxiety about victims and victimhood has been present in a variety of cultural manifestations over the past thirty years. In the context of the interview, the Frenchman implies two things about this “victim society.”2 First, his phrase suggests continuity within the broken temporality of modernity.3 Baudrillard’s concern with the Western self-perception as victim, irrespective of any concrete harm, reaches back into the early nineteenth century. It transcends the fixation on the new, the innovative, and the radical break we have come to associate with everything modern. Second, Baudrillard intimates that the perception of victimhood has undergone a kind of diffusion and intensification today. It is far more widespread than it once was and encompasses society in its entirety rather than particular groups (33). In the English translation, Baudrillard’s arresting expression is carefully separated from the remainder of the text within single ‘scare’ quotes. In this manner, emphasis and distance are simultaneously signaled. Both strike me as appropriate—there is something powerful but nonetheless counterintuitive about his neologistic concept. Common sense indicates that the West is still, in economic and political terms, in a position of superior power and, if anything, victimizer rather than victim. The sense of being victims could, perhaps, be the prerogative of distinct groups or individuals within the West (such as women, ethnic minorities, postcolonial subjects, or homosexuals), but certainly should not be that of society as a whole.

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This book is about why many authors, filmmakers, artists, and philosophers in Europe share Baudrillard’s sense that we have become a “société victimale.” More to the point, it is about how their cultural anxiety expresses itself; about how such rhetoric sometimes criticizes itself; and, above all, how victim talk perpetuates itself in the very moment that the ground seems to be pulled from beneath it.

I In order to systematically elaborate the meanings of the term “victim,” I would like to start my inquiry from the multivalent dictionary definition of “victim.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s continued acceptance as an impartial standard helps map a kind of changing consensus regarding the word’s meaning.4 The primary definition of “victim” relates the word either to the pagan sacrificial ritual (“1.a. a living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to some deity or supernatural power”) or the Christian religious context (“b. applied to Christ as an offering for mankind”). Although this entry is etymologically anterior to the others in the list and hence is given pride of place, this first definition seems to have long ceded ground to the supposedly secondary and tertiary meanings of “victim” (607). The definition for “victim” under 2.a. also does not pertain to the intangible sense of victimhood to which Baudrillard alludes: “A person who is put to death or subjected to torture by another; one who suffers severely in body or property through cruel or oppressive treatment.” Rather, those clarifications revolving around a more abstracted sense of injury under later subheadings seem relevant for our purposes. Indeed, definition 2.b., which speaks of a victim as “one who is reduced or destined to suffer under some oppressive or destructive agency,” and 2.c., which mentions that a victim “perishes or suffers in health” because of “some enterprise or pursuit voluntarily undertaken,” are particularly germane. Definition 2.b. points to the diminution (“reduction”) or impoverishment of the self in many contemporary victim narratives—psychological suffering abrogates the full unfolding of the self. The impersonal nature of the experience is, with the OED’s general formulation, inadvertently moved to the center of our attention: in many victim narratives, harm arises from either unidentified or non-localizable institutions of “destructive agency.” Definition 2.c. indicates that the feeling of victimization at the hands of an indistinct, anonymous entity arises within the context of the greatest possible freedom of choice (“voluntarily undertaken”). After 2.b. and 2.c., where a type of predestination toward suffering comes into conflict with an element of willed self-harm (which suggests that either definition applies, but not both together),5 we arrive at the third definition of “victim” in “the phrase to fall a victim to (some thing or person),” which seems to run counter to definition 2.c., with its emphasis on human volition. Definition 3 introduces passivity into victimhood or reintroduces it, if we take 2.b. to

INTRODUCTION

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mean passivity as well. The element of decision-making in pursuing an activity that leads to harm is not a factor in this final definition. Without further elaboration, the last phrase suggests either the inexorability of fate or the contingency of chance, and it may corroborate the “destiny” implicit in definition 2.b. All definitions, ambiguous and contradictory as they are, pertain to the contemporary impression of victimhood at issue in this book. Most surprisingly, definition 1—with its cultic overtones and its allusions to the sacred—remains applicable. It actually still holds pre-eminence in the logic underpinning the generalized perception of victimhood that I discuss. Baudrillard, however, does not focus exclusively on this one aspect; rather, he creates the adjective “victimale” in French to activate the various clashing meanings of “victim.” For him, ubiquitous victimhood comes into being as a result of global forces, where events succeed one another without historical meaning, the social realm is liquidated as a political factor, and all differences become irrelevant (Paroxysm 8–11). Baudrillard is, as I have indicated, not alone. He shares this view—with different inflections and emphases of course—with an impressive set of people: the French literary critic René Girard, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the Austrian director Michael Haneke, his fellow national, the writer Christoph Ransmayr, the German painter Anselm Kiefer, the Austrian literary doyenne, Friederike Mayröcker, the French best-selling author Michel Houellebecq, and, finally, the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. These are, in my view, some of the most important artists and thinkers in Europe reflecting upon victimhood at the moment (with the exception of Girard, based at Stanford), and their concern warrants close attention. If I fall into a kind of ventriloquism at times, speaking in the first-person plural from the viewpoint of their respective victims, it is to show the rhetorical persuasiveness of this ethically complex speaking position. Although this book began as an in-depth study about the conditions and forms of victim discourse within the spatially and temporally circumscribed confines of post-war Austria, it quickly became apparent to me that subtle permutations of victim rhetoric were not limited to the small republic, struggling in the 1980s to come to terms with the repercussions of its foundational ‘myth’ as Hitler’s first victim during the Anschluß. Indeed, stumbling across Baudrillard’s eye-catching phrase, I realized that the circle had to have a greater radius; that the uses to which victim rhetoric was being put—in often highly sophisticated fashion—were geographically spread, with an older lineage than 1943 (the year of the Moscow Declaration, in which the Allies set Austria-as-victim down in writing). So my inquiry broadened, as I tried to make sense of the millennial appeal to victimhood I encountered in widely divergent works and texts. Victim status, rather than being shunned per se, appears as a means to create a tenuous affiliation within a radically atomized society, that is, when Robert Musil’s modern “man without qualities” has become the paradigmatic exemplar of contemporary humanity. It gains a particular foothold—as a popular

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discourse pervading all kinds of cultural manifestations in Western Europe— in the period after 1968 (as Baudrillard himself suggests throughout Paroxysm and in The Transparency of Evil [3–13]). I begin by asking how stricter definitions of victims in criminology foreshadow the development toward a “victim society.” In the remainder of the introduction, I also look at the sacrificial victim narratives that come to the fore in Sigmund Freud’s and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theoretical reflections on “victim society.” How is sacrifice and victimage intrinsic to the construction of empowered victims (see def. 1.a.)? In what manner do these thinkers conceive of the sense of victimhood as being endemic to society, and how is it related to questions of substitution? The spread of victim society also broaches the question of affective involvement, to which I turn in chapter 1. Here I discuss works such as René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacré, 1972) or Peter Sloterdijk’s The Contempt of the Masses (Die Verachtung der Massen, 2000), where the psycho-social effects that victimhood generates in individuals and in groups within mass society and in mass-mediated society are explored. In the latter regard, Sloterdijk’s narratives on society’s ‘soft differences’ and Michael Haneke’s films, particularly his Benny’s Video (1992), become relevant in chapter 2. Indeed, for all of the men so far, victimhood is intimately related to and dependent on violence, and Haneke delves into the relationship between victim society’s paradoxically inclusiveexclusive relation to violence and the dissemination of images of suffering. Where violence subtends all human interactions—where, for example, National Socialism produces an atemporal narrative of extreme human victimization—the issue arises whether violence is given a transcendental ‘spin’ and hence brings with it redemption (LaCapra, History 144–55). For this reason, I am concerned with whether or not the sacred returns in rhetoric highlighting or even aggrandizing violence, even when directed against the self. Must a discourse of victimhood inevitably give rise to apocalyptic or exculpatory narratives?—I ask in chapter 3. Here I discuss Anselm Kiefer’s Cosmos and Star Paintings of the mid-1990s onward, as they dovetail with the concerns Christoph Ransmayr brings to the fore in his biographical essay on the painter, “The Unborn” (“Der Ungeborene,” 2001), and his prose poem, Resplendent Decline (Strahlender Untergang, 1982). Because so many of these works—in particular Kiefer and Ransmayr’s— are profoundly melancholy, I return to the strict Freudian sense of this adjective to ponder the relationship between victimhood, melancholia, and tradition in the brief chapter 4. This marks the transition to the second half of this book, where I look at solutions to “victim society.” Why is the victim in Freud’s seminal account of melancholia feminized, psychically impoverished, and beholden to a replay loop that suggests stasis? For Friederike Mayröcker, particularly in her novel The Communicating Vessels (Die kommunizierenden Gefäße, 2003), there seems to be a gendered resolution

INTRODUCTION

5

possible to the melancholic fixity and eternal repetition of such a speaking position in the very reduction of the ego we encountered in definition 2.b. In chapter 5, we see how she counteracts an aggressively paternalistic tradition with an art of impoverishment. Peripherally in Mayröcker’s work (in its concern with material superabundance), but more significantly elsewhere, unease with consumer society coincides with the stress on voluntary victimization and anonymous agencies of harm in Western-style democracies (def. 2.c.). We are led to wonder: do consumer individualism and the pluralization of possibilities lead to the reduction of humans to a bare, undifferentiated form of life, along the lines Giorgio Agamben has proposed in Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995)? Once this hyperbolic state has been reached, it may become possible to transcend the conditions of victimization. I follow up on these questions in the controversial works of the French author Michel Houellebecq, looking closely at his Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994) and The Elementary Particles (Les particules élémentaires, 1998) in chapter 6. Where may a strategy of hyperbolic identification with victims begin and what are its possible post-traumatic effects? In conclusion, I examine Elfriede Jelinek’s post-dramatic works with emphasis on A Sport Play (Ein Sportstück, 1998). Her extreme rhetoric of victimhood inevitably calls attention to victim society’s ungrounded grounds.

II The topic of victims has long been broached in legal studies and even spawned its own sub-discipline in criminology.6 For reasons I intimate later, the definitive distinctions these fields require are far removed from the welcome ambiguities of the cultural realm.7 Nonetheless, some points they raise merit our attention here. Precisely because they distill difficult issues down to a raw essence, the problems confronting us with the phrase “victim society” emerge all the more clearly. In Victimology: The Victim and the Criminal Justice Process, which discusses the importance of stringent definitions of victimhood in the legal realm, Sandra Walklate argues that the status of victim is something to be “achieved” through the complete absence of acts leading to harm on the victim’s part. Victim status pertains in those cases in which our own behavior does not “contribute to or exacerbate our victimization” (xii). In this instance, the definition of the word “victim” under OED. point 2.c. is challenged: it matters how one arrives at a self-definition as victim, since the non-willed nature of victimhood is paramount. Only a pursuit involuntarily undertaken contains the potential to confer legitimate victim status. As Walklate explains, this is particularly important because the definition of victimization is always at issue in criminal cases of rape, to name the bestknown example. Where women are subjected to physical injury, they may

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be blamed for being victims who bring harm on themselves (the infamous “victim precipitation” argument, 3–4).8 Walklate indicates that social and, by extension, juridical legitimacy is essential when someone defines herself as a victim, especially in cases involving physical acts.9 I would like to inquire into the reasons why someone might conceive of him- or herself as a victim outside of physical, psychological, or material harm that can be prosecuted in a court. While the examples I discuss are about acquiring legitimacy or lacking it, they are not concerned with the domain of jurisprudence, but with the social world, where an ethical legitimacy is in question. The assumption of victim status may be correlative to an unassailable high ground, when others believe that this status has been rightly “achieved.” Perhaps the burgeoning interest in victimology—the study of victims, their typology and social status, as well as the asymmetrical relationships and differential power relations between victims and victimizers—in the post-war period is a first step toward a “victim society,” in which neat delineations between victims and victimizers are called into question.10 Victimology itself begins with works such as that of criminologist Hans von Hentig, who in his seminal book, The Criminal and His Victim (1948), attempts to classify victims according to character traits that would make them more or less prone to being killed. Von Hentig gives contour to the partially responsible victim, and his cast includes depressive, acquisitive, wanton, and lonesome types, who precipitate their misfortune (419–38). With the shift to the prospective victim who is at least partially culpable for any future injury, victimology takes on an anticipatory dimension. It speaks in a future anterior, where a person is made responsible for a victimization that has not yet occurred.11 Once the viewpoint that a hapless person could instigate his or her plight gains credence, it seems a small progression from the innocent victim to a paradoxically guilty one. Baudrillard’s assertion in Paroxysm that we are today living as a “victim society” suggests that the potential of becoming or, in some form, being a victim has been internalized, together with the guilt for letting it be so. He generalizes from the paradoxically guilty individual to the body politic where all members, regardless of wealth, station, education, creed, color, and so on, can potentially see themselves as victims.12 Baudrillard clearly links his neologism to a ‘new sentimental order’ (“le nouvel ordre sentimental” [33]), a phrase also placed in scare quotes in the English translation, which in turn is meant to resonate with an earlier essay, “The New Victim Order” (“Le Nouvel Ordre Victimale,” see note 2). What he allusively describes for this society and this new regime is a kind of affective fallout from the processes of modernization, including the Industrial Revolution and colonization, in which emotions such as guilt figure prominently. While he thus gives “victim society” an older lineage (in which

INTRODUCTION

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Nietzsche plays an important role) than the one I describe here, he maintains that we have reached a particularly acute phase in the late twentieth and incipient twenty-first centuries. The “paroxystic phase” (“la phase paroxystique”) insinuates the priority of an emotional economy, where there is a strong disaffection with the status quo. For thirty years, he claims, we have been living in a dedifferentiated, indifferent phase where there are no more guarantees for belonging: “It’s a kind of horizontal field in which everyone must find their mark” (15) (“C’est un espèce de champ horizontal où chacun doit trouver sa marque” [33–34]). It seems that the problem lies in the loss of fixed hierarchies, of vertical coordinates: Westerners futilely try to inscribe themselves in a field of social relations where there are no fixed points. The assumption of victim status here becomes important because it seems to guarantee our emplacement; however, it has, in Baudrillard’s opinion, not been legitimately “achieved.” A generalized “victim society” occurs concomitantly—I am hesitant to relate it in any causative or chronological manner—with the progressive questioning, or as Baudrillard would say evacuation, of historical continuity (15–16). When the sense of oneself as a historical being has become equivocal (for history would seem to provide another resistant frame of reference), there is a willingness to interpret psychological and physical harm that has occurred in a new manner. Certain victims, such as the Jewish victims of Nazism, risk becoming some victims among many. They are compared, for example, to victims of Stalinism (see the German Historians’ Debate, or Historikerstreit, in the mid-1980s in Germany).13 In other instances, where the effort is made to reinstate historical meaning to counter the threat of amnesia, emphasis may be placed on other victims—such as German civilians in Allied bombing campaigns—who for a long time were discounted due to socio-political considerations and fears of quantitative tallying.14 With these examples I touch on some of the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the proliferation of discourse surrounding victimhood: we run the risk of seeming insensitive to the claims of those who have been historically injured, where material and physical claims cannot be separated from psychological ones. Qualitative considerations quickly seem quantitative, with one victim being counted against another. Law professor Martha Minnow, discussing some of the developments I outline cursorily earlier, also mentions the potential pitfalls of talking about “victim talk” (1412). In an article for the UCLA Law Review from 1993, she argues that one may seem to be aligning oneself with a vengeful, conservative crowd that would stress the victim’s rights (relying on subjective testimonials) over against any exculpatory narratives on behalf of criminals. While her interest also lies in the effects of the victims’ rights movements on sentencing in the United States of America,15 she is more concerned with a new mode of discourse that actually reverses “victim blaming.” She takes to task this strategic

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reversal. Hentig’s 1948 book is characteristic of an earlier moment with respect to the developments Minnow outlines. He actively sought to focus the spotlight on the victims’ dyadic relationship to perpetrators in an effort to complicate crude scenarios allocating guilt. The current tactic of willingly embracing victim status is, for Minnow, an attempt to simplify complex social interactions and arrest dialogue about issues such as compassion or entitlement (1432).16 As we will see, there is a socially “rebounding quality” to the subjective accounts of hurt that are set against one another (1417–28). In the place of dialogue one finds formulaic, ritualized exchanges, where testimonials become incontrovertible evidence. The sense of victimization that is espoused and expounded does not engender agency (Minnow offers honor duels in the antebellum South as a counterpoint). The embrace of victimhood erases human volition and enshrines the passivity we encountered under OED definition number three. In this regard, the escalating blame games she describes take on an almost tragic, stichomythic rhythm. In the leveling of all differences that ensue, Minnow fears the loss of differentiated narratives of victimhood that are grounded in particular, socio-economic, and historical accounts (1429–31, 1437).17 It is such differentiation, with corresponding symmetrical as well as asymmetrical relations between victims and victimizing agencies, which makes the victim narratives I look at particularly interesting. In the main, intricacy, subtlety, and beauty characterize the texts and art works I examine, which largely avoid the pitfalls of more overtly juridical and political “victim talk.” However, I should mention the following at the outset. In steering clear of neat delineations between right and wrong, good and evil, they generally also engage in a rhetoric of victimhood at a remove from specific historical considerations.

III While Minnow’s answer to the political, legal, and social issues she raises is optimistic (she urges us to espouse complexity against simplicity), she is aware of how important the manner of articulation is: it matters how we tell our stories of victimization (1432).18 I, too, commence this book inquiring into the kinds of narratives that are common in the presentation or self-presentation as victim. Psychoanalytic accounts, in particular, are dependent on a victim scenario (Dever 1–6). It should come as no surprise that the spread of depth psychology today, often in bedraggled, popularized form, makes it a repository of stock victim narratives (chapter 2).19 Leaving this popularization aside for the moment, we can argue that Freud’s questionable contributions to natural science are more than compensated for by his vast importance to wide-ranging philosophical and cultural issues of the sort I discuss here (Levine 1–9). To gain an insight into the centrality of victimhood for Freud’s writing, a glance at the Concordance to The Standard Edition of the Complete

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Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud is helpful: it lists eighty-seven entries for the term “victim” in the psychoanalyst’s oeuvre (Guttman 403–04). There is an additional entry in the English Concordance for Freud’s quotation containing the French variant “victimes” in The Interpretation of Dreams (4: 60). A perusal of the list, which gives fragments of the sentences in which “victim” is embedded, makes clear that the word generally occurs in one of four sometimes overlapping contexts, roughly matching the subdivisions of the OED definitions discussed earlier. First, it appears in the generally accepted usage for someone who has—presumably through no fault of his own—suffered harm that comes from the outside. This corresponds to the OED definition 2.a., “one who suffers severely in body or property through cruel or oppressive treatment.” Such phrases as “the person who is the victim of the injury, pain” (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 8: 230), or “who had himself been the victim of an earlier seduction” (Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, 3: 152) belong to this category. Second, it is used in a more abstract sense to refer to someone who is prey to his own hurtful inner workings and corresponds to OED definition 2.b. dealing with a “destructive agency.” To this latter group belong such statements as “a neurosis should make its victim asocial” (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 18: 142) or “she fell a victim to a splitting of her mind” (Autobiographical Study, 20: 31). Third, we find the OED definition number 3, the phrase “to fall a victim to” in various contexts, which is not always separable from the other definitions mentioned earlier. “Victim” is pronouncedly used in this manner in two of the three phrases containing the pronoun “I.” These instances, as the marginal annotations in the Concordance show, occur in Freud’s early work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). There he describes himself as a diligent medical student who is the “constant victim of an impulse” to learn only from monographs, and he portrays his surname as a “victim of feeble witticisms” (4: 172; 4: 207).20 It is also used in this rather colloquial way when talk is of drives, instincts, or wishes undergoing repression (“wishes that have fallen victim to repression,” Interpretation 4: 244; “sexual life that must fall a victim to repression,” Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis 10: 248).21 However, what strikes me after this survey is the recurrence of the first dictionary definition of the word “victim,” relating to the concept of pagan or monotheistic sacrifice. Only in its etymological allusion to the Latin “victima” does the English word “victim” recall this definition, which seems furthest from any understanding today. This connection to sacrifice arises from the dual meaning of the German word for “victim”; in Freud’s native tongue, an “Opfer” is also a “sacrifice.” For this reason, the German Konkordanz—which I have avoided simply for the English-speaking reader’s ease, but with which the aforementioned points could have been equally easily made—lists 132 occurrences of the term “Opfer,” a singular and plural

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noun (Guttman 4038). In the English version, “victim” and “victims” is coupled with “sacrifice” and “sacrificial” nine times in Freud’s writings.22 Three more times mention of the “animal victim” makes apparent that sacrifice is at issue. It is further present, if we include the “sacrosanct victim” of the “holy mystery” in ritual killing (Totem and Taboo 13: 134; 137;147;149). This frequency, the reader may have guessed, is due to two significant Freudian texts separated by a quarter of a century: Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu) from 1912/1913 and, to a lesser extent, Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion), published 1939 in its entirety only after Freud had fled National Socialist Vienna for London.23 In both sets of essays, Freud broaches the question of human communality under prevailing conditions of adversity. The distance between Freud’s sacrificial victim and Baudrillard’s victimized society is smaller than may appear. Indeed, Freud’s attempt to describe the affective condition of a generalized victimhood bears affinities to the intangible psycho-social malaise that Baudrillard describes with his locution “victim society.” An element of sacrificial rhetoric remains present in the contemporary usage of the term. It is also from sacrifice’s ambivalence that the picture of concomitantly aggressive and innocently guilty victim emerges. By starting his perorations on sacrifice at the beginning of Part IV, section four in Totem and Taboo with an explicit definition of “Opfer,” Freud himself suggests that the double meaning of “Opfer” is central to an understanding of all abstracted victim narratives (13: 121–94).24 He carefully stresses its meaning as sacred “sacrificium,” noting that the nonreligious usage followed from the subordinate meanings of “Opfer” (13: 161–62). Freud envisions mankind’s original victimization culminating in the primal murder in the infamous fifth section on “The Infantile Return of Totemism” (“Die infantile Wiederkehr des Totemismus”) with his customary caveats preceding and following his dramatic reconstruction: “Let us call up the spectacle of a totem meal [...] ” (13: 140).25 Drawing on the anthropological, archaeological, and socio-historical studies he has cited earlier, Freud audaciously describes the first cannibalistic feast on which all human progress comes to depend. In order to explain the features of exogamy and totemic ambivalence in ‘primitive societies’ and in more ‘advanced’ cultures, Freud imagines—drawing on a mélange of Charles Darwin, James Atkinson, James Frazer, Johann Jakob Bachofen, and particularly William Robertson Smith for inspiration—the sons’ slaying of the tyrannical, all-powerful, sexually omnipotent father. The primal horde’s retrospective apotheosis of the father articulates itself in all later permutations of the initial feast, when the sons devour the dead elder to incorporate his strength. Momentary alliance (“verbünde[n]”) is necessary to overwhelm and overcome (“überwältigen”) the dominant father. As a result of the overturning of their conditions of victimization, the sons can found a new order. The rescuing of the fortifying “organization”

INTRODUCTION

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(“die Organisation, welche sie stark gemacht hatte” [9: 174]), which transforms them from “pitiable” and “hapless” victims into “strong” victims, is the necessary by-product of their successful revolt.26 We do not have to subscribe to Freud’s reconstruction of “mankind’s earliest festival” (13: 142) (“das erste Fest der Menschheit” [9: 172]) to construct a viable theory of victimhood with relevance today. It has become a commonplace in literature on Freud to lament the speciousness of the anthropological research, the apparent Lamarckism underpinning his view of inherited, collective guilt, and the fallacious Darwinism of patriarchal hordes.27 These problems can be taken for granted and Freud’s theory nonetheless moved from the realm of historical to psychic reality, as Peter Gay and other scholars advocate.28 This would be in keeping with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s assertion about Totem and Taboo: “Freud did not have to be a historian, for the pivotal event it presupposes does not really have to take place in historical time. It would be as absurd to ask Freud to date the primal patricide as it would be to inquire in what year Cain murdered Abel, the primal fratricide” (21). The anthropologist Robert Paul, who has devoted a monograph to the parallels between Freud’s genetic myth as it is elaborated upon in Moses and Monotheism and the Torah, has also convincingly argued that we can retrace Freud’s reasoning without making his wrong turns. If we do so, we can see how “cultural symbol systems” and “individual psychodynamic constellations” inform one another in a “dialectical, mutually constitutive process” (5). When we interpret Freud’s society of victims and victimizers in Totem and Taboo as a psychical construction accounting for the dynamics of human fellowship, sacrificial victimage—the condition of being a victim as well as the practice of seeking out a symbolic victim for purposes of expiation (OED Additions 297)—becomes the necessary precondition for society’s development. Victimization of numerous, competing individuals occurs at the hands of a superior agent, who is feared, envied, and admired for the very power with which he subjugates others. He represents the “destructive agency” we encountered in the OED definition 2.b. This victimizer can only be overcome if many share the sense of victimization. Freud’s story places emotional ambivalence—where fear, envy, admiration, and love coexist—at an imaginary beginning, where a sense of community through victimhood arises. The victims must make common cause, using some “cultural advance” (“Kulturfortschritt” [9: 171]), to overcome their maltreatment (13: 141). Freud distinguishes his idea of Hegelian progress through the sublation of victimhood into a higher kind of self-victimization from the cyclical Opfer that Atkinson describes in primal hordes.29 Atkinson’s conception of victimhood frustrates Freud in its inability to go beyond a vision of eternal violence and chaos, as a telling footnote indicates. The psychoanalyst’s comments on Atkinson are formulated in an exasperated German subjunctive, of which I offer my own translation: “In this manner,

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no new organization of society would ever come into existence [...]” (13: 142 n.1) (“Auf diese Weise käme eine neue Organisation der Gesellschaft niemals zustande [...] ” [9: 172 n.1]). Freud’s dialectic, on the other hand, is efficacious, even if only to be had at a price. Progress, in the form of new weapons technology and a concomitant “feeling of superiority” (“Gefühl der Überlegenheit” [9: 171]), precedes the overturning of victimhood and in turn enables other progress—social organization and moral obligations (13: 141–42).30 The sacrificial dynamic, with its foundational violence, becomes the motor of cultural development and solidarity. This is the case especially after the guilt for having killed the father is internalized, which leads to a form of life predicated on self-renunciative acts.31 The primal father dematerializes almost instantly in Freud’s account, with his literal incorporation and then metaphoric internalization as guiltinducing super-ego, and he finds later reincarnations in a variety of mortal and immortal guises. In this way today’s profane meaning of the word Opfer emerges from a discussion of the origin of religion: the sacrificial victim becomes the ground for all social functioning, reliant as this is on the denial of unfettered desire. The question will arise, in the course of this book, what happens when desire is entirely liberated and its denial no longer a requisite moment in societal functioning, above all post-1968. Such a socio-libidinal sea change invariably will inflect the perception of victims and sacrifice. For the moment, however, let us remain with Freud’s text: over against the private property and individualism of capitalism, Freud envisions an early communal order based on sacrifice in Totem.32 It is worth noting the generally positive coding of the scene of victimization and the ritualistic order that defines the society founded on violence. Sociability within the “company of brothers” (13: 142), or “Brüderschar,”33 is only one permutation of other possible consortia of men, the “Männerverbände” (9: 171–72).34 In the German original, Freud places particular emphasis on the solidarity founded through sacrificial actions. Because translator James Strachey leaves out Freud’s stress,35 I will retranslate the passage here: “The sacrifice was, as can be proven, at first nothing other than ‘an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers,’ an act of sociability, a communion of the believers with their god” (“Das Opfer war nachweisbar zuerst nichts anderes als ,an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers’, ein Akt der Geselligkeit, eine Kommunion der Gläubigen mit ihrem Gotte” [9: 162]). Freud’s quotation of the English, followed by his own translation into German, and by a second rephrasing all serve to emphasize his larger preoccupation with communality based on victimhood. A whole complex of words returns over and over again to the idea of a collective, ranging from the shared nature of the sacrifices just mentioned (13: 133), to the commensal meal (13: 134), and the act of communion in Christian mass (13: 155).36 Freud’s usage of Darwin’s theory of evolution

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is a further hint that the “communism”—to employ Darwin’s and Atkinson’s overdetermined expression37—inherent in Opfer is at issue in Totem and Taboo. Before speaking of parricide in the closing chapter, Freud quotes from the German translation of The Descent of Man (1871) at length, in which Darwin (in turn citing Dr. Savage in the Boston Journal of Natural History) discusses male jealousy and competition in the animal kingdom. For Darwin, the powerful affect of jealousy leads him to doubt that absolute promiscuity was ever likely: Therefore, if we look far enough back in the stream of time, ... judging from the social habits of man as he now exists ... the most probable view is that primaeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives “agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community”. [...] The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the same family. (qtd. 13: 125) (Wenn wir daher im Strome der Zeit weit genug zurückblicken und nach den

sozialen Gewohnheiten des Menschen, wie er jetzt existiert, schließen, ist die wahrscheinlichste Ansicht die, daß der Mensch ursprünglich in kleinen Gesellschaften lebte, jeder Mann mit einer Frau oder, hatte er die Macht, mit mehreren, welche er eifersüchtig gegen alle anderen Männer verteidigte. Oder er mag kein soziales Tier gewesen sein und doch mit mehreren Frauen für sich allein gelebt haben wie der Gorilla; denn alle Eingeborenen stimmen darin überein, daß nur ein erwachsenes Männchen in einer Gruppe zu sehen ist. Wächst das junge Männchen heran, so findet ein Kampf um die Herrschaft statt, und der Stärkste setzt sich dann, indem er die anderen getötet oder vertrieben hat, als Oberhaupt der Gesellschaft fest [...]. Die jüngeren Männchen, welche hiedurch ausgestoßen sind und nun herumwandern, werden auch, wenn sie zuletzt beim Finden einer Gattin erfolgreich sind, die zu enge Inzucht innerhalb der Glieder einer und derselben Familie verhüten. [qtd. 9: 152–53])38

With the quotation from Dr. Savage, Darwin stresses the antagonism to which the tyranny of the older male gives rise. A contest for mastery ensues between young and old male (cf. Paul 17–21). Shortly after this reference to the establishment of exogamy at the end of section two, Freud downplays the aspect of natural selection between group members in part four. Against Darwin, he notes human conduct to be less like the behavior of mutually exclusive gorillas than that of interconnected chimps—the brothers must come together in bands.39 However, for all his emphasized difference from Darwin here, Freud seems to draw on other arguments in The Descent of Man, which make a case for the preferable nature of solidarity over rivalry

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within communal life and in natural selection. Freud partakes of this collective aspiration without speaking of fidelity or “sympathy,” as Darwin does.40 Victimhood and its attendant ambivalence is a kind of compensation for collective “sympathy,” Darwin’s optimistic expression of an eminently moral constitution. In this positive form, community is dependent on the ritualistic repetition of the scene of victimhood and victimization, even if it was originally generated through a joint loss and the mourning of that loss. “The totem meal,” Freud elucidates, “which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion” (13: 142) (“Die Totemmahlzeit, vielleicht das erste Fest der Menschheit, wäre die Wiederholung und die Gedenkfeier dieser denkwürdigen, verbrecherischen Tat, mit welcher so vieles seinen Anfang nahm, die sozialen Organisationen, die sittlichen Einschränkungen und die Religion” [9: 172]). While Freud may be working deductively from the ritual of Communion, with the ingestion of the body and blood of Christ in the form of wine and bread, as Paul has argued (8–9), he is more abstractly concerned with the imbrications of ritual and victimage. The acts of sacrifice guarantee democratic equality and, more than that, a kind of social belonging. In order to function, however, ritual and sacrificial victimization are dependent on iterability. For this condition to be met—for repetition to be able to occur—a resistant, delineable context is necessary. As such, Freud begins with a closed social group of the primal horde, into which he can somewhat tautologically read the resistant context that is only ever guaranteed through the repetition of its foundational moment. Freud’s primary insight in Totem for the study at hand is, then, as follows: in an increasingly disenchanted world at the beginning of the twentieth century, the common experience of victimhood becomes a means of generating cohesion through systematic affirmation of the experience. However, it requires a closed community within which the “spectacle” of sacrifice can found and regenerate bonds as they fray (13: 140). In other words, Freud returns to the origins of mankind to envision an alternative to the radical dissociation of modern society; at this point he espouses sacrifice as a generator of “communism.” He dissolves what we could call ‘vertical’ relations of difference predicated on a stark, incommensurable asymmetry between victim (son) and victimizer (father) into ‘horizontal’ relations of difference, where the religious and cultural foundations are based on a new symmetry between victims (some sons) and victimizers (other sons). It is a fragile, but nonetheless democratizing undertaking.41 In his ambiguous use of the word “horde”—which anthropologically designates a smallish, loosely knit group, but carries overtones of a “large and unorganized mass of people” (see Strachey’s note in Totem 13: 125, n. 2)—Freud seems to capture

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in nuce the conflicting thrust of section five of Totem, the post–father segment I have been discussing. He wants to reconcile the small, homogeneous, and loosely knit horde with the large, heterogeneous, and utterly disorganized mass.42 Indeed, in light of the centrifugal threats to cohesion in the multiethnic, polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire at Freud’s time of writing, it is unsurprising that Freud is concerned with the issue of community and cohesion, and it is today tempting to suggest a parallel to the current European Union.43 Furthermore, it is a question of generating a logical coherence in place of the lacking cohesion that threatens the brotherly band and the bands of brotherhood. Freud’s trepidation in advancing his hypothesis, his vacillation, self-questioning, and rhetorical feints stylistically mimic the delicate effort involved in generating consistency.44 His murder story creates narrative coherence through the hair-raising “historical truth” (“historisch zu nennende [...] Wahrheit” [16: 191] [...])—as he himself later calls it in Moses (23: 85)—of the primary victimization and the commonality it supposedly generates. Does Freud in Totem already call into question the fantasy of community through victimhood, implicit in the band of brothers? There is some justification for arguing this. First, there is the overlap between his communal ritual and what Freud describes as pathological melancholia. Freud fleshes out his reflections on “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie” [10: 427–46]) in an essay written shortly after Totem and Taboo and published 1917 (14: 239–58). There seems to be a closer relation between melancholia and sacrificial rituals than Freud’s description of the salutary “mourning” (“Trauer”) in the totem feast would have us believe (13: 140). Melancholia’s fixation on past injustice at the hands of another person, the ambivalence toward this narcissistically chosen loveobject, the repeated return to the traumatic experience of injustice, and the manic unleashing of pent-up emotions are all characteristics Freud otherwise locates in “mankind’s earliest festival.” Second, the necessity to return, over and over again, to the primal murder, to re-enact, and re-dramatize the conditions for the current state of equality and fellow feeling insinuates the compulsive nature of social relations dependent on victimhood.45 Third, he highlights the necessary drama in victimhood and victimization: when Freud approvingly quotes Robertson Smith’s hypothesis of the “commemoration of a mythical tragedy” in ancient Semitic ritual (23: 152),46 we should be sensitive to the strong and weak meanings of “tragedy.” Precisely the spectacular, dramatized enactment of the scene of victimization in later festivals renders it suspicious: the victim puts on display his powerlessness to render himself all the more powerful. While Freud will problematize the victim’s self-aggrandizement in the more personal Moses and Monotheism many years later, he will ultimately recuperate this selfaggrandizement on a higher level as a necessary step for the victim.47 With a view toward the following chapters, we may say that the increasingly

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mediated moment of self-aggrandizement (when achieving victim status is linked to the mass media’s attention) is included, in a highly embryonic form, in Freud’s Totem. Freud’s definition of “sacrificium” also casts a shadow on his interest in the establishment of community. His explanation is, after all, focalized through the individual, be he neurotic or otherwise. Freud apparently draws his definition of Opfer from the nineteenth-century GrimmWörterbuch, with which he will later work in the 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (17: 219–56) (“Das Unheimliche” [12: 227–68]). For in this dictionary, sacrifice is treated in a religious context before it is elucidated in a secular sense. However, Freud uses “self-renunciation,” “Selbstentäußerung,” where Grimm’s Dictionary speaks only of renunciation, defining “Opfer” as something “offered or suffered” and dependent on “privation or renunciation” (“etwas mit entbehrung oder entsagung dargebrachtes oder erlittenes”) (italics in the original).48 Here, Freud is offering a definition of “victim” much closer to contemporary German definitions of Opfer, where the stress also falls on the self.49 Since the Strachey translation leaves out the accent on the self in Freud’s explanation, I again advance my own to highlight Freud’s etymological quest: “From the other sense of ‘self-renunciation’ the profane usage of the word developed” (“Von dem Nebensinn der Selbstentäußerung ging dann die profane Verwendung des Wortes aus” [9: 161]).50 Freud’s definition must encompass an element of selfabnegation and painful self-renunciation, if the parallels he postulates between phylo- and ontogenetic development are to make sense. The correspondence between mankind’s and the individual’s evolution must go hand in hand to make Freud’s paradigm cohere. With the ideology of bourgeois individualism strong and national, religious, ethnic, and other pressures bearing down on any sense of community, Freud is wary of idealizing the primal horde’s solidarity too much. Instead, he infuses his post-patricidal horde with a more up-to-date vision of social anomie and isolation: where a tenuously communal id was,51 there only isolated egos can be.52 In Moses and Monotheism, Freud returns to Totem and Taboo to mark his distance from the original scene of victimization: there is no longer a resilient, delimitative context for sacrifice in the late 1930s. Freud deterritorializes and universalizes the experience of sacrificial victimage, even as he attempts to apply his earlier findings to the origin of Judaism and its dialectical relationship to Christianity.53 I noted that the totemic ritual provides Freud with a clear framework for developing his ideas about social cohesion and societal development. When, under the pressures of National Socialism and its own homoerotic “male confederacies” or “Männerbünde” (23: 84 and 190),54 he turns back to the primal patricide to interrogate the questions of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and Judaism’s resilience to hardship, he has good reason to further underline a victim’s ultimate triumph over any adversary.55 For my purposes, it is worth looking at the

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role of ritual, so fundamental to Opfer ’s value within a social body. In Freud’s construction of the Judaic religion, the Egyptian priest Moses— influenced by pharaoh Amenhotep’s sun-worship—brings monotheism to the oppressed Semitic tribe living under Egyptian domination. Leading them out of Egypt in what becomes the historical core of the Exodus narrative, Moses imparts to the Hebrews the severe demands of the new god, for which he is murdered. Now, in Freud’s 1937 historical account in the second essay, [...] the main function of the priests [was] to develop and supervise the ritual, and besides this to preserve the holy writ and revise it in accordance with their aims. But was not all sacrifice and all ceremonial at bottom only magic and sorcery, such as had been unconditionally rejected by the old Mosaic teaching? Thereupon there arose [...] the Prophets, who tirelessly preached the old Mosaic doctrine—that the deity disdained sacrifice and ceremonial and asked only for faith and a life in truth and justice [...]. (23: 51) ([...] war die Hauptleistung der Priester geworden, das Ritual zu entwickeln und zu überwachen, überdies die heiligen Niederschriften zu behüten und nach ihren Absichten zu bearbeiten. Aber war nicht aller Opferdienst und alles Zeremoniell im Grunde nur Magie und Zauberwesen, wie es die alte Lehre Moses’ bedingungslos verworfen hatte? Da erhoben sich [...] die Propheten, [...] die unermüdlich die alte mosaische Lehre verkündeten, die Gottheit verschmähe Opfer und Zeremoniell, sie fordere nur Glauben und ein Leben in Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit [...]. [16: 152–53])

We see that the progress that Judaism represents for Freud relates to the prohibition placed on outward sacrifice (self-sacrifice and self-renunciation are, of course, still present). Freud no longer deems sacrificial ceremonies such as the totem feast worthy of preservation. Progress, in terms of communal feeling and banding together, is not reliant on any endogenous investment in sacrificial rites. Indeed, Freud stresses that the “social contract” (“Gesellschaftvertrag”) is still intact in this new variant, with its “renunciation of instinct” (“Triebverzicht”), “recognition of mutual obligations” (“Anerkennung von gegenseitigen Verpflichtungen”), and “introduction of definite institutions” (23: 82) (“Einsetzung bestimmter [...] Institutionen” [16: 188, emphasis in original]). How may this shift away from sacrificial rites inflect our understanding of the term Opfer? For Freud, the denigration of ceremony marks the particular distinction of Judaism and places it into a direct and conflicting relationship with the universalizing tendencies of a ritualistic (Catholic) Christianity.56 With respect to Judaism, we have the decreased efficacy of Opfer : the asymmetry between victim/God and victimizer/son remains irreducible, and a victim cannot serve as a substitute. In relation to Christianity, we have the complete substitutability of victim/God for victim/son. As Paul has argued, Jesus embodies “an adequate talionic sacrifice sufficient to erase the guilt for having killed God, the guilt that sustains the Law.” Such an equivalent

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victim can expunge the murder, Paul continues, “and wipe clean the guilt of the Israelites—and by extension all humanity—in a way that, as the Epistle [Rom. 7:7] to the Hebrews stresses, the blood of goats and lambs cannot” (211–12).57 The issue, as Freud envisions it, rests on the comparability and substitutability of one victim with another. In my view, Freud is problematizing some of his early assumptions about communality based on victimhood, and with Moses he marks his return to a particular moment in the Opfer dialectic that represented his primum movens in sociocultural development. While democracy relies on the “deferred obedience” of the sons to the slain victim-father in Totem, when the sons institute equalizing laws associated with paternal injunctions through rituals after the murder, it no longer guarantees the long-term equality of all in Moses. The sons’ “deferred obedience” of Freud’s post-murder scenario in Totem and Taboo winds up being an endless deferral of obedience in his account in the 1930s.58 With this deferral, a sense of guilt arises (this, to be sure, was already the case in Totem, but is emphasized in Moses). Only when one victim can be completely substituted for the first, paternal victim, does the sacrificial system work—as it does in Christianity; only then can guilt for the deferral be assuaged.59 As Eric Santner has argued, engaging with Daniel Boyarin (251–53), Freud depicts Judaism as a Neo-Kantian religion of reason, which is “averse to all forms of ritual, to all ‘carnal’ practices aside from the elaboration and refinement of the original ethical commandments” (6).60 Christianity’s popularity and its universalizing thrust are linked to its ability to continue the symbolic rites Judaism has shunned. The only important sacrificial substitution is paradoxically of an asymmetrical order—of the son for the father—that has been forced into symmetry—one part of the father (Jesus) takes the place of another part of the father (God). This sacrifice and substitution is eternally repeated in the ceremony of mass. All other symbolic rituals in Christianity, for Freud, belong to the category of symmetrical victim-victimizer relations of a lower order (he notes the subordinate role of other deities that are absorbed into Christianity [88]). Not everywhere in Moses does Freud turn away from his earlier postulates. In upholding his ideas from Totem and Taboo on the law of the talion, which “lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life” (13: 154) (“kann ein Mord nur durch die Opferung eines anderen Lebens gesühnt werden” [9: 185]),61 Freud posits a distinct logical end to his victim dynamic that is completed in Moses : competitive victimhood (which necessarily results from competing claims to victim status as well as from the inability for one victim to compensate fully for another) insists on resolution, at the very moment that it cannot be resolved. Returning almost verbatim to the formulation for talionic law that he used in his phantastic and phantasmatic reconstruction, Freud in his historical reconstruction emphasizes that rivaling claims to victimhood will ultimately

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demand to be judged against each other.62 The primacy or priority of one over the other will be the dominating issue for society’s members. Competitive victimhood is, in other words, the invariable result of the displacement from a vertical axis—where the sons’ claims to victim status can only ever be measured against a transcendental signified (the primal father, God, the paternal injunction) that makes any immanent adjudication impossible—to a horizontal axis, where the sons’ claims will and can only be measured against other sons’ contentions. In this manner, we are also able to understand Yerushalmi’s observation in Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable that both Judaism and Christianity are actually both “son-religions,” “each inevitably claiming its exclusive legitimacy at the expense of the other” (92), with no clear outcome to their opposing truth claims. In the case of radical asymmetry between victim and victimizer, the question of victimhood may be raised, but it can only be truly resolved in a transcendental realm. In the case of greater symmetry, the same question is brought into immanence, but resists resolution.63 Freud associates the impossibility of resolving competing victim claims with the diffusion of a vague but ubiquitous perception of victimhood in modern society. When he writes about this “malaise” (“Unbehagen”) toward the end of his Moses, he brings to the forefront contemporary implications for the modern masses. Because victimhood lacks a clearly discernible cause and no one remembers the true beginning of victimization, the dispersion of victim status brings with it unease and apocalypticism. As such, the general emotional state is akin to the discontents of Baudrillard’s “victim society” and the dissatisfying, reverberative testimonials of Minnow’s “victim talk.” Freud hypothesizes that personal, Oedipal guilt spreads like an infection, contagious to all: “The sense of guilt of those days was very far from being any longer restricted to the Jewish people; it had caught hold of all the Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which no one could suggest a reason” (23: 135) (“Das Schuldbewußtsein jener Zeit war längst nicht mehr auf das jüdische Volk beschränkt, es hatte als ein dumpfes Unbehagen, als eine Unheilsahnung, deren Grund niemand anzugeben wußte, alle Mittelmeervölker ergriffen” [16: 244]). Judaism itself becomes, to some extent, a contingent occurrence in Freud’s account (the Israelites happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and are thus chosen), as does anti-Semitism. Having witnessed the mass phenomena fueling National Socialism’s fire and the ire unleashed against completely acculturated and assimilated Jews, Freud links prejudice in mass society of the 1930s to perceptions of small, contingent differences, when the larger dynamics involved are resistant to discernment. In the final pages of the third essay he stresses mass behavior in precisely this regard: “[T]he intolerance of the masses, strangely enough, expresses itself more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones” (“[D]ie Intoleranz der Massen äußert sich merkwürdigerweise gegen kleine

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Unterschiede stärker als gegen fundamentale Differenzen” [16: 197]).64 People in mass society focus on minimal differences that either obfuscate or simulate the fundamental difference between a primal father, who “does not engage in any form of exchange and so cannot be said to inhabit a world of object relations,” and the sons, who do both—engage in all manner of exchange and live in this world with its subject–object distinctions (Santner 31, emphasis in original). In sum, Freud’s account must be kept in mind when we turn to the horizontal paradigms we encounter in the first half of this book, where the indifference of differences comes to be felt as the primary problem facing Western European social democracies today. In the second half, minimal or non-existent differences or the simulation of fundamental differences will seek to restore a jenseits, a beyond, to victim society.

IV In Freud’s writing, as in some of the works under discussion here, much hinges on the substitutability of victims—and its relationship to a discursive logic of objectification. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer seize on these aspects in their continuation of Freud’s sacrificial thinking in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) (published 1947). Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument about sacrifice alerts us to aspects that will recur in this book: the issue of substitutable victims, the malaise of a capitalist world reliant on the equation of victims, and the introversion and dissemination of sacrifice. The introduction and first excursus on the Homeric Odyssey, interweaving totems, magic, animism, sacrifice, and hordes (1–62), is a direct engagement with Totem and Taboo and an indirect one with Moses and Monotheism.65 Indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer’s overarching argument concerning the baneful entwinement of myth and enlightenment, of instrumental reason and the omnipotence of thought, begins with an explicit invocation and implicit condemnation of Freud’s “law of the talion.” According to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we have demythologized all realms of life during the course of our history. In the process, we have attempted to draw everything external to ourselves into the domain of consciousness, in order to subjugate and control it. We have enshrined the talionic—and, by extension, capitalist—equivalence in sacrificial thinking as the non plus ultra. “All birth is paid for with death, all fortune with misfortune,” they write, continuing shortly thereafter: “Hence, for both mythical and enlightened justice, guilt and atonement, happiness and misfortune, are seen as the two sides of an equation” (11–12) (“Alle Geburt wird mit dem Tod bezahlt, jedes Glück mit Unglück. [...] Daher gelten denn der mythischen wie der aufgeklärten Gerechtigkeit Schuld und Buße, Glück und Unglück als Seiten einer Gleichung” [38–39]). As a result, we

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deal with a functional society of sons, who are universally fungible under the laws of the marketplace (7). Let me draw on the arguments from the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment to briefly adumbrate the concern with fungible humanity. In order to espouse Odysseus rather than Freud’s Oedipus as an avatar of Enlightenment thought, Adorno and Horkheimer devote a large section of their first excursus to the role of ritualistic sacrifice (40–45; Wiggershaus 50–52). They return to the various sacrifices demanded of and performed by the epic hero to argue against then current vitalist and irrationalist interpretations of sacrifice as regenerative for the social body; they also wish to counter psychoanalytic readings that ascribe a democratic impulse to the primal horde (260 n. 6, 9, 16). For them, incipient secularization marks the sacrificial act and serves an individuating function (Schmid Noerr, “Sechzig”). In the Odyssey, sacrifice straddles an uneasy position between capitalist trade and pre-capitalist gift.66 Sacrifice in capitalism, to use the terms I introduced in section III, epitomizes the dynamics of a post-primal murder world, where like object is set against like; the gift, by contrast, characterizes a pre-murder world beyond or outside of object relations. Self-sacrifice in capitalism, by extension, requires the movement into this realm. Occasionally Adorno and Horkheimer seek to recuperate elements of their pre-murder, pre-object relations world in the post-murder humanity they describe—distinguished as it is by nearly unremitting bleakness.67 The emergent ego, as which Odysseus is coded in their account, is continually in opposition with the instinctual environment from which it arises as a result of the “law of the talion” (Deneen 190). Joel Whitebook admirably summarizes this thread of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought: Odysseus sought to emancipate himself from the prerational and preindividuated world of myth and thereby escape the law of equivalence. His trials and adventures chronicle the stages in the emergence of the individuated, unified, and purposeful, which is to say, enlightened subject. [...] He reckoned that by bringing the disorderliness of his internal nature under the control of a unified ego—that is, by repressing his unconscious-instinctual life—he could outwit the law of equivalence and survive the numerous dangers that awaited him on his journey home. (77)

Of course, Adorno and Horkheimer go on to show that any such escape from talionic law is illusory. The self-sufficient ego can only come into existence if it relinquishes its own investment in the here and now, endlessly deferring psychosexual fulfillment: “this antireason appears prototypically in the hero who escapes the sacrifice by sacrificing himself ” (43) (“diese Widervernunft ist prototypisch im Heros ausgebildet, der dem Opfer sich entzieht, indem er sich opfert” [79]). As such, self-sacrifice in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account parallels Freud’s stress on self-renunciation in

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Totem. The German philosophers also do not lose sight of the collective in which this incipient individual with his sacrificial thinking is embedded. They stress the doubled character of sacrifice, “the magic selfabandonment of the individual to the collective (in whatever form) and the self-preservation achieved through the technology of this magic” (“die magische Selbstpreisgabe des Einzelnen ans Kollektiv—wie immer es damit bestellt sei—und die Selbsterhaltung durch die Technik solcher Magie”). While this twofold, chiastic quality for them implies a contradiction and spurs the “further development of the rational element in sacrifice” (260 n. 6) (“auf die Entfaltung gerade des rationalen Elements im Opfer drängt” [73 n. 6]), it may also help us explain the necessity of ritual and its eventual downplaying in Freud’s Moses. Since sacrifice is the motor driving individual and social development, Adorno and Horkheimer seem to argue, ritual cannot disappear with the dematerialization of patriarchal power. Rather, it becomes the rationalizing element within Opfer. Sacrificial ritual has been reformulated through its incorporation, reintegrated into every possible context as mathematic calculation, and undergone a complete dispersion. Sacrificial logic, which necessitates that a ‘price be paid,’ continues in all-pervasive modern science: “Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought” (19) (“Die mathematische Verfahrungsweise wurde gleichsam zum Ritual des Gedankens” [48]). With the introjection of sacrifice in the self-sacrificial ego (42–43), such ritualistic thinking determines all forms of Western life.68 Both culture and civilization in the traditional German opposition fall prey to its seductive clarity. The institution of Opfer is nothing less than the “stigma of historical catastrophe” (41).69 The German philosophers introduce deception (“Betrug”) in lieu of Freudian guilt as a foundational element in the new social order. Where Freud establishes a communal sense through the idea that shared guilt binds everyone who takes part in the primal murder and later totem feasts,70 Adorno and Horkheimer are keen to show that any sense of communality is eviscerated in a society that uses deceptive sacrifices.71 For them, deception cannot serve the same inside-outside function as guilt, where the guilty person is unable to imagine himself outside the closed circle of victimizers-cum-victims and thus cannot assign responsibility to a wrongdoer.72 Sacrifice is not important to position the group or as a generator of values (including the love accompanying guilt). Not only do sacrifices deceive the god to whom they are offered in bad faith, but they are structurally homologous to the ruses perpetrated against the people by the priestly class—which is engaged in the work of distortion through ceremonial rites, much like Freud’s priests (Moses 23: 50, 64). It is worth quoting Adorno and Horkheimer to clarify this point: “All sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the god for whom they are performed: by imposing on him the primacy of human purposes they dissolve away his power, and the fraud against him passes over seamlessly

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into that perpetrated by unbelieving priests against believing congregations” (40) (“Alle menschlichen Opferhandlungen, planmäßig betrieben, betrügen den Gott, dem sie gelten: sie unterstellen ihn dem Primat der menschlichen Zwecke, lösen seine Macht auf, und der Betrug an ihm geht bruchlos über in den, welchen die ungläubigen Priester an der gläubigen Gemeinde vollführen” [74]). Sacrifice gestures toward the imminent split between the victimizers and the victims—since the disbelieving priests require sacrifice to keep the believing community (which also acts in bad faith) in place—at the very moment that it denies any break (“bruchlos”) in its power to create commonality and community (“Gemeinde”). A victim must be split off from society in order to be sacrificed at the same time as this fraudulent act is presented as a necessity. This break without a break will be repeated, on a microcosmic level, in every individual that must engage in the renunciation of his natural self to get ahead in bourgeois life.73 The mathematical thinking in equivalents—a son for a son, the self for the self—is indicated in Adorno and Horkheimer’s word choice here. There is no remainder in this division (in German: “Bruchrechnung”), where the calculating priests ensure that a son will be sacrificed for a son, an object for an object.74 One is tempted to continue the word play: the distorted narratives, which the priests tell to rationalize their victimizations, feign continuity rather than admit breaks or “Brüche.”75 Adorno and Horkheimer themselves sensitize the reader to the necessity of breaks in the ceremonial rituals that accompany sacrifice and self-sacrifice, as well as in the sacrificial logic that sees all victims as equivalents. The contours of a break can be redrawn with a glance at prehistory, and Adorno and Horkheimer go back to a moment in time when sacrifice might still have avoided the discursive logic of objectification. The writers, in effect, reinstate a kind of primal difference, an incommensurable asymmetry between the victim and the thing it is to represent in sacrifice. In their introduction, they impugn the substitutability I have been discussing. “The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic,” they warn (“Die Substitution beim Opfer bezeichnet einen Schritt zur diskursiven Logik hin”). The “arbitrariness of the specimen” (“die Beliebigkeit des Exemplars”) is already inherent in the exchange of the paschal lamb for the firstborn in the Bible, and of the deer for the daughter Iphigenia in Greek myth. While these victimae have their own inherent qualities, they stand in for the species within the sacrificial act. Adorno and Horkheimer underline the contingency of this equivalence, which brings together individual and species, onto- and phylogenesis (as Freud does in Totem and Moses). Sacrifice and sacrificial ritual require negating the “abundance of qualities” (“Fülle der Qualitäten”) in the victim who is sacrificed, qualities that exceed any exchangeable ‘core.’ To put this another way: what has been lost in rationalizing sacrifice is the perception of an irreducible difference that depends on the fullness and abundance of qualities. Not enough

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difference is discerned between the victim and the victimizer, between the victim and the thing it represents, between the self and the sacrifice of itself. Where once a sacrifice still meant communication with a god and hence the “sanctity of the hic et nunc ” (“Heiligkeit des hic et nunc”), this gives way to a scientific thinking where difference has become “fluid” (“flüssig” [32]), fungible, and profoundly immanent (6–7). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, it becomes impossible to resurrect such prehistorical sacrificial thinking in the present. A break marks man’s irreversible separation from nature and a way of life anterior to victimization. When Adorno and Horkheimer, with uncharacteristic trepidation, return to their moment of historical truth within sacrifice (41),76 they hark back not only to the immanent reasons which may have made sacrifice necessary (where they come down on the side of Freud’s hungry savages), but to the transcendent ones, which requires a different kind of thinking in equivalence—equivalence with a difference. To restitute an asymmetry between victimized and victimizing consciousness would mean partaking of both the pre- and post-murder worlds, of the sons and their exchanges as well as of the father, who resists any exchange. I have come back to the break within the already broken temporality of modernity with which I began. My detour through these ‘master’ texts from the first half of the twentieth century may seem presumptuous vis-à-vis the far less threatening victim rhetoric we encounter today and comparing the eschatological tenor of Freud’s, Adorno and Horkheimer’s victim models, their “historical catastrophe” and “premonition of calamity” with the “dull malaise” in the victim narratives under discussion here might be perceived as unfitting. After all, these thinkers were writing against the backdrop of National Socialism. As Jews within Germanic culture, they had a vested interest in exposing the dangers of self-sacrificial rhetoric on the part of a majority that saw itself as falsely victimized. However, the immense academic currency of these texts today suggests our identification with the mechanisms of sacrificial victimage they describe, be it in the repression or renunciation of one’s own desires and aggressions or in the sense of victimization at the hands of external, often disembodied entities. The scholar Andreas Huyssen has remarked on the extreme popularity of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Freudian trauma theory, tying it to the fact that we have come to see “modernity as the trauma that victimizes the world, that we cannot leave behind, that causes all our symptoms” (9). Indeed, the recent attention to the work of Giorgio Agamben is part and parcel of an interest in the aspects of self-sacrificial victimage of an ongoing modernity. Throughout the various parts of the work comprising Homo sacer, Agamben does not tire of linking homo sacer to the very modernity that will be under attack in the other works I discuss (most directly in René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred and Peter Sloterdijk’s The Contempt of the

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Masses). Agamben, too quickly severing the link between sacrifice and sacredness (see chapter 6), writes: In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term “sacred” continues the semantic history of homo sacer and not that of sacrifice (and this is why the demystifications of sacrificial ideology so common today remain insufficient, even though they are correct). What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways. [...] Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. (114–15) (Nella modernità, il principio della sacertà della vita si è, cioè, completamente emancipato dall’ideologia sacrificale e il significato del termine sacro nella nostra cultura continua la storia semantica dell’homo sacer e non quella del sacrificio (di cui l’insufficienza delle pur giuste demistificazioni, oggi proposte da piú parti, dell’ideologia sacrificale). [...] La sacertà è una linea di fuga tuttora presente nella politica contemporanea, che, come tale, si sposta verso zone sempre piú vaste e oscure, fino a coincidere con la stessa vita biologica dei cittadini. Se oggi non vi è piú una figura predeterminabile dell’uomo sacro, è, forse, perché siamo tutti virtualmente homines sacri. [126–27])

It is worth noting that this argument’s “line of flight” is a properly modern one. Agamben returns not only to Foucault’s notion of biopower in Homo sacer, but also to Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt. In my reflections, I certainly do not mean to propose that there would and could not have been alternative routes into the topic of victim society. One could very well imagine beginning with Nietzsche’s conceptualization of slave morality and ressentiment and continuing on to Foucauldian genealogies and discourses of power. Alternatively, one could relate Franz Kafka’s Josef K. from The Trial (Der Proceß, 1925)—the paradoxically guilty innocent victim—to the depersonalized, all-pervasive state authority described in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1: 236–52) (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” [2.1: 179–203]). Indeed, other, now classic modern texts treat the issue of victimhood, sacrifice, and social attenuation in such a way as to suggest a kind of continuity or, to speak less linearly, similarity with discourses of the late twentieth century. However, the contingency of my choices here does not give lie to the pervasiveness of the rhetoric I describe in the time period from 1970 to 2005. If anything, the plethora of applicable texts only serves to show the generality of the phenomenon I perceive as intrinsic to our

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modernity—which many of the people under discussion here help constitute even when they criticize it. In the novels, films, paintings, philosophical essays, and poems that follow—where this victim rhetoric comes to a head at the same time as it undergoes refinement—we will notice a symptomatic admixture of cunning and self-deception, a combination of sacrificial and self-sacrificial rhetoric, and a movement between weakness in power and power in weakness. At times, it will seem to be an inexorable dialectic, containing an element of self-renunciation at the same time as it holds out a deceptive promise of redemption. However, I would also like to remain open to the possibility of the breaks to which Adorno and Horkheimer alert us. These could, after all, become the condition for the possibility of living in and as a “victim society,” rendering Baudrillard’s lament overhasty.

CHAP TER

1

Politics of Indifference: René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk

The explanatory narratives with which I commenced stress the communal context of victimization and victimhood. For Freud as well as Adorno and Horkheimer, the establishment of Opfer—with its double meaning of “victim” and “sacrifice”—in society is the instigator of the dialectic I have traced. Violence, either in the primal horde or in the Homeric epic, accompanies this sacrificial dialectic from the start. For Freud, we begin with the patriarchal father’s murder; for Adorno and Horkheimer, Odysseus’s subjugation of natural forces (represented alternately by Poseidon, Circe, and Polyphemus) entails verbal or physical violence, and sometimes even both. If their scenarios still hold the key to understanding the dynamics of victimization today, what has happened to this originary and generative violence, written into the sacrificial process and the subject of much questionable glorification in modern thought?1 How does it manifest itself now, when the more clearly delimited social groups that the Austrian psychoanalyst or the German philosophers envisioned have been replaced by even less coherent and cohesive conglomerations of individuals? Is there the possibility of a sense of commonality in or through victimization within today’s violent Western society? What emotion, other than resentment and guilt, may enter into the dialectic between victim and victimizer? Before I discuss these issues in relation to the films of Michael Haneke (chapter 2), I would like to delve into the issue of sacrificial violence itself. This topic has for some time now been intimately connected to the work of the French literary critic René Girard. The resurgence of interest in his books, fixated as they are on the issues of sacrifice and violence, has become symptomatic, to my mind, of a larger fascination with victimization.2 In examining his “grandiose monotony” (“grandiose[…] Monotonie”) and “auto-hypnotic force” (“autohypnotische[…] Wucht”), I would like to link him with the media-savvy German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who so adequately characterizes Girard’s oeuvre with these ambivalent expressions (“Erwachen” 249). In his own work, Sloterdijk breaks open the

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restrictive structure underpinning Girard’s theoretical edifice, inflecting the Frenchman’s thoughts toward mediated and mediatized society. Their dissimilar, yet unique prose—characterized by repetition in the case of the former and metaphoric drift in that of the latter—does not attest to any ‘hard’ theory of victimhood. However, in both of their indiscriminate, yet distinct ways, they articulate an indifference to difference that is intrinsic to the figurations of violent victimization we will find elsewhere.

I Girard examines the relationship between violence, victims, and sacrificial practices in a series of books beginning in the early 1970s, utilizing a wildly interdisciplinary approach. His volume Violence and the Sacred (La Violence et le sacré ) from 1972 is most relevant to my purposes, since in it he outlines the trends that permeate his thinking throughout the 1980s and thereafter. Taking issue with the anthropology of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, and the in-depth psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, Girard here attempts either to rectify their denigration or to refine their appraisal of Opfer as the basis for social order.3 Drawing particularly on Freud’s insights, Girard continues the psychoanalyst’s vein of inquiry and, in a brazen move, stresses the historical veracity of the primal murder.4 He reverses the movement of Freudian theory from history into fantasy that the majority of scholars advocate, including myself.5 Girard’s purpose is, as Dominick LaCapra maintains with some deprecation, to emphasize the already well-known foundational violence underpinning all social behavior. In doing so, Girard participates in a problematic current of modern thought that connects violence, trauma, and transcendence (LaCapra, History 262). There is nonetheless a rhetorical strategy to Girard’s overarching argument that becomes paradigmatic for numerous texts about surrogate victimage and its relationship to violence. Let us bear in mind the fundamental premises of Girard’s work. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard establishes his view of society on a fundamental paradox: through the attempted elimination of violence by way of victimization, society encloses violence all the more firmly within its confines. Every society, envisioned here as a closed, self-regulating system, depends on this paradoxical mechanism to maintain an inner homeostasis. Without the sacrificial act as an internal regulator, violence could and would run rampant, spreading like an epidemic and obliterating the society within which it arises. The sacrifice, designating the slaughter of an animal or human to appease two warring factions, diverts violence away from the conflicting groups toward a third party. This third party (if not an animal, it is usually a weaker member of society incapable of exacting vengeance or inciting retribution) is only vaguely linked to the groups that demand its expulsion or annihilation. Girard lists the insane, the crippled,

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prisoners of war, slaves, and other marginalized persons as primary examples of sacrificial victims, but the French critic allows that superior individuals such as kings may also become scapegoats—and hence victims in the sacrificial ritual—by virtue of their isolated standing (Violence 12–14). The victim, whose relation to Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer I will trace at a later juncture, occupies an unusually ambivalent, even contradictory position. On the one hand, his connections to the social body have to be so weak that the victim’s killing does not inspire fear of a renewed cycle of reprisals and a continuation of violence. On the other, his ties to the social body have to be strong enough so that the rivaling factions are aware of the victim’s embeddedness in the group and of his intrinsic value to the group (if a ‘price’ were not being paid, there would be no sacrifice). This factor ensures that the victim is a worthy substitute for a full-fledged member of society and can function as a surrogate (1–38, 302). In Violence and the Sacred, Girard focuses on mythological figures such as Oedipus or Dionysus and ethnological research relating largely to African tribes to discuss sacrificial victimization. In The Scapegoat (Le Bouc émissaire, 1982), the critic fleshes out the methods whereby such a victim has been chosen. He here looks at the victimizers’ illusionist practices, which retroactively sanction sacrificial rituals. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, 1978) and Job, the Victim of His People (La Route antique des hommes pervers, 1985), he looks at the potentially non-sacrificial dimension of the Gospels and at the victims of Biblical accounts (Abel, Joseph, Job), continuing the ideas that he began to explore in The Scapegoat. Girard himself has admitted that his perpetual reiteration of sacrificial dynamics amounts to an idée fixe (cf. Bottum 42). Although Girard has been taken to task for his slack use of classical texts, willful interpretation of imperialist accounts of African tribal rituals, and Biblical apologetics,6 his argumentative turns regarding the communal effects of victimization are worth considering. Girard is keen to point out the persistent and pervasive nature of sacrificial rites in Western society down to the present day; in his conception, they are isomorphic with contemporary judicial institutions and customs, especially festivities. While our social matrix, with its reliance on a court system to rationalize and control vengeance, may be more resilient to the outbreak of violence than that of a smaller, more archaic society, sacrifices are still necessary to preserve a fragile emotional equilibrium. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard steers away from discussing the guilt or innocence of the victim—or from the victim’s possible immanent or transcendent redemption through sacrifice—toward an appreciation of the latter-day rituals whereby modern Western societies seek to “deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it desires most to protect” (4) (“détourner vers une victime relativement indifférente, une victime ‘sacrifiable’, une violence qui risque de

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frapper ses propres membres, ceux qu’elle entend à tout prix protéger” [17]). Violence toward the victim, even in contemporary practice, is precarious in its efficacy: administered in a homeopathic dosage, the sacrifice revives the delicate social order. While threatening an individual with extinction, it restores the frayed bonds among group members. However, sacrifice does not always succeed in checking violence’s spread. When the sacrificial rite no longer works as a preventive or curative measure, violence spirals out of control, and it touches everyone. Drawing on a long history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought revolving around the ambivalence of the sacred and sacrifice, Girard in his early work characterizes such violence as impure, as opposed to the (purportedly) pure or purifying violence of sacrifice.7 In effect—and for all his declared differences—Girard follows his predecessor Freud in examining the development of society from a religious basis and in asking why this process requires victims at all. Both agree that when the lex talionis governs relationships between human beings, socio-cultural endeavors are thwarted by the give-and-take of reciprocal violence. Self-sacrifice, as Freud envisions it and as I discussed it earlier, is never altruistic: it arises from and with a sense of guilt. The culpable person, hidden behind the self-deception of martyrdom and the emphatic gesture of self-sacrifice, presents himself as a victim to achieve reconciliation with the vanquished recipient of violent impulses. In this scenario, the defeated party is made into a victim twice over; the person is not only robbed of his or her former power, but also of the new moral status as victim. This doubled victimization nonetheless leads to the institutionalization of certain codes and norms governing interpersonal relationships. We remember Freud’s “mutual obligations” and “definite institutions” from Moses and Monotheism, which are no longer based on the immediate gratification of (sexual) desire, but on the processes of inversion and introjection (23: 82–83, emphasis in original). In Violence and the Sacred, the reconsideration of guilt and the matter of expiation are irrelevant, since religious narratives are only screens for the perpetrated violence, much as they are for Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of the Enlightenment.8 Established institutions and codified relations emphatically precede the sacrifice. Sacrifice guarantees the strength of social mechanisms that have already evolved previously—it is a necessary part of their continued functioning. The community, which unleashes and is prey to violence, is simultaneously anterior and posterior to the crime that it seeks to punish through bloodshed (Scapegoat 49). The sacred inscribes itself in the violence, and not the other way around; in the process, it sanctifies bloodshed. In the quotation from Girard’s text I gave earlier, he chooses a striking adjective to designate the victim: an “indifferent victim” is his phrase, “une victime relativement indifférente” (La Violence 17). The descriptive term is related to a host of similar words permeating Violence and

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the Sacred. These include terms such as “anti-differential” (“anti-différentiel”), “indifferentiation” (“indifférenciation”), “nondifferentiation” (“nondifférenciation”), as well as “differentiation” (“différenciation”), and all arise from one lexical relation—“difference” (“différence”).9 For Girard, social stability is dependent on maintaining differences and, correspondingly, different levels in society. Girard’s “sacrificial crisis” results from the disappearance of differences between individuals and the leveling of society that such dissolution implies. In a crisis, socio-cultural foundations teeter on the verge of collapse, institutions lose their validity, and cyclical vengeance threatens (Violence 39–67, 49). Once this crisis point is reached, the sacrifice’s efficacy is no longer vouchsafed. It cannot put an end to retributive violence between equal sparring partners. In a few unusually succinct phrases, Girard sketches the continued pertinence of his theory of difference: If the history of modern society is marked by the dissolution of differences, that clearly has something to do with the sacrificial crisis to which we have repeatedly referred. Indeed, the phrase “modern world” seems almost like a synonym for “sacrificial crisis.” [...] The wearing away of differences proceeds at a slow but steady pace, and the results are absorbed more or less gracefully by a community that is slowly but steadily coming to encompass the entire globe. [...] A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern. (188–89)10 (Si le mouvement historique de la société moderne est la dissolution des différences, il est très analogue à tout ce qu’on a nommé ici crise sacrificielle. Et sous bien des rapports, en effet, moderne apparaît comme synonyme de crise culturelle. [...] l’effacement des différences se poursuit, de façon graduelle et continue, pour être tant bien que mal absorbé et assimilé par une communauté qui s’etend peu à peu à la planète entière. [...] Un certain dynamisme entraîne l’Occident d’abord puis l’humanité entière vers un état d’indifférenciation relative jamais connu auparavant, vers une étrange sorte de non-culture ou d’anticulture que nous nommons, précisément, le modern. [260–61])

For Girard, the vanishing of differences is the hallmark of modernity, understood as a process, and the modern, understood as our current state of being. This disappearance signifies a loss of culture understood in its broadest sense. Girard conflates the sacrificial crisis with the modern as cultural crisis tout court. Dedifferentiation, for Girard, reaches its apogee in the twentieth century, proceeding at an ever more rapid pace. It is correlated, in the section from which I take the aforementioned quotation, to an absence of law that becomes the functional equivalent of the law run rampant.11 Girard’s impression of apocalyptic crisis reveals an affinity to Freud’s perception of historical malaise and Adorno and Horkheimer’s

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sense of calamity. A new basis for a more kinetic, frenetic community is intimated in this passage, whose parameters can only be defined negatively: through the absence of difference. However, this route—toward imagining a dedifferentiated society after the institutionalization of crisis and the instability it entails—is one Girard does not choose to pursue. Instead, his alarmist account remains hypnotized by the threat of an imminent collapse to our social and cultural matrix, dependent as it is on indifferent victims. The sacrificial crisis itself is due to the erasure of a kind of vertical, hierarchical difference. Girard sees evidence for the loss of difference in the weakening of patriarchy and a concomitant “destructuralization” (189) (“déstructuration” [261]). He shifts attention from the father-figure to the competing band of brothers in Totem and Taboo, denying that the death of the father has relevance per se. The murder’s meaning is intrinsic to the act itself rather than tied to a particular instantiation of power, such as the father. This is, indeed, the crux of his thesis and the characteristic of contemporary society most relevant to my purposes: the de-filialization of the brothers, a result of dethroning any specific embodiment of power, is the primary reason victim society can come into existence. When the bands of brotherhood are severed through similarity, the absolute substitutability and fungibility of humans I outlined comes into being. Since the brothers have lost their distinctiveness, they become anonymous equals in their victimization, incapable of communality, threatened by their radically attenuated importance within the group, and unable to focalize attention on a superior outer force (213–14). Interestingly enough, Girard inadvertently furthers the de-paternalization his argument impugns on a macro level, shifting our attention away from any dominating figure embodying overweening power. He thereby augments the deficit of vertical difference he imagines as the root cause of sacrificial crises. ‘Indifferentiation’ does not reveal itself plainly within Girard’s conception. Indeed, it displays the ambivalence of Girard’s theory itself, which laments while adding to the reason for lamentation. On the one hand, only insurmountable and irreconcilable differences are apparent to those involved in aggressive rivalries. These are absolute differences that the participants use to condone their aggressivity. To outsiders, on the other hand, the antagonists seem to be replicas of one another. They mimic each other’s desires and thereby become involved in a double-bind situation: a person’s model for desire becomes his obstacle to the fulfillment of that desire.12 For the observer of this society in crisis, differences between rivals have not been entirely effaced, but they have certainly become “muddied and confused” (161) (“brouillées et mélangées” [224]) and even “inverted” (158) (“s’inverser” [220]). At this moment, the lack of differentiation affixes itself less to the indifferent victims than to the indistinguishable victimizers. While we would intuitively welcome a differentiation

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of victimizers from victims, with a clear separation between perpetrators and those they abuse, Girard himself fogs up all differences, be it between victims and victimizers, among victims, or among victimizers, in an effort to prove the timeless validity of the scapegoat mechanism. In effect, his argument reveals how difficult it becomes to draw distinctions in a society that perceives itself as victimized. While all potential victims can be subsumed under the single category of expendability, the more severe dedifferentiation attaches itself to the victimizers. This, in my view, is the ostensible reason for violence and Opfer, rather than the victims’ willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting participation within a socio-cultural dynamic prone to the language of faith. Girard’s views of contemporary society, which arise out of his indifference toward actual or construed victims, are, to be sure, of a conservative cast (a reputation that his Biblical exegesis has only solidified). “Modern society,” he writes in Violence and the Sacred, “aspires to equality among men and tends instinctively to regard all differences, even those unrelated to the economic or social status of men, as obstacles in the path of human happiness” (49) (“Le monde moderne aspire à l’égalité entre les hommes et il tend instinctivement à voir dans les différences, même si elles n’ont rien à voir avec le statut économique ou social des individus, autant d’obstacles à l’harmonie entre les hommes” [77]). The modern view of difference is, most of us would maintain, quite a bit more complicated. We are not simply confused about differences, as Girard seems to say, be they natural differences perceived as constructed or constructed differences that have come to seem natural over the course of time. Rather, our view of difference relies on two conflicting premises. As Girard’s statement presented earlier implies, the absolute, irreducible, and incommensurable difference of all individuals from one another is the basis of our democratic value system. As such, difference becomes the salutary guarantor of the relativity of all values and is in itself posited as an absolute value. Maintaining difference is, then, the non plus ultra that must be safeguarded—it prevents any one individual from appearing sacrificeable. However, we also regard difference as fungible to some extent: we aspire to an absence of social hierarchies through the erasure of vertical difference. In this, our notions lie close to the egalitarian, communitarian thrust that Freud envisions within his victimized primal horde at an early stage. The lack of differentiation among victimizers in Girard’s scenario becomes, in this light, a desirable thing. Although he does allow that an equalizing, mimetic desire among victimizers (which obliterates differences and instigates violence against a scapegoat) is the motor for human development, Girard seems to deny the possibility that important social structures arise out of victimization and the erasure of difference. As such the judicial system becomes for Girard the modern permutation of sacrificial violence par excellence. In his opinion, the uniformity of all triggers catastrophic rivalries that do not lead

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to the institution of jurisprudence, but to its destruction. Justice’s eyes, Girard claims, are not blindfolded and her scales not impartial, since the “roots of [human–F.N.] justice” lie in “differences among men” and the “demise of justice in the elimination of these differences” (51) (“La justice humaine s’enracine dans l’ordre différentiel et elle succombe avec lui” [80]).13 Such a view—if there were any truth to it—becomes especially troubling in light of our tendency to look to the courts to adjudicate more and more of democracy’s problems.14 The question arises: What occurs when it is not simply the build-up leading to the release of violent impulses against a surrogate victim that is at issue, but the sacrificial moment itself? In the act of sacrifice, there is the possibility of a Freudian “communism” for those who see themselves as victimized.15 Although the threatened and divided polity reasserts a differential hierarchy and, presumably, social inequality after the sacrifice, it does so only following a paroxysm, in which it is united on the basis of a radical equality.16 When the two sides converge on the surrogate victim, shifting their attention away from the opposing side toward the substitute, they manifest a singularity of purpose that allows a switch from individual to community. “Each member’s hostility,” Girard explains, “caused by clashing against others, becomes converted from an individual feeling to a communal force unanimously directed against a single individual” (79) (“Pour que le soupçon de chacun contre chacun devienne la conviction de tous contre un seul, rien ou presque n’est nécessaire” [117]).17 Girard is actually speaking of the intrigues and machinations feeding the snowballing Opfermechanism; rather than “hostility,” he here writes of “initial suspicions” (“soupçon”) that solidify into convictions. These become the groundless grounds on which victimization may take place. On such unstable footing, the members mimic each other’s aggressive impulses and transition from a dangerous state of “reciprocal violence” to “restraining violence” through the sacrificial act (96).18 Sacrifice, then, contains within it the possibility of cohesion irrespective of the presence or absence of difference. Seen from this perspective, sacrificial violence has the ability to at least briefly solder people together. They are united based on their joint perception that action must be taken against their victimization. Because Girard’s analysis makes possible the rationalization of violence (by transcending any attention to difference), he has searched out narratives that could prevent retrospective mythologizing. He has become preoccupied with the gospels and their story of the quintessential victim rather than the victimizer. However, Girard is less interested in explaining the psychology of the actors in their moment of paroxysm. He is more concerned with their backward-looking justifications (especially in The Scapegoat). I would like to pick up where Girard leaves off, by returning briefly to Violence and the Sacred and the adjective “indifferent.” While Girard makes mention of the victim’s “indifferent” status within the polarized group,

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what he does not talk about is the role of indifference itself—a surprising lacuna considering the obsessiveness with which he talks about the lack of differentiation, or “indifférenciation.” In my estimation, the feeling of indifference, arising from indifferent victims and a state of ‘indifferentiation,’ is the unexamined aspect within Girard’s book. As I did in the Introduction, I turn again to the abridged Oxford English Dictionary with its aura of studied impartiality and general applicability. “Indifference” has a broader spectrum of meanings than I suspected, ranging from its primary sense of “the quality of being [...] neutral, neither good nor bad” to its second meaning, “the absence of bias or favour for one side or another; impartiality,” to the “absence of active feeling for or against, esp. absence of care or concern for, or interest in, a person or thing; unconcern, apathy” and the “lack of difference or distinction between things.”19 Of course, it is difficult to separate the neutrality of the first OED definition from the impartiality of the second, and both shade into the want of “active feeling” that the “lack of difference” brings with it. In light of these definitions, it becomes especially surprising that Girard sees the underlying absence of differentiation as a precursor for explosive affective release. When we no longer perceive difference, these definitions intimate, we may feel apathy toward our surroundings. For is neutrality not a variant of apathy? We may also demonstrate our unconcern for our environment by actively withholding certain emotions—emotions without which life together becomes very difficult, but which do not necessarily lead to violence. Without an “active feeling for” and “interest in” our fellow human beings, a sense of victimhood can flourish. As little as we care for others, so little do they care for us; since we are unconcerned about their well-being, they similarly have no interest in preserving ours.20 ‘Indifferentiation’ and its related indifference, in this reading, become the ground for a different kind of victimhood—to which a socio-cultural explanatory model such as Girard’s is only applicable to a slight degree (whose account parallels other theories of emergent mass society and the explosion of affect in the early twentieth century).

II Indifference, in its entire spectrum of meanings, becomes the chief psychological and social factor in contemporary society, when we follow Girard’s writings through to their logical conclusion. This is the case principally when we move away from the idea of a rather small, clearly defined group toward the conceptualization of society as a looser, heterogeneous conglomeration of individuals—toward our mediatized mass society, in short. Girard’s correspondences to the illustrious precursors writing on social behavior (Freud, Elias Canetti, and José Ortega y Gasset) are less surprising, I find, than those between Girard and the contentious philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who develops some of Girard’s premises in his own work.

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Sloterdijk also examines the sense of indifference today in a controversial treatise entitled The Contempt of the Masses: On the Culture Wars in Modern Society (Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft). His short piece, published in 2000, shares Girard’s negative appraisal of dedifferentiation and the general perception of victimization. The Contempt of the Masses offers a summation of Sloterdijk’s ongoing concern with societal fragmentation and the role of the media in fostering or subverting social cohesion, expressed in such varied writings as his magnum opus, Spheres I–III (Sphären I–III, 1998–2004), Not Saved: After Heidegger (Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger, 2001), and In the World’s Inner Space of Capital (Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, 2005). Although it comes three decades after Girard’s book—to which, among other texts, it does not mention its indebtedness—the model for society in The Contempt of the Masses has changed little, although its general tone has.21 The treatise’s millennial pessimism is far more extreme than Girard’s glumness: the little faith in precarious balances between conflicting groups that Girard demonstrates has nearly disappeared in Sloterdijk’s tract.22 Contempt is a property inherent in the psychosocial make-up of the mass (which Sloterdijk personifies). It is also the affect elitist philosophers, statesmen, artists—who perceive themselves as privileged observers— display toward the mass. Hence come the genitivus subjectivus and the genitivus objectivus of Sloterdijk’s German title. Two passages can be juxtaposed to underline the fundamentally similar arguments of these thinkers regarding the disappearance of significant differences between individuals and groups within modernity. Girard, interpreting Totem and Taboo, establishes equivalence between the fragmented temporality and space of modernity and the dynamic of the sacrificial crisis.23 He writes: All in all the modern crisis, like all sacrificial crises, can be defined as the elimination of differences. The interplay of antagonisms actually does the eliminating, without ever being recognized for what it truly is: the increasingly feeble, increasingly tragic intervention of an enfeebled difference. This difference appears to be always growing, but it fades away whenever someone tries to appropriate it. Each faction is mystified by the isolated restructurings, increasingly fragile and transitory, which lend their support to each of the antagonists in turn. (206) (Saisie dans son ensemble, la crise moderne, comme toute crise sacrificielle, doit se définir comme effacement des différences: c’est le va-et-vient antagoniste qui efface, mais il n’est jamais appréhendé dans sa vérité, c’est-à-dire comme le jeu toujours plus tragique et nul d’une différence malade, laquelle paraît toujours grandir mais s’évanouit, au contraire, dans l’effort de chacun pour se l’approprier. Chacun est mystifié par les restructurations locales, toujours plus précaires et temporaires, qui s’effectuent au bénéfice alternatif de tous les antagonistes [...]. [282–83])

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Girard here postulates a negative trajectory for sacrificial rites, as he does for modernity more generally (the collapse of the modern with sacrifice occurs again here). With each repetition, these rituals lose more and more of their power, because a strong, vertical difference—as opposed to an “enfeebled,” horizontal one—cannot be restituted within the parameters of an ever more tragic and useless game (“le jeu”).24 By extension, the affirmation of community or even just commonality on the basis of indifference becomes more tenuous with every effort to press sacrifice into service. Furthermore, the social bonds formed in violent convulsions, when all differences are put aside, are as erratic and capricious as the differences the tremors supposedly re-establish. Sloterdijk, concerned primarily with the role of the mass media in societal concord, makes the following assertion about difference in The Contempt of the Masses. Note in particular the adjectives he uses to outline his dismal interpretation of modern development and his synonyms for the word “difference”: However, because [...] all distinctions are made on the basis of equality, that is, an already pre-determined indistinguishability, all modern distinctions are threatened, more or less acutely, by indifference. The cult of differentiation in contemporary society, as it spreads from fashion to philosophy, has its reason in the fact that all horizontal differences are perceived, and rightly so, as weak, revocable, and constructed. Through vehement emphasis they are vocally brought to the fore, as if the law of the survival of the fittest now also counted for distinctions. But these maneuvers are not really effective [...]. (86, emphasis mine) (Weil aber [...] alle Unterschiede auf der Basis der Gleichheit, also einer im voraus festgesetzten Ununterschiedenheit, vorgenommen werden, sind alle modernen Unterscheidungen mehr oder weniger akut von der Indifferenz bedroht. Der Differenzkult der aktuellen Gesellschaft, wie er sich von der Mode bis in die Philosophie ausbreitet, hat seinen Grund darin, daß man alle horizontalen Differenzen zu Recht als schwache, widerrufliche, konstruierte empfindet. Durch heftige Betonungen werden sie lautstark hervorgekehrt, als gelte jetzt auch für Unterschiede das Gesetz vom Überleben der Fittesten. Aber all diese Manöver verfangen nicht wirklich [...]. [86, emphasis mine])

For Sloterdijk, contemporary mass society replaces vertical differences— stratification based on lineage, or genius—with horizontal differences, based on trends and fashions.25 In my view, Sloterdijk’s spatial model of difference, with its horizontal and vertical axes, is tied to what he sees as the longevity or ephemerality of difference’s effects. Like Girard, Sloterdijk evinces an apocalyptic tenor in regard to the dissolution or diminution of fixed differences; in both scholars’ opinions, this entropic characteristic of our age marks its specific malady.26 Horizontal difference, for both men, is “transitory” and “revocable,” as well as “feeble” and “weak.” For Girard

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and Sloterdijk, malleable and indeterminate difference no longer clearly divides antagonists, supplying a necessary differential between victimizers and their surrogate victims. An inverse relation exists between difference’s desirability and its elusiveness: although everyone wants difference, it evades everyone’s grasp. The continual, but futile reassertion of horizontal difference gives rise to more and more frequent crises, to quickly renewed searches for expendable victims, and to sacrificial rituals in ever shorter temporal succession, in which the very people deemed expendable assert their value based precisely on their exclusion. While Sloterdijk seems not to place any emphasis on his synonymous words relating to difference, I would like to develop the implications of his inadvertently discerning usage, leaving aside his debt to systems theorist Niklas Luhmann.27 “Unterschiede,” differences or distinctions, are lost in our inability to make “Unterscheidungen,” understood as the act of differentiating or distinguishing. With the loss of vertical, irrevocable differences, we have lost the crucial capacity to discriminate. Indeed, it is unclear whether there is a causal or a temporal relation between the two, that is, whether the loss of clearly delineating differences has led to an atrophy of our ability to distinguish or whether they simply occur concomitantly as the result of other forces (such as the democratizing tendencies, the increasing power of the mass media, global capital, all of which Sloterdijk brings into his extended reflections). In either case, the indistinguishability of differences—in itself a reformulation of the “anything goes” critique that has been around for half a century now—is related to a weakened perceptive and cognitive ability on our part.28 As a result, there is a ritualistic, cultish fetishization of difference per se; the positing of difference as an absolute, which I discussed earlier, plays into what Sloterdijk disparagingly calls a “Differenzkult.” With the overvaluation of difference on the part of mass society, we actually find ourselves in an impossible situation. In Sloterdijk’s view, a mass is by definition indivisible and undifferentiated (without “Unterschiede”), and also incapable of making the discriminatory judgments (“Unterscheidungen”), which would enable it to rise above itself or, more accurately, subdivide into units that had a less homogenous aspect. As such, the cult of difference is a compensatory, mythologizing mechanism, which hides a lack of discriminatory capacity under the hyperbolic glorification of difference. Although Sloterdijk uses the noun “Kult” in its German conversational sense to designate something extremely popular and actually denigrates religious affiliation as being on the order of deceptively constructed difference (78), his repetitive use of the word belies his animadversion of all things ritualistic and quasi-sacred. Indeed, the word plays a similarly important role to the word “difference” in Girard’s theory. Coming at this late juncture of the ninety-five-page text (86), the unusual colloquialism harkens back to the first of the five sections, devoted to the “Personenkult”

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and the “Führerkult” of the early twentieth century and the “Starkult” ninety years hence (24–25). By harping on the cultish element of culture throughout the text, Sloterdijk unintentionally affirms the democratic perspective on difference against which he is writing, where difference is considered a transcendental absolute. Sloterdijk, in contrast to Girard, focuses less on ‘indifferentiation’ per se than on the emotional effects of societal dedifferentiation. For him, we have already reached the stage where the public sphere is riven by the lack of meaningful difference, a phase that Girard to some extent still anticipates. For Sloterdijk, it is a matter of analyzing the social effects of this generalized perception of victimization stemming from the lack of meaningful difference. There are, in his conceptualization of a massed and mediatized society, no longer simply the two parties that Girard counterpoises in Violence and the Sacred. In The Contempt of the Masses, the antagonistic groups have dispersed widely. Agglomerations of random individuals enter into fragmented and volatile alliances; all compete for the media’s and the public’s brief attention span. Sloterdijk, predictably enough, links the viewer’s identification along horizontal axes of similarity to National Socialism and the masses’ mediated perception of Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. Such a horizontal identification as a social phenomenon has not disappeared today, Sloterdijk claims. It survives as a functional continuity between the masses seeking politicized escape and affective release in the first half of the twentieth century and those looking for apolitical entertainment in the second (9–29). This model, based on a regressive method of quasi-Lacanian identification, where the Führer becomes the mass’s reflected ideal self, unwittingly makes victims of the German population once more. Its responsibility for its actions—as a mass—is abrogated per se. In the mirror stage, the German Volk cannot help but search for an illusory higher form (23). In nuce we have here the polemical position Sloterdijk has staked out for himself within the German public sphere, which has once again turned to issues of German suffering and the role of historical victimhood.29 As such, he is often grouped with other writers who have challenged the left-liberal status quo in the German-speaking world such as Martin Walser, Botho Strauß, Wim Wenders, and the Austrian Peter Handke.30 The reliance on ‘hard’ differences—specifically between German victimizers and their victims—is the basis of this status quo, which for a long time tended to downplay German suffering lest it be seen as supporting revisionist accounts. Sloterdijk is interested in maintaining difference in the name of cultural quality. The dismissal of the Munich Kammerspiele (municipal theater) director, Dieter Dorn, by the Cultural Affairs Officer Julian NidaRümelin in 1998 was the instigator for Sloterdijk’s text. The Contempt of the Masses can be read as a defense of the last artistic elites like Dorn, who become the victim of society’s relativizing view of difference. To a degree,

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this tract can also be read as Sloterdijk’s self-defensive gesture: he polemically counters what he perceives as his own victimization within a mediatized public sphere. Particularly after his controversial Elmau speech in 1999, Sloterdijk sees himself as the prey of journalistic misreaders, ensnared by their mean-spirited misprision.31 While parts of the text defend high culture as the last salvation in a commodified world, I am more interested in the affective dynamics Sloterdijk outlines as existing in current society. Sloterdijk’s concern is with the strange cycles of victimization today and the contempt inherent in them. A person’s insistence on his or her singularity is disparaged because differentiated indifference permeates the attitudes of all who compete with one another (86).32 An individual that has sought to differentiate himself within a media-driven society composed of rivaling groups will, at best in this scenario, be viewed with indifference; more likely, he will face contempt. The only parity is disparity, but that disparity has no resolution to offer.33 There is a way in which Sloterdijk’s own ontological reorientation of difference toward an analysis of its constructed nature leads him into problematic terrain, most notably in his book, In the World’s Inner Space of Capital (301–30). Within the turn to money-oriented relationships, traditional categories of belonging—of defining oneself as a member of a group—give way to radically short-lived expressions of similarity based on the perception that certain affiliations would be profitable. Sloterdijk terms earlier national or ethnic groups of belonging as “loser keywords” (“Verliererstichworte”). Rather than subscribing to the horizontal paradigm he outlines in The Contempt of the Masses, Sloterdijk now inadvertently shows how horizontal differences acquire an aspect of verticality. Nationality, for example, becomes as much a fixed difference as royal lineage once was. To be economically successful, one must show one’s own independence from such inflexible markers of distinction as “being German, being Basque, being Serbian” (“Deutschsein, Baskischsein, Serbischsein” [327]). If we look closely, Sloterdijk considers the overarching criteria for differentiation to be the domain of groups who consider themselves specifically nationally or ethnically victimized. Implicit in his examples—“being German, being Basque, being Serbian”—are contemporary discursive constructions: Germans who see themselves as victims of aerial bombardment during World War II, Basques who perceive themselves as sufferers of Spanish domination, Serbs who deem themselves victims of historically thwarted prerogatives. Their victim claims may have become untimely, but hardly indifferent in cultural, political, or economic terms. As Sloterdijk returns to the role of the media’s public spotlight within an atomistic public sphere, he fleshes out an aspect of Girard’s circulus vitiosus that remains undertheorized in the latter’s work itself. As J. Bottum has observed in this regard, Girard’s analysis beckons toward our contemporary

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situation, with the bizarre “cycles of mimetic victimization into which we have fallen” without actually looking at the way “in which victims compete for notice of their victimization.” Sloterdijk adds this component to his analysis: the ability of groups to demonstrate their victimized difference from all others remains central to his analysis. Because of the central role he accords the mediation of mass media, Sloterdijk can acknowledge that this kind of positioning is futile on the world stage dominated by flexible capital and simultaneously admit that this will continue to make “loser”-positioning relevant in the twenty-first century. Sloterdijk has the opportunity to acknowledge his debt to Girard—and to emphasize his distance from him—in an afterword to the German edition of I see Satan Fall like Lightning (Je vois Satan tombe comme éclair, 1999). In this brief piece, “Waking up in the Empire of Envy: Notes on René Girard’s Anthropological Mission” (“Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht: Notiz zu René Girards anthropologischer Sendung” [Ich 241–54]), Sloterdijk recapitulates his argument from The Contempt of the Masses. He steers the discussion away from contempt toward Girard’s envy. By doing so, Sloterdijk brings his own terminology into line with the deeply Christian model subtending Girard’s analyses. The invidia on which he focuses, one of the seven deadly sins, nicely complements Girard’s core theorem of the original sin of mimetic rivalry (250). While Sloterdijk’s basic premises pertaining to the endogenous tensions in mediatized society remain in place, he further explicates the connection between malleable difference and the global marketplace that remain separated in The Contempt of the Masses and The World’s Inner-Space of Capital. Having dissolved all horizontal and vertical differences (including the ontological category of being), modern globalized society relies on the idea that the deregulation of the erotic field—where one desires what another desires—can be kept in check by producing ever more goods to satisfy this unbridled desire. Sloterdijk expressly denigrates the neoconservative or liberal idea (depending on your vantage point on one or the other side of the Atlantic) that globalization, with its increased productive capacities, can avert mimetic rivalries in an increasingly networked world. The introduction of Nietzsche’s terminology, which Sloterdijk upholds as an antidote to the backward turning Christianity of Girard, spotlights the key concept that Sloterdijk has not addressed in his thoughts on ‘indifferentiated’ losers: ressentiment (251–52). Fueled by resentment, egalitarian societies become ever more depressed, with increasing numbers of people who see themselves as victims. There are no longer other religious, philosophical, or social visions that could break the spell of mimetic desire or modify it toward abnegation, self-renunciation, or (and this point remains unarticulated) a kind of useful indifference. Again, Sloterdijk, with an ear for popular turns of phrase, ends with a succinct colloquialism that captures the tone of many of the works of culture under discussion in this book. The “Stimmung”—the

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atmosphere, good mood, happy carelessness—in economically prosperous societies is continually sinking (254). The party, he implies, is over; or, perhaps it is all a big party to which no one has been invited.34

III In The Contempt of the Masses, Sloterdijk plays with the German word for contempt, “Verachtung,” relating it to the lack of “Hochachtung,” or respect, subtending all social rivalries. All demand the respect once reserved for those in a superior position of power (which Girard would say is restored with the successful sacrifice). However, “Gleichachtung” (88)—literally the equivalent attention and mutual regard that equality implies and that is a foundational tenet of mass democratic society—excludes respect from the outset. We may, in contrast, argue that many of the differences in Western society such as gender, race, or class are not as fungible as Sloterdijk portrays them to be. Nonetheless, the role of emotions within a pluralistic, heterogeneous, increasingly global society, which a sense of victimhood permeates, is not to be neglected. In our dynamic, mobile age, temporary hierarchies and alliances are continually reshuffled among changing allies.35 However, I wonder whether it is actually contempt that underlies the indifferent interactions in the social sphere, as Sloterdijk insists, predominantly concerned as he is with “Verachtung.” Contempt suggests the animosities of earlier mass-behavior theories and their backdrop of fascism. Sloterdijk risks overlooking important distinctions between then and now. Is the emotion, and more importantly, the emotional rhetoric, at work in the West not subtler and also more insidious, since it leads an unacknowledged, less eye-catching existence? I return to the dictionary definitions of “indifference” I lumped together earlier, in order to reflect further on their implications. I would like to find out more precisely what it is that results from a condition of absolute indifference, in which a perpetual perception of victimhood holds sway. I first looked to the abridged Oxford English Dictionary at the beginning of this chapter, but the standard version promises greater clarity (or perhaps only greater detail?). In the unabridged OED, the following definitions of “indifference” can be found as the top entries: (1) “The making of no difference between conflicting parties; impartiality,” (2) “Absence of feeling for or against; hence esp. Absence of care for or about a person or thing; want of zeal, interest, concern, or attention; unconcern, apathy,” (3a) “Indetermination of the will […] or of a body to rest or motion; neutrality,” (3b) “Psychol. indifference point (tr. G. indifferenzpunkt [sic]), a position or value between two continua of experience, such as a temperature

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that is experienced as neither warm nor cold, or a feeling-value that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant,” “The quality of being indifferent, or neither decidedly good nor evil,” “Passableness; mediocrity; as, indifference of quality” “Want of difference or distinction between things,” “The fact of not mattering or making no difference; unimportance; esp. in phrase a matter of indifference; also, an instance of this; a thing or matter of no essential importance” […]. (864, emphasis in original).36

When we make no difference between persons (which does not seem coextensive with impartiality, as the dictionary would have it in def. 1), a feeling is absent (def. 2). In this regard the second definition is akin to the one I earlier endowed with particular significance, namely the “absence of active feeling for or against” (emphasis mine). I note that in the unabridged version, which generally tends to supply more rather than less words, the word “active” is elided. In the complete OED, the writers of the definition have chosen to be more laconic and hence more general, pointing to a lack without specifying what type of feeling it is that could be lacking. This definition, without identifying the absent feeling, works within negative parameters, as does the former, abridged variant. Yet this latter definition allows us to imagine a feeling of a passive variety. With its additional verbiage, the abridged version (which I prefer) enhances the already negative definition; the stress on the impossibility of an “active feeling” augments the existence of the lack itself. Not only is there no longer a feeling, there is no longer a feeling that would impel us to do something, that would remove us from the passivity we might otherwise demonstrate. If this feeling—be it active or occupy some middle ground between activity and passivity—is not present in a “matter of indifference” (def. 6), it should logically exist in a “matter of difference.” However, and this takes me back to Sloterdijk, contempt arising from matters relating to difference—even when these are conceived of as indifferent differences—requires a more active variety of emotion. Contempt, with its intimations of hatred, is irreconcilable with the burgeoning tropes in works of culture, centered on a victimizing indifference and indifferent people. Sloterdijk’s concern is so palpably centered on the qualitative “mediocrity” (def. 4b), which a “want of difference or distinction between things” (def. 5) supposedly brings with it, that his entire analysis of societal tensions is marred (based as these are on a general “indetermination of the will,” def. 3). His only resolution for social strains is to reinstate a Romantic variant of artistic genius or, as he calls it, talent. Sloterdijk thus ends his text, The Contempt of the Masses, rather questionably, with a plea for the normative role of culture and with a reminder that art criticism’s responsibility is to respect the truly unique in art. Artistic “exercises in provocation,” which place demands on the mass audience to

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rise above itself and its middling taste, counter the contempt inherent in society by re-establishing a vertical difference. These provocations demand admiration and, in Sloterdijk’s estimation, reinstitute a “relevant” difference—a “relevante Unterscheidung”—that becomes a “difference for the better,” “eine Differenz zum Besseren” (95). When we resort to a fixed, ‘hard’ difference, we restore our failing critical capacities to discriminate, purportedly rising above ourselves (like Munchausen’s pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair). Presumably, Sloterdijk’s own writing style— a fluid, metaphorical prose with many a stunning belletristic turn— amounts more to a literary provocation than a scholarly account of social frictions. By his account, he, too, should be spared the unflinching contempt of the media and the penetrating, homogenizing gaze of the readers. If it is not contempt that arises from a dearth of emotion, what does come into being? I would argue that the emotion we face in a public sphere that a sense of victimization pervades is something more akin to disrespect. This “Mißachtung,” upon which Axel Honneth elaborates in The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Der Kampf um Anerkennung : Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte) and “Invisibility: About the Moral Epistemology of ‘Recognition’ ” (“Unsichtbarkeit: Über die moralische Epistemologie von ‘Anerkennung’ ”) arises from withholding certain feelings that testify to another person’s intrinsic value.37 Better said, disrespect arises from withholding the expression of certain feelings.38 To reorient the debate away from indifference (Girard) or contempt (Sloterdijk) to disrespect, to shift the focus from “Verachtung” to “Mißachtung,” it is worthwhile retracing Sloterdijk’s steps and emphasizing the ideas he downplays. In The Contempt of the Masses, he begins with a negative definition when he states, “Refused recognition means contempt” (“Verweigerte Anerkennung heißt Verachtung”). Sloterdijk alludes to Honneth’s theories, asserting that the proposed teleology is unavoidable: “If the modern world, as some Hegelinterpreters have demonstrated with good arguments, is an arena of generalized battles for recognition, then it has to lead inevitably to a societal form in which contempt becomes epidemic [...]” (“Wenn die moderne Welt, wie manche Hegel-Interpreten mit guten Argumenten dargelegt haben, eine Arena von generalisierten Kämpfen um Anerkennung ist, so muß sie unausweichlich zu einer Gesellschaftsform führen, in der die Verachtung epidemisch wird [...]” [31]). It is this all-encompassing disrespect that fosters the social rivalries at the base of the dialectic of victimhood, or, at least the rhetoric of such a dialectic. Perhaps we are not confronted with the abridged definition of indifference, the “absence of active feeling for or against,” but something closer to the unabridged one, with a pervasive making absent of feeling. In this latter instance, the element of volition is stressed; we will an absence. Like Sloterdijk, Honneth begins with a negative definition, but he arrives at a positive one: he moves

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from a person’s perceived non-existence in a state of disrespect to the potential for collective action.39 In chapter 2, I argue that the emotions generated by the experience of disrespect and the willed absence of care can be the impetus for people’s attempt to move from disregard or disrespect to a positively connoted personhood via Girard’s sacrificial violence. In closing, I would argue that it is not the fundamental premise of universal equality—according to which differences never create an unalterable or insurmountable differential between individuals—that is problematic or threatens the delicate equilibrium of our social relations. Both Girard and Sloterdijk intimate that democracy and the equality it entails are deficient, a questionable assumption to be sure. However, the waning sense of individual particularity, which a desire for absolute equality and the belief in mutable difference bring with them, gives rise to today’s violent societal tensions and the rivalries for uncontested exceptionality within a permanently mediatized sphere. This self-reflective quality is at issue, which Honneth alludes to in the context of invisibility—the “Wahrnehmbarkeit,” or ability to perceive difference as well as indifference (“Unsichtbarkeit” 12). The historical moment Sloterdijk describes in The Contempt of the Masses, I think, has been superseded in the West: the fleetingness of the fifteen minutes of fame in the media’s spotlight is common knowledge. As a result, the self-mirroring people seek (despite their awareness of its transient nature) within a permanently mediated and mediatized sphere calls the perception of individual particularity into question at the very moment that it is sought. The weakening perception of individual particularity per se makes people far more prone to seeing themselves as victims, for whom communal feelings are not possible. If I cannot see myself as a valuable individual, valued because I am different from all others due to certain effable and ineffable qualities, on what basis can I feel a commonality with others, endowed—like myself—with indifferent qualities?40 I am far more likely to see myself as the victim of another person, who contests whatever minimal resources of self-worth I have. Girard associates the lack of strong difference implicit in democratic politics and the indifference it generates with the fact that the victim no longer serves an ambivalent function in the sacrifice. Its equivocal purpose was to be both substitutable and, to a very minimal extent, unique. The victim’s role was one of a limited mimicry. Although Girard only discusses the perpetrators of violence mimicking each other’s actions and desires, the victim, too, mimics society to a degree (143–68).41 Within the triangulation of the sacrifice the victim is supposed to be similar to others, yet dissimilar from them. Where the victim’s mimicry of society ends and its difference from all others begins, its potential for sacrifice becomes apparent. However, when certain distinct and permanent features (royal status, mental incapacity, physical weakness) do not adequately vouchsafe the victim’s difference, then the efficacy of the sacrifice is called into question. In Western democracy,

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there is no longer any marginalized or isolated group that can supply the “indifferent” and “sacrificeable” victim—at least not on a generally accepted level. What Sloterdijk accurately describes is how everyone now feels isolated and marginalized to some extent, yet indistinguishable from the next person. When an individual feels the lack or loss of respect his exchangeability entails, he bands together with others who feel victimized on similar grounds. A combined and momentary victimhood, as Freud, Adorno, and Horkheimer adumbrate, continues to be the only alternative to apathy, unconcern, and disrespect. The solidarity we exhibit in such moments of unanimity certainly rests on the assumption that this victimhood is a transitional phase. In the end, we expect to emerge in a superior position, where the conditions of victimization no longer hold.

CHAP TER

2

Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke

In the figurations of victimhood under discussion, there is a discernible dissatisfaction with standard sociological, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and psychological models.1 For many artists and thinkers, these explanatory paradigms seem remarkably incommensurate to the violence that often accompanies perceptions of victimhood (even when violence does not give rise to such perceptions). Artists, in particular, seem to resist the therapeutic element of literary-theoretical scenarios such as René Girard’s discussed in chapter 1. His idea of homeopathic doses of “purifying” violence proposes that aggression can be a curative for society’s ills and ultimately disavows the very aggressiveness that constitutes society. I suggested other reasons why earlier accounts may be seen as deficient: there is something antiquated about Girard’s reliance on the Bible and Classical texts with their brotherly conflicts, as there is in Freud’s dependence on an anthropology of primitivism. Even Peter Sloterdijk’s The Contempt of the Masses appears somewhat dated in explaining the effects of hyper-mediated culture on Opfer. Here, I would like to turn to the films of the fêted director Michael Haneke, which hew more closely to the present. His cinema may offer a more synchronous articulation on the dynamic between sacrifice and victims that I have been describing. In the course of this chapter, we will, however, have to confront the question: Does Haneke, at the same time as he pries open older, confining models and updates them for a media-driven present, confirm our reliance on the paradigms he wishes to transcend?

I Let me begin with the description of a scene from Haneke’s Funny Games from 1997, an Austrian production with an explicitly English title. This film assumes that prevalent paradigms have already been superseded, even while the structures of surrogate victimization remain in place. Near the

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beginning of the film, two young men, Peter and Paul, impeccably dressed in white polo shirts and tennis shorts insinuate themselves into an uppermiddle class family. Father, mother, and son (the bourgeois triangle is complete) have just arrived at their posh summer home for un sejour à la campagne. Introducing themselves as neighbors’ friends, Peter and Paul importune the family with a request for eggs. There is something excessive about their behavior: their tone is too polite, their manner too demonstratively formal, and their language too mellifluous. We viewers become increasingly uncomfortable, privy to an escalating diplomatic crisis between the housewife and Peter. An abrupt shift in the camera’s axis signals the irruption of the violence that has been present in the conversation’s menacing undertones (Rouyer 37–38). In a few seconds, Paul has broken the father’s leg with a golf club, and the family, wide-eyed with horror, is suddenly seated across the couch from two captors hardly old enough to be at university. The two torturers, insisting on a respectful dialogue, inform Anna, Georg, and Junior of their immediate plans: within twelve hours, the three hostages will all be dead. When asked “why?” their laconic “why not?” in response makes a mockery of all possible explanations: the only rational explanation for irrational violence becomes its irrationality (Metelmann 27–28). Funny Games will follow through on the young men’s “wager” with the family—“We bet that you will all be dead in, say, twelve hours,” smirks Paul. The “resistance of the victims and their execution will not alter the humor of the two young elegants,” Alain Masson has written, “who preserve their worldly placidity” throughout their infliction of pain [“La résistance des victimes ou leur exécution n’altèrent pas l’humeur des jeunes élégants, qui conservent leur placidité mondaine” [39]). Within the logic of this film, Peter and Paul, with their alliterative Biblical names, their matching white gloves, and spotless boating shoes, must resemble one another. Between this duo of perpetrators, differences have been erased. They are the outgrowth of increasingly indifferent differences; in their schematic nature and ideational construction,2 they embody their society’s pervasive indifference. As a team, they present a united front against the bourgeois order that opposes them with its Judeo-Christian norms (thou shalt not kill) and provides them with their instrument of power—a sociological language of victimization (parental maltreatment, sexual confusion, drug abuse) and a formal language that opens the wary doors and the locked gates of the upper-middle class. They sacrifice this family, and others similar to it, not to avert destabilizing rivalries between themselves and other similar people competing for scarce attention or resources, but to affirm what they consider their prerogative. In their minds, they have the right to do violence and to violate without justification. They are presented as perfectly pellucid victimizers, who highlight the senselessness of suffering and the groundlessness of violence.

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The family members’ anguish will be on display in an approximation of real time. Funny Games, shown in official competition at Cannes, seems to have given up on any dialectic between victims and victimizers. In contradistinction to Girard’s scenario of a cathartic violence, aggression here has no rationale within the social body. It exists in an unadulterated and ultimately useless form in contemporary society.3 It literally can be rewound and replayed at will, and the remote control removes any feeling of reality that accompanies bloodshed.4 When the victimizer Paul turns to the viewer in the midst of the action, addressing us and pointing to our collusion in the narrative’s violence, his gesture is not part of a dialogue. Indeed, the direct address to the viewers engenders a false sense of participatory volition. While Paul reminds us of our stake in separating victims from victimizers, the “us” from the “them,” he also asserts his narrative control in determining the dividing line. “What’s your opinion?” (“Was meinen Sie?”), he asks, looking straight into the camera and presumably at us, “Do you think they’ve a chance of winning? You’re on their side, aren’t you? So on whom are you betting?” (“Denken Sie, sie haben eine Chance zu gewinnen? Sie sind doch auf ihrer Seite, oder? Also auf wen setzen Sie?”). In the end, the film reveals that the malevolent protagonists will have determined any outcome in advance, since they also control our (extra-textual) ability to fastforward or rewind uncomfortable scenes. Funny Games will thus leave the viewer feeling doubly victimized. On the one hand, the audience falls prey to the largely aural violence within the narrative (there is, for such a gruesome premise, remarkably little blood spilt). On the other, there is the ultimately deceptive sense of different possible outcomes on the Brechtian, self-reflexive meta-level. The film subverts our expectations of a thriller and calls into question why we see such films in the first place. Victims and victimizers have not always been this rigidly juxtaposed in Haneke’s work. In fact, his attempt to capture the “ambiguity of our life between victim and perpetrator,” as he has said in an interview, is the guiding intention in his preceding films for cinema.5 In the “Trilogy of Glaciation”6—The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989), Benny’s Video (1992), and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, 1994)—and in two later films, Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, 2000) and The Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du loup, 2003), the labile balances among individuals, the ensuing rivalries, and their shifting identities as victims and victimizers have been his subjects.7 As his protagonists jockey for respect, they resort to violence to achieve either a semblance of social recognition or to escape from the constraints of a middle-class environment, in which achieving this recognition exacts too high a price. The characters establish temporary bonds with others to counter the lack of difference they perceive around them. Occasionally they

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even rally to a common purpose through what can be described as sacrificial acts. While the “Trilogy of Glaciation” garnered plaudits for the devastating explosions the director situates within the closed milieus of claustrophobic Austrian cities, his acclaimed French films move toward more open social scenarios, where the politics of victimization have become more fractious and destabilizing. Funny Games is the middle of the hourglass in Haneke’s development: having progressively narrowed the space of movement within the Opfer dialectic until it reaches a constraining bottleneck, the director turns abroad to reactivate this dynamic in his following films, Code Unknown and Caché.

II Haneke’s view and representation of violence rely on paradoxes, some of which we have come across earlier. The self-styled auteur is beholden to the Girardian premise that society firmly encloses violence within its bounds by attempting to expel it.8 In this model, our indirect manner of dealing with the aggressivity subtending all interactions accounts simultaneously for violence’s fascination and repulsion. We regard it as a powerful force of chaos and destruction that comes from the outside, rather than as something written into the fabric of our lives.9 In the exclusively inclusive relation we construct, it becomes easy to “fall prey to” a malevolent, purportedly external force (see def. 3 of “victim” in the Introduction). We profess horror toward violence even at a remove—when violence presents itself in mediatized form on television, in the cinema, on the radio. In other words, when we consume violence as fictional it does not necessarily alter our relationship to it on an ethical level. The relation between real and mediated violence remains an intractable problem, according to Jörg Metelmann’s survey of existent scholarship (15–29). Precisely because a kind of competitive victimhood is at issue in the fraught discussions of a causal or non-causal relationship between violence and viewers, the truth claims remain resistant to adjudication (see Introduction). Haneke works with our ambivalences toward violence, and he augments Girard’s paradox with his own: the director seeks to make us aware of mediated violence through its representation in the very media blamed for its dissemination. Precisely because his scenarios play with and confound our generic expectations, his films are shocking to many viewers.10 Since Haneke plots his fictions with long takes, rigid frames, and static shots that connote real time, his scenarios of victimhood and victimization become unbearable for many. Whether it is a family’s collective suicide in The Seventh Continent, a teenager’s killing of a passing acquaintance in Benny’s Video, a student’s murderous reaction to petty frustrations in 71 Fragments, or a bloody confrontation between have and have-nots in a society of scarcity in Time of the Wolf is irrelevant to the temporality these films

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insinuate. The clock ticks monotonously while the victim is slaughtered. Surprising disjunctions between the visual and the auditory plane—with the latter taking on an autonomous dimension11—and fragmentation on the formal level menacingly magnify the details. Disembodied hands engage in the mutilation of personal property prior to the collective suicide in The Seventh Continent. In Benny’s Video, the dying girl’s horrifying screams emanate from off-screen, while the camera focuses on an empty live-cam monitor with which the boy has been filming the girl. Shown from a perfectly perpendicular bird’s eye view, the ballistic student in 71 Fragments leaves a bank in the sixty-seventh scene. After he seats himself in his car, a final shot is heard. A pater familias is gunned down midsentence in Time of the Wolf. We see his speaking face, while we hear the shot fired at him in the midst of tense negotiations. Haneke, detractors have been quick to note, is in a double-bind situation: he attempts to show our investment in violence while distancing himself from precisely such violence. Not without some justification have accusations of sanctimonious pedagogy and duplicitous moralizing been levied at him.12 In his defense, the director has explained that he aims to radicalize the viewer in a self-reflexive manner not uncommon to other avant-gardists in the twentieth century. Pushing the audience against the limits and limitations of conventional expectations, Haneke hopes to make it aware of its self-perception as violence’s innocent victim. In the following statement, Haneke shifts attention from the re-presentation, the filmic ‘making present’ of violence, to the viewer’s self-positioning vis-à-vis this violence. The following questions motivate him: “The question is not: what am I allowed to show? But: what chance do I give the viewer to recognize what is shown for what it is? The question—limited to the theme of VIOLENCE—is not: how do I show violence, but: how do I show the viewer his own position toward violence and its representation?” (“Die Fragestellung—eingeschränkt auf das Thema GEWALT—lautet nicht: Wie zeige ich Gewalt, sondern: Wie zeige ich dem Zuschauer seine eigene Position gegenüber der Gewalt und ihrer Darstellung”).13 To answer this challenge, his films self-reflexively and obsessively emphasize the audience’s mediated relationship to violence, as well as its perpetual inundation with graphic images and visceral soundscapes. There is the interspersion of TV news and radio programs, predominantly Austrian in the Trilogy, French in Code Unknown; there are the many snippets of movies such as Toxic Avenger in Benny’s Video and pornography in the Piano Teacher. He reminds us that we are never at a safe remove; instead, we consume violence in the perpetual present tense of repetition, which magnifies the traumatic, victimizing aspect of mediated and mediatized violence.14 Haneke, who came of age in the politicized 1960s, jars the spectator out of voyeuristic passivity and docile consumption. The director’s humanist thrust, in JeanMichel Frodon’s view, seeks to restore agency to the victim, “making him

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pass from the status of media victim to that of potential interlocutor” (“le faire passer de status de victime du média à celui d’interlocuteur potentiel”). Apparently, further media victimization is necessary to sensitize the viewer, who already considers himself a victim of the media. The aggressiveness of Haneke’s mise en abîme, as he unleashes a supposedly rational violence on us, has repercussions for the director’s description of his larger project. In interviews, he slips continually into strong language, speaking of “provoking” the viewer’s self-reflection (“einen Selbstreflexionsprozeß [...] zu provozieren”), luring him into a “trap” (“Falle”), as well as of the viewer’s necessary “rape [...] into independent thought” (“Vergewaltigung [...] zum selbständigen Denken”).15 He “destabilizes” (“déstabiliser”) the viewer and “offend[s] his sensibilities” (“heurter sa sensibilité” [Rigoulet]). Then the viewer must take action to “defend” himself (“sich wehrt” [Rybarski 94]). The contagion that René Girard ascribes to impure violence finds a corollary in the linguistic contamination in evidence here. Largely absent from Haneke’s films are the volatile scenes of irascibility and vituperation, as I intimated, which such an undertaking implies. The crucial violence in his films rarely has anything to do with the excessive emotionality, the release of pent-up anger, or the joyous mania that accompanies the sacrifice as envisioned in previous chapters. In Haneke’s films, the minutes before a violent deed are often deceptively calm; the instantaneous pushing, shoving, and shouting that irrupts at other times is without direct consequence. The director’s films generally preserve a clinical veneer corresponding more to the tensions that accrete to societal indifference and supercilious disrespect.16 This manner of filming helps create clarity, Haneke maintains, and is the precondition for the salutary distance (in place of a more violating nearness) that we need to ponder human relations in the highly industrialized West.17 Bloodshed, in Haneke’s hospital-ward world, is calm, collected, and methodical; violence is not a disease to be treated either traditionally or homeopathically. The aura of detachment these films exude has to do partially with the director’s proclivity for subdued color schemes—cool blues and grays predominate—and partly with his use of spatial coordinates.18 Haneke’s Trilogy, ostensibly set in contemporary Vienna, deliberately effaces any characteristics that would mark the location as present-day Austria. There is neither a well-known tourist sight nor Gründerzeit architecture. Instead, we see urban areas common to any major city such as subway stations, post-World War II office buildings, and schools. The same is evident in The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001), the adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s eponymous novel (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983). The French actors Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel move through an abstracted Austrian capital as they engage in sadomasochistic teacher–pupil relations.19 In Code Unknown, too, the typical Parisian landmarks are avoided in favor of the spaces of everyday life (interiors, streets, theaters), and the scenes occurring in the French countryside disdain the

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predictable pastoral clichés. From the lack of spectacle an aesthetic sobriety emerges, whose measure is of a different order than the voluptuous video- or advertisement-aesthetic that Haneke criticizes and associates with American media dominance (Kilb 49). Haneke’s Bresson-inspired technique gives rise to a frugal beauty within the banality of everyday evil and lends an ascetic quality to the human condition he portrays. Nonetheless, the insistence on the mundane aspects that the execution of violence entails infuses the images of daily life with a subcutaneous cruelty. Meticulously framed closeups of fragmented physiques, carefully measured long shots of plain building façades, or long takes of pubescent choir boys in calibrated alternation foreground not only the images’ excessive ordinariness, but also their potential threat.20 The rolling golf ball harbingers torture in Funny Games ; the cash transactions in Benny’s Video precede betrayal.21 Haneke is repeatedly concerned with adolescence, in particular as it exceeds prevalent ideas about teenage behavior. He began exploring this topic in a television montage for the experimental Austrian TV-series Works of Art (Kunst-Stücke) in 1991.22 In Obituary for a Murderer (Nachruf für einen Mörder), he focuses on the actual case of a twenty-one-year old, Felix Zehetner, who killed his parents and then himself. Haneke’s collage places the soundtrack from a highbrow Austrian Club 2 talk show devoted to the murder over image fragments culled from public television channels on the day the Club 2 discussion was transmitted. With this juxtaposition, the director suggests that—in an age of global self-reflexivity—the well-known psychological, psychoanalytic, and sociological accounts offered up in the talk show have taken on the mustiness of clichés. This interpretation is applicable to all of Haneke’s films dealing with youthful crisis. To say that the protagonist Benny in Benny’s Video, for example, behaves the way he does because he is inundated by violent American movies, lives in a simulacrum, or is prey to affluent negligence holds true to a degree.23 Benny’s eating habits, relying on fast food and pre-packaged meals, are symptomatic of the parents’ private careerism displacing communal repasts and solitary rituals replacing common ones. Again, however, these explanations seem incommensurate to the state of crisis and are greeted with a blasé attitude and resigned cynicism, also on the part of the characters.24 In regard to the violence contained in his Trilogy, Haneke contends that these are acts that magazines and the local sections of newspapers like to present with hypocritical horror. For him, their true horror lies rather in the suspicion that the supposed irrationality of these acts could have their very rationally explicable roots in a Western European way of life.25 We, in turn, could ask whether Haneke’s reliance on the Dialectic of Enlightenment (where irrationality is always entwined with the rationality of bourgeois life) transcends prevalent explanatory models. But perhaps the problem is less the existence of inadequate accounts than our search for monocausal answers avoiding a dialectic, however worn it may seem.

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III Haneke’s perspective on violence, his film style, and his view of conventional paradigms feed into his examination of victimhood at the nexus of contemporary media technology, societal self-surveillance, and the proliferation of images. In his works, increased technology and media render victims increasingly invisible—as a kind of unwilled absence of concern. In this regard, Haneke’s films contradict the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s contemporaneous treatises: Sloterdijk claims that the possibility of media attention fuels the public airing of victims’ grievances and heightens the desirability of victim status (chapter 1). Haneke shows that the proliferation of video technology and its capacity for digital reproducibility have little to do with increasing mass society’s narcissistic self-constitution or any paranoid self-surveillance (where every action is recorded and becomes an excuse to discipline). Rather, his films are about the augmentation of metaphorical invisibility. It is the fundamental violence arising from indifference that generates struggles for direct recognition and sacrificial gestures.26 Haneke’s preferred method for filming violence performs the invisibility of social relations: the camera looks away when sacrificial acts take place, which are meant to counter the attenuation of social bonds. The camera’s foregrounded impartiality, although subverted in the long run, could be read as an outgrowth of the characters’ indifference and social indifference more generally. In many a visceral or politically important scene, it distances itself like a willfully oblivious bystander. It cannot be bothered to take too active an interest in the events unfolding before it. In Benny’s Video, for instance, the camera refuses to follow the wounded girl as she falls to the floor; it chronicles the fact that a black woman serves Benny in McDonald’s only by a glance at her hands. However, the viewer is implicated in the onscreen proceedings via the recorded sound.27 In Benny’s Video, the young protagonist creates a chimerical video environment, through which he seeks to exert a modicum of control over an indifferent world rendering him non-existent.28 A segment before the girl’s murder crystallizes the core of Haneke’s undertaking. When we are first introduced to Benny (Arno Frisch), a handsome boy around thirteen years of age, we see him in his darkened lair-like bedroom. We are clearly dealing with a well-off family. It has put at the adolescent’s disposal all the requisite paraphernalia for a sequestered existence, in which Benny prefers to film his limited interactions with others.29 He is watching a tape he made of his older sister’s party and her pyramid scheme (see f igure 2.1). A knock is heard over the videocassette’s soundtrack, and a woman’s voice overlays the grainy home video footage. In this way, the film signals its concern with invisibility: Benny’s mother (Angela Winkler) comes in first on the auditory level, articulating a command. When she tells Benny to stop the video, his response is monosyllabic. A medium shot shows Benny, seated on a swivel

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Figure 2.1 Benny sits in his technologically up-to-date room in Benny’s Video (1992) and watches a video he has made of his sister’s pyramid scheme.

chair and surrounded by video paraphernalia, with the running television to his left; another monitor is to his right. We hear the mother tell Benny to change channels and see Benny’s hands on the VCR. Then, finally, we get an image of her after she has entered his room. Now, she is shown against a sliding door in medium close-up. She wants to know more about the party his older sister threw without parental consent—a situation of which we had already been apprised earlier through Benny’s incriminating video (it is shown here for the second time). Not once in this scene are mother and son shown together in a two-shot or depicted in the customary shot/reverse shot method. Occasionally, her eyes wander over in his direction, but they remain glued to the nightly (German) news, which fill the screen during the perfunctory conversation. She questions Benny about not having let people into his expensively outfitted room and about cleaning it up. His answers remain brief. The two are isolated in their respective frames, and their focus on the television screen rather than on each other lends this scene its peculiarly irritating quality. The mother seems to be looking at the viewer while concurrently not meeting the viewer’s gaze. The criticism that Amos Vogel levels at the film, “that too much [is] being withheld and for too long,” is precisely the point of scenes like this one (“Nonexisting” 75).30 The door slides open a second time, and the familial triangle, privileged locus of confrontation in Haneke’s Trilogy, is consolidated. A strong light

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falls across Benny and endows the father (Ulrich Mühe) and his arrival with overwhelming emphasis. Benny pivots to meet his father’s eyes, blinking momentarily into the light source. The paternal gaze is firmly fixed, however, like the maternal one, on the television screen. Only once in this sequence has there been a series of shots indicating rudimentary interaction between parent and child. The family members are at a permanent “indifference point,” where a “feeling-value [...] neither pleasant nor unpleasant” compensates for the lack of feeling for one another (see chapter 1). In this segment and throughout the film, expressive gestures are almost entirely absent and, with few exceptions, limited to the female characters (Hrachovec 296–97). The indifference the characters evince toward each other—the “absence of active feeling,” the deliberate dispassionateness—goes hand in hand with the permanent mediation and mediatization that takes place. Instead, Haneke’s static camera is focused on the television with images from the nightly news. Our collective attention is continually diverted to the television screen with its serialization of violence on a grand scale. In this scene, as in others with news footage, the characters seem impervious to the flow of information before them—the news says “nothing,” as the mother Anna claims. This is hardly the case: there is documentary footage of football rowdies beating up asylum seekers in economically depressed Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of Imelda Marcos’ return to the Philippines, and of fighting between Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia. While the television monitor’s black frame replicates the film screen’s borders and suggests containment, the film will give lie to all such efforts at enclosing and sealing off violence. The doubled frame also emphasizes that mediated violence is always perceived from a limited and biased perspective, which the f ilmmaker’s/editor’s selection of scenes and method of filming further delimits and defines. Any attempted objectivity and impartiality, which the scene’s lack of cuts and static filming technique suggest, are simultaneously undercut. This tension between the neutral, chronicling authorial voice and the evaluative, condemnatory one will persist in Haneke’s later works. I wrote earlier about the pervasive sense of indifference in contemporary mass society that Sloterdijk analyzes, and I would like to refine my previous discussion with respect to Benny’s Video. Of course, we are not dealing with mass society of yesteryear, that dense throng searching for physical contact in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960), which Sloterdijk uses as a foil for his updated philosophical version of social anomie in The Contempt of the Masses. In Benny’s Video, we are contending with particularized society, conditioned by perpetual mediation. Playing on the double meaning of the word “gemein” as both “common” and “mean,” Sloterdijk writes: “[T]he mass today only experiences itself in its particles, as individuals that—as elementary particles of an invisible commonality/meanness—dedicate themselves to those programs in which

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their quality as mass and their commonness/meanness are presupposed” (“Vielmehr erlebt sich heute die Masse selbst nur noch in ihren Partikeln, den Individuen, die sich als Elementarteilchen einer unsichtbaren Gemeinheit genau den Programmen hingeben, in denen ihre Massenhaftigkeit und Gemeinheit vorausgesetzt wird” [19]).31 A society of elementary particles, in this view, suffers from a positive feedback loop. The mass particles are habituated to commonality through the media programs they consume, whose lowest-common-denominator aspect furthers the mass’s meanness as well as the basic similarity of its particles. Its consumption of the very programs by which it feels victimized thus advances its quality as an indifferent and ‘indifferentiated’ mass. At the same time, the media is not perceived as a means to community through commonality; instead, it leads to the perception of radical isolation. Haneke’s view of contemporary society is arguably more extreme than Sloterdijk’s. The filmmaker shows what occurs when perceptions of others are no longer simply mediated or when individuals or groups do not seek to garner attention in the spotlight of a fickle yet omnipresent public eye. Haneke reveals what happens when this permanent mediation begins to inhibit the recognition of others as beings of differential value. In Benny’s first encounter with the girl, whom he will lure to his home and later kill with a slaughter gun used for livestock, we see this aspect concretized. Benny first watches a segment of a video before selecting one to rent. He stands next to other customers, each shut off from the outside world via headphones and engrossed in a personal screen (see f igure 2.2). The video shop scene outlines the manner of interaction pervading society; the behavior in Benny’s own home is simply an exemplification and intensification of what we find in this seemingly lower-class establishment (note the owner’s ring, insisting on his blue-collar status). Even in Haneke’s romantic build-up with the girl, they interact as if their conversation depended on triangulation with a television. The screen in front of the video store provides their first point of contact. The figures in Haneke’s film, we are led to believe, are exemplars of an atomized society that could only grasp its contiguous nature via the television and other modes of self-reproduction, but fails to do so (Assheuer 59). While there is nothing “mean” (Sloterdijk’s “gemein”) in the sense of “common” about the haute bourgeois family Haneke depicts, there is something simultaneously parcellized and reproducible about these lives—and there is plenty about them that is malicious, in the other sense of “gemein.” Mass society, comprising all social strata (the girl comes from a distinctly less affluent background than Benny), shies away from immediate physicality in favor of mediated perceptions of one another. The system of mediated perception, having become firmly established, replicates itself infinitely. The numerous reprints, Warhol included, adorning the tasteful living room or Benny’s videotape of himself wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his own face attest

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Figure 2.2 Benny stands in front of one of the numerous monitors in the video store.

to this infinite reproducibility. Furthermore, the duplication of parental names, citing Haneke’s earlier film The Seventh Continent, suggests a replication of the bourgeois anomie presented there. It is no coincidence that all couples in the Trilogy and beyond have the same names (Seventh Continent, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Caché).32 The first segment in Benny’s Video I described presents disrespect (“Mißachtung”) as the inexorable outcome of such missing recognition, and the absence of care that disrespect entails generates the impetus for a sacrificial act. The teen seeks to move from parental disregard to a positively connoted personhood. Anna’s and Georg’s overly composed behavior toward their son, lack of eye contact, and rigid conversations make visible the problem of invisibility arising from indifference. The reciprocal nonrecognition between child and parents, evidence of the emotional glaciation of the Trilogy’s title, indicates a deep-seated crisis, and from this mutual stance follows all other violence in the film. Camille Nevers maintains that Haneke, in both Benny’s Video and his preceding film, The Seventh Continent (1989), is concerned with seeing, being seen, and—most importantly for my purposes—not being seen.33 The absence of the gaze is what kills: [A]ll of his visceral work in the mise-en-scène consists of getting the spectator to see for himself, so that he can slowly begin to realize, putting him in

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the objective position of a voluntary voyeur as conscious of his gaze as of himself: the vertigo is such—and any escape through identification with the characters forbidden—that (unless we are totally perverse) we are very frightened. It is the gaze, or the absence of the gaze, which kills; this is what one sees in the films of Michael Haneke [...]. (66, emphasis mine) ([T]out son travail viscéral de mise en scène consiste à amener le spectateur à voir par lui-même, qu’il puisse se rendre compte un peu, le mettant dans la position objective d’un voyeur volontaire, aussi conscient de son regard que de lui-même: le vertige est tel, et toute échappatoire par l’identification aux personnages étant interdite, qu’à moins d’être totalement pervers on a très peur. Le regard, ou l’absence de regard, qui tue, c’est ce que l’on voit dans les films de Michael Haneke [...]. [66, emphasis mine])

Nevers, playing with the double meaning of “regard” in her clause, “(l)e regard, ou l’absence de regard, qui tue,” cleverly links the mutual cognition by way of sight to the mutual recognition necessary for respect. Benny is present to others only as a type, as a boy of above average intelligence possessing the right degree of teenage ‘coolness.’ Despite being white, he is like the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, whom Axel Honneth discusses in “Invisibility: Towards the Moral Epistemology of ‘Recognition.’ ” Lacking parental (particularly paternal) acceptance, he tries to break out of invisibility (chapter 1). According to Honneth, the first-person narrator of Invisible Man senses his social stigmatization not because the white people around him say or do something, but because they withhold all gestures and expressions of recognition. Violence is a necessary defensive mechanism against such willed invisibility. Honneth is understandably ill at ease with the consequence of his analysis, for it provides a rationale for any sacrificial violence ensuing from the deficient status quo. The philosopher writes apologetically: “[E]ven that which is described in the (Ellison) text as a ‘striking out with your fists’ is probably meant in a metaphorical sense [...]” (“Auch das, was hier im Text als ein ‘mit den Fäusten’ Umsichschlagen beschrieben wird, ist wohl in einem übertragenen Sinn gemeint [...]”). He immediately shifts attention away from the actual violence with which an individual may seek to provoke visible gestures of recognition (14). There is, of course, a distinct difference between Benny’s situation and that of Ellison’s invisible protagonist, which has nothing to do with race, an issue to which Haneke turns later in Code Unknown and Caché. In Ellison’s case, non-recognition arises from an act of will: white people do not want to see the black man on purpose. On the other hand, Benny’s Video, in line with the definition of indifference I discussed earlier, suggests that invisibility—while it requires an active making absent—is not a matter of choice. Confronted with the reality of ubiquitous mediation, people cannot help but make one another absent. Because technology makes expressive

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gestures in unmediated form impossible, video technology (and, by extension, all media used to record events) thwarts the direct experience of social recognition that is a pre-condition for self-respect and respect of the other.34 While Haneke’s film is most interesting when it explores the possibility of mediated forms of recognition, for example, when the two insecure teenagers hesitantly grope toward an understanding via the video camera, it remains beholden to older notions of human community and commonality. Ultimately, the television screen does not provide an adequate interface for human interaction. When Benny films the young girl, she first smiles at the camera (we see her face in close-up on the TV) and then chooses to drop down, out of the sightline of the viewfinder—and Benny.35 The film must end with the derangement of the parents’ Weltanschauung. They are slow to accept the complete replacement of verbal communication by visual images (Metelmann 101–03). Benny’s Video cannot envision a social order based on the indifference and the invisibility of permanent video mediation. Against this backdrop of indifference and invisibility arise the adolescent’s murder and its ritualized aftermath. Some commentators have been too quick to see society as the victim and Benny as the malicious perpetrator, an embodiment of youth gone awry (Hrachovec 292). His sacrificial victimization is in line with the narrative’s drive toward ritual. As Jörg Metelmann has persuasively argued, the film early on channels any human interaction into formalized exchanges (90). The girl is, to an extent, an “indifferent victim,” eminently sacrificeable. Like the ambiguous victimae in Girard’s Violence and the Sacred that I treated in chapter 1, she is both similar to and different from Benny. We should not discount the girl’s anonymity as an unimportant factor in this context, since her invisibility within her own home (of which she is disinclined to speak) parallels Benny’s. The correspondences between the two become unmistakable after the killing, the victimizer linked directly to his victim. Benny takes on the girl’s proclivities and speech patterns. As Metelmann’s detailed description of Benny’s post-murder development underlines, the teenager copies his victim’s taste in comic books and slang: However, the Donald-Duck-comic book gives yet a further indication, leaving a trace. It leads to the nameless victim, to the girl whom Benny killed by manslaughter, and whom the parents afterwards intentionally murdered, the girl who liked to watch cartoons, especially Roger Rabbit. The girl and Benny were still so similar—despite the described differences that Benny strongly emphasized in his posing—that the girl, the victim, can formulate the common denominator for Benny’s life and his Weltanschauung: “WHATEVER”/“BECAUSE.” (96, emphasis in original) (Doch ist über den Donald-Duck-Comic noch ein weiterer Verweis gegeben, eine Spur gelegt. Sie führt zum namenlosen Opfer, zum von Benny durch Totschlag umgebrachten, von den Eltern dann erst richtig vorsätzlich

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gemordeten Mädchen, das gerne Zeichentrickfilme ansah, vor allem den Hasen Roger Rabbit. Das Mädchen und Benny waren sich trotz der beschriebenen Unterschiede, die Benny in seinem Posing besonders betonte, doch so ähnlich, daß das Mädchen, das Opfer, den Generalnenner für Bennys Leben und Weltanschauung formulieren kann: ”SO HALT”. [96, emphasis in original])

The girl’s own indifference manifests itself in a shoulder-shrugging “whatever”—she could have come along, she could have decided not to come, she could stay with Benny, she could leave him to his own devices, nothing really matters.36 In this, her behavior refracts Benny’s unresponsive environment. She must die to exorcise the crisis. “So halt,” fittingly enough, will be the phrase that Benny uses in the police station, when he turns in the videotape incriminating his parents and is asked why. Is this a further sign of indifference on his part, an acceptance of the status quo, or an attempt to spurn his parents’ treatment of the murder (in a rewinderase-replay mode, they extinguish all traces of the corpse)? Is this ambiguous German “so halt” less a “whatever” gesture than a “because” one? Does Benny rebel against his parents, emulating the Toxic Avengersuperhero in the satiric horror video he watches, because he considers the girl significant within the context of the sacrificial ritual?37 All proceedings in the post-murder scene point to the purifying nature of the sacrifice in a Christian rather than pagan mold. For theological interpreters, Haneke’s Catholicism surfaces most clearly in the focus on the protagonist’s transformation, from the ablution of the room to the boy’s literal stigmatization of himself with the girl’s blood in front of a running video camera.38 Having cleansed his world with an Opfer, Benny marks himself as the victim of the highest order. As he smears his thin body with blood in an imitatio dei, we sense that we are watching his own self-willed crucifixion. Benny later takes his remorse to the barbershop, where, in a symbolic act of penitence, he has his head shaved. The mother and son flee to Egypt, traveling to Luxor and Karnak, while the father disposes of the corpse at home. While abroad, the scenes are characterized with a warm glow, including Benny’s own videos, utterly dissimilar from the anterior scenes in Vienna. Parallel to Freud’s account of Christianity in my Introduction, we are dealing with a double victimization—Benny, mimicking the girl linguistically, usurps her status as victim through the rhetorical gesture of selfsacrifice. An overidentification with the victim, to the point where the victimizer erases his victim, seems to have taken place. In broad outlines, the film’s narrative conforms to the sacrificial pattern I delineated earlier. From his own victimization through invisibility, we move to the teenagers’ failed efforts at reinstating a sense of mutual recognition via a video camera interface, to the boy’s victimization of the girl, and on to Benny’s renewed status as invisible victim. The parents’ reaction leads Benny to realize that the sacrifice was, as far as they are concerned, for

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naught; in the world Benny inhabits, the potential for recognition has long been forfeited. Georg’s and Anna’s dispensation of the rules of law when they dispose of the body cancel out Benny’s deed. They reaffirm everyday life with its continual subsurface of violent invisibility. The film shows the minor shift in the ways in which they deal with their son, as it restages scenes from the beginning with slight alterations (the boys’ choir singing, the pyramid scheme). The victim has been immolated, but the aggression between the two rivaling parties remains nonetheless. However, the ease with which the film lends itself to a Judeo-Christian sacrificial paradigm gives pause, particularly in the case of a filmmaker who professes profound skepticism, intra- and extradiegetically, toward such models today.39 In fact, the willingness with which most viewers and reviewers construct and accept such a reading, investing Benny’s final act of violence with a restorative power, neglects numerous clues within the narrative itself. A Girardian sacrifice may be a possible explanation for this film from the perspective of the parental generation. Again, Jörg Metelmann sensitizes us to the narrative’s ambivalences, resisting the comforting closure that a reintegration of sacrificial violence into a theological horizon could imply. About Benny’s supposedly changed behavior in the third section of the film, he writes: But for how conscious or ‘responsible’ can one take this behavior? The trace of suffering of this victim put in an abstract and larger context (such as, for example, in the thoughts of Derrida or Lévinas): of the victims of fear and violence in history generally, which shows itself only in the elusiveness of any sense and precisely thereby remains permanently destabilizing for our understanding; it cannot be taken as anything that can be consciously worked through, that one could ‘master,’ if one didn’t “avoid taking responsibility.” The trace is present in its absence, just as the “whatever” confirms without affirming any sense whatsoever. “WHATEVER” is the distance that appears verbally in the surface’s absolute proximity in the system “Benny Video.” (97) (Für wie ,bewußt’ oder ,verantwortungsvoll’ aber kann man dieses Verhalten nehmen? Die Spur des Leids dieses Opfers, abstrakter und im größeren Kontext (etwa der Gedanken von Derrida und Lévinas) gefaßt: der Opfer von Schrecken und Gewalt in der Geschichte generell, die sich nur im Entzug eines Sinns zeigt und gerade dadurch für das Verständnis stets (ver)störend bleibt, kann nicht als bewußt abzuarbeitende Größe genommen werden, mit der es ,sich fertig werden ließe’, wenn man sich nicht um die Verantwortung drückt”. Die Spur ist ” in ihrer Absenz präsent, so wie das ”So halt” zugleich bestätigt wie nichts sinnhaft affirmiert. ”SO HALT” ist die Ferne, die in der absoluten Nähe der Oberfläche im System Benny Video” verbal aufscheint. [97]) ”

Benny, in this sophisticated reading, never reaches an ethical decision. The girl’s indifferent gesture becomes symptomatic of the “ambiguity of

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our life between victim and perpetrator” Haneke aims to thematize in his Trilogy. The aura of the sacred (such as the inextinguishable trace of the victim’s language)—that which is far but appears near in Walter Benjamin’s conception—cannot be reinstated through the deceptive proximity of the video interface. This aura is, in the Trilogy generally and in Benny’s Video specifically, related to images of the dead. It is the only important deviation we find in the repetitions structuring the film: when Benny returns after the sojourn in Egypt, he confesses to his friend that he did not see his grandmother’s corpse (a fictive grandmother who was laid to rest there). We remember that, shortly before the shooting—after having watched his video of the pig slaughter—Benny had discussed death with the girl. In this conversation, Benny admits that he was once confronted with a corpse. However, he closed his eyes in order not to see his grandfather’s body in the coffin. The relation of images to the aura that the dead body retains in our culture is the problem with which Benny wrestles.40 In a world where the permanent mediation of the image has intervened in all personal interactions, there is, naturally, a preoccupation with image at the expense of anything else. When the image has become the commodity par excellence, sacrificial gestures are absorbed into the circulation of images. The father, in the crucial scene where this becomes apparent to Benny (and us), confronts the son in the bathroom, interrogating him about his closely cropped hair. We see them both reflected in the mirror, the son’s emaciated torso next to the father’s upright body—the senior figure functions as the future double of the junior one. Georg berates his son, interpreting Benny’s gesture as one of racist rebellion, and the parent suspects his son of harboring sympathies with a “baby skinhead gang” (“eine Baby-Skinhead-Bande”). In the same sentence, Georg calls the haircut a “concentration camp look” (“KZ-Look”). A teenager suffering from Weltschmerz, he implies, emulates the suffering and ‘look’ of concentration camp inmates. These are, needless to say, two astonishing comparisons, which can be made only if the trace of another, anterior victim has no power to destabilize. The victimization involved in the lack of recognition of the son is apparent in the victimization implicit in the historical comparison. Following a principle of exchangeability, differences between victims and perpetrators are elided and, more significantly, become a matter of image. Skinheads with their National Socialist slogans are substituted for concentration camp victims and vice versa. The father’s later efforts to save his son are undertaken in the mode of self-interested, imagistic crisis control and PR-damage limitation (Metelmann 94). Georg’s willingness, as Benny emerges from invisibility to a negatively connoted visibility, to repress the immediate crime—as well as the historical one—only perpetuates the instrumental logic necessitating a sacrifice, as well as the ethical maltreatment that invisibility entails.41 The sacrificial ritual, like all formal articulation, requires a “resistant material, structure, or context,” which is

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simply no longer available in the infinitely reproducible world of fungible images.42 Demonstrating the ease with which we exchange images of victims and perpetrators is perhaps Haneke’s great feat in relation to our historical moment, and the one that has given rise to the most misunderstandings. His abbreviated allusions to the history of his country have encouraged French critics in particular to espouse him as one of Austria’s enlightened avatars, who polemicizes against historical amnesia (Païni 36; Derobert 24; Grünberg 63–65). He himself has been quick to underline the continuity between fascist behavior in the past and repressive behavior in the present.43 However, precisely the vagueness of the director’s references to an unwelcome Austrian history and the country’s questionable status as victim (trenchantly criticized since the election of one-time Wehrmacht-member and former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as Austrian president in the mid-1980s) has led certain reviewers in Haneke’s homeland to cast doubt on his approach. The influential publicist Karl-Markus Gauß, in this latter group, writes in relation to Funny Games: In the way in which we learn nothing about the violence, because it remains pure presence and timelessness, we learn almost nothing about the country in which this story takes place, nothing about either the perpetrators or victims, and hardly anything about the age, which is, after all, ours. The open, hidden, and hushed up struggles of the epoch, its paradoxes, which break open between social groups and cut through each one of us, are sublated in a strangely unspecific artificiality, in which humans [...] speak in movie-phrases and prove themselves to be beasts. (56) (Wie man nichts über die Gewalt erfährt, weil sie reine Gegenwart und Zeitlosigkeit bleibt, erfährt man auch fast nichts über das Land, in dem diese Geschichte spielt, nichts über Täter wie Opfer und kaum etwas über die Zeit, die doch die unsere ist. Die offenen, verdeckten und vertuschten Kämpfe der Epoche, ihre Widersprüche, die zwischen den gesellschaftlichen Gruppen aufbrechen und durch einen jeden von uns selber schneiden, sind in einer seltsam unbestimmten Künstlichkeit aufgehoben, in der die Menschen [...] sich in Kino-Phrasen unterhalten und als Bestien bewähren. [56])

The veneer of unspecificity and, by extension, artificiality in Haneke’s fictions attests to the presence of victimhood as the master discourse, certainly prevalent in the post-Waldheim context of Austria. Since the dynamics of victimization are part of the general experiential fabric, there is no need to situate Funny Games —Haneke’s film implies—in a historically definable space or time. I should add that the facility with which the roles, or better said, the images of perpetrators and victims can be exchanged and to which Georg’s KZ-Skinhead comparison bears witness, is not delimited by national borders. The focus is on the suffering of the victims, as the murderer Paul states in Funny Games (chuckling maliciously that their silent suffering

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would be boring),44 since all are capable of envisioning themselves as victims. The victims, Gauß continues in his reflections, are “completely absorbed in the role that is accorded them and have no other meaning than to be maltreated, tortured, and massacred” (“Opfer, die vollends in der Rolle, die ihnen zugedacht ist, aufgehen und keine andere Bedeutung haben als die, malträtiert, gefoltert, massakriert zu werden” [57]). This total absorption into the role of victim is possible because—in the all-encompassing mediatization to which Benny’s Video is part one and Funny Games the sequel—there is such a pervasive sense of non-recognition in a culture of images. Benny’s world functions according to a kind of perverted Kantian dictum: “Let the video act and act in such a way that there can be another video of it” (“Laß das Video handeln und agiere so, daß es wieder ein Video gibt”). In this “system Benny video” our selfperception as victim becomes all the easier (Metelmann 103, 95). There is no outside to the proliferation of videos, which reproduce in a timeless loop the endless now of the victims’ suffering. The final shot, a closed-circuit television screen showing, in triplicate, the brief encounter between son and parents in the police station, is overlaid with radio reports of war. Blood-red writing, repeating the title “BENNY’S VIDEO” in capital letters, is superimposed on the television screen. Again, we are confronted with the violence of invisible watchers; an unknown person is observing the one who surveyed without making this known. Another “Benny’s video” is in the offing, with its distribution of indifference, victimhood, and victimization.

IV The media’s diffusion of a sense of indifference through its dalliance with exchangeable victim images is even more strongly emphasized in the later Code Unknown (Code inconnu). Code Unknown marks Haneke’s filmic departure for France. Ostensibly done for pragmatic reasons such as access to funding and renowned actors (Köhler), this move allows him to bring his interest in victim–perpetrator dynamics—always colored by our shared knowledge of the Nazi era in the Austrian setting—to bear on contemporary Western, indeed global, geopolitics. Indifferent differences and the resulting horizontal paradigm occasion a profound incommunicability, another variant of social invisibility, among the Malians, Romanians, and Frenchmen peopling the forty-five fragments. In the glutinous historical fluid of the present day, provisional coalitions arise between people on the basis of a shared experience of victimhood—an experience, however, which does not preclude victimizing others. Any forced solidarity is momentary; the self-positioning as victim is a matter of circumstance and shifting alignments. The only unmediated gestures in Code Unknown are of an aggressive nature. While they arise from a demand for respect, they never succeed even in ensuring a basic recognition (Goudet 23–24). At one moment, a

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Parisian of African origin defends a Romanian beggar’s right to respect vis-à-vis a French youth. The consequences are predictably disastrous for both: the police arrest the black Amadou for beginning a tussle and deport the beggar woman (scene two). In the next instant, a young Arab first flirts with and then insults a Parisian woman. In his cynical view, her rendering him invisible is an outgrowth of the French colonial legacy. He spits in her face to punish her indifference and is confronted by an older, dark-skinned man, who berates the young man in Arabic as he takes sides with the woman (scene forty). Some characters arrogate the moral high ground by appealing to their historical victimization. They then use this supposedly incontrovertible position to either aid victims or to victimize others. For the older Arab, it is perhaps his own experience of victimhood that leads, after a long delay, to his intervention in this excruciating scene. Historical victimization is, in his case, nothing that would link him with the belligerent youth. The mediatization of daily life proceeds apace in the multicultural metropolis, and there exists no “code” to unlock the image world. While the film lacks the interspersed television and radio broadcasts that characterized the earlier Trilogy, it contains a character whose conundrum relates to the media’s omnipresence. Traveling from one conflagration to another, the photojournalist Georges ponders the relationship between the media and the masses, whom his images affect (or not, as the case may be).45 In Code Unknown, which is structured by mirroring scenes like Benny’s Video, two of his photomontages are juxtaposed. The first photomontage shows images from battle-scarred Kosovo. The local conflict between Albanian fighters and Serbian police flashes immediately on a global screen via CNN and Newsweek, news organizations for which Georges works. Yet these struggles bear no relevance for those viewing them. Remember, in this regard, Anna’s words to George in Benny’s Video. Staring at the nightly news, he says: “Anything new?…So, what are they saying?” (“Was Neues?…Und was sagen sie?”). She, having just watched the recap preceding the full broadcast, answers his repeated question in the negative: “I don’t know . … Nothing” (“Ich weiß nicht . … Nichts”). In Code Unknown, news images from the former Yugoslavia—a war exceptionally close to home not only for Austrians, but also for Western Europeans in general46—neither communicate their absolute difference from other conflicts nor the need for emotional investment.47 Particularly the medium of television, as Haneke so disparagingly conceives it (his denigration pertains also to his own TV productions), is seen as working together with the indifference Code Unknown impugns. As Susan Sontag writes in her extended reflections on images of suffering, reflections that arose from her experience of the war in Yugoslavia: “Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content” (106). The oblique but existent connection between indifferent content and spectatorial indifference is what

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these news images in Code Unknown and the discourse generated about them convey. To reveal the lack of affective participation of all involved, the director separates the voice-over from the images: Georges calmly speaks about his son’s impending fifth birthday as still photos of aggrieved and maimed individuals pass before us. Although he professes to a lack of words, he seems as untouched, the disjunction suggests, as we are. This disconnect is, earlier scenes from other films hint, not only the problem for the one whose livelihood depends on the taking of such pictures. There may be no purpose in disseminating images of victims in a saturated West preoccupied with its own victimhood. Near the end of Code Unknown, we see Georges’s second series in the thirty-fourth scene. These are portrait photos of commuters in the Paris metro, which he has taken surreptitiously. Some forty images of diverse faces fill the screen in alternation, while Georges recounts his harrowing encounter with Afghani Taliban on the soundtrack in a letter to Anne. Again Haneke utilizes the disjunction between spoken word and image to introduce an element of self-reflexivity into the film. Now, surprisingly enough, the stubborn Georges displays greater skepticism toward his work. Georges ponders an earlier dinner conversation with a friend, who provocatively asked whether it was necessary to see pictures of starving children to imagine hunger. In imagining his new reply to the unconvinced friend, Georges paraphrases Baudrillard, Sontag, Ernst Gombrich, and the French director Robert Bresson, who in his Notes sur le cinématographe espouses an economy of means as the key to film art. Georges now speculates that it is easy, from a distance, to chat about the “ecology of images” (“l’écologie des images”) and the ethical value of not transmitting certain images. However, this remains chatter when seen against the images’ actual consequences. In a resigned and pensive tone, he asks whether his friend may be right after all. Behind the friend’s query and Georges’s imagined reply lingers the larger question of what it means to be made to see unpleasant, gruesome, or heart-rending things. Being a spectator to catastrophes is our essential modern experience, as Sontag suggests in Regarding the Pain of Others, and it requires a perpetual level of shock (18). Where “shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value” (23), efforts to control the possible shock on behalf of the public’s “good taste” are never far away. They are most effectively made, as Sontag points out, on the part of news producers and newspaper editors in the name of a general decorousness (68–69). However, moral probity does not seem to be at issue in the dinner conversation; the friend does not appear to be attacking Georges for having taken offensively graphic photos. The fear seems to be more that no level of shock can pierce the public’s indifference. Georges’s images naïvely aim to produce those sentiments that would lead someone to intervene against the causes of suffering—the viewer’s identification with the victims’ anguish is to become productive. We infer from Georges’s tone of voice,

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however, that the consequence of his images may be that a person cannot imagine anything at all. I do wonder whether this second portrait series corroborates the theses on victimhood that Haneke’s films put forward, which suggest that there is no solution to the mediatized dialectic of victimhood and victimization. Or does this metro series offer a way out through the permanent mediation that Haneke impugns? The individual close-ups of people from all age groups and ethnicities possess a quiet dignity. It is at odds with the aesthetics of violence in the Kosovo photos and their illusion of worldwide simultaneity. The second montage distances itself from the obsessive depiction of violence that indicates apathy or engenders indifference toward the overly familiar. Rather than demonstrate indifference to the local and the proximate, the photos espouse interest in and concern for the extreme diversity at hand (sensationalist images of Taliban captors are withheld). Instead, we seem to find equal respect for all members of the body politic. Indeed, it is difficult not to read into the second montage an echo of James Agee’s pathos-laden words about another, seminal series of subway portraits.48 In regard to Walker Evans’s Many Are Called, Agee proclaimed in 1940 that the photographer’s New York portraits celebrate the multiplicity of the hybrid mass as well as the individual in his irreducible uniqueness.49 Admittedly, at Agee’s time of writing, his prose is impelled by urgency of an altogether different magnitude. He writes: “They are members of every race and nation of the earth. [...] Each is incorporate in such an intense and various concentration of human beings as the world has never known before. [...] Each carries in the postures of his body, his hands, in his face, in the eyes, the signatures of a time and a place in the world upon a creature for whom the name immortal soul is one mild and vulgar metaphor” (15–16). The updating of Evans’s photos in Haneke’s film would, in their focus on individual features, seem to counter the waning sense of individual particularity I discussed in chapter 1. These images restore to the timeless, ahistorical victims their temporal and historical situatedness. Haneke has chosen a striking number of non-white, postcolonial subjects for this portrait series. Seriality, in this case, counters the indifference associated with the violating nearness; it goes against the proximity of the non-stop imagery against which Haneke rails. The photos of fellow Parisians seem to make good on the imagined closeness that other, more violent, documentary images fake.50 With their black-and-white documentary realism and distinctly unaesthetic appeal (this is no glamour gallery), these portraits reinvest everyday human experience with a spirit of tolerant acceptance—of dissimilarity within similarity. Jean Baudrillard also showers accolades on this type of image when he discusses the photos from Code Unknown. The portraits in Haneke’s film were actually taken by the Frenchman Luc Delahaye and reprinted in a volume entitled The Other (L’Autre).51 In his afterword, Baudrillard

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declares that a “poetic transference” (“transfert poétique”) takes place between subject/photographer and object/photographed. Delahaye avoids the moralizing pitfalls of testimony and witness (indicators of a victim discourse in Baudrillard’s view). Delahaye, in contradistinction to most contemporary photographers, makes no pretence of his distance from the real—he stresses his mediating function. Other photography and, by extension, film fall prey to a belief in immediacy within the realm of mediation, within art- and news forms that depend upon being an impure medium. Photography that believes itself immediate and transparent does not break down the barriers to communication. It does not diminish the “paradox of incommunicability,” whereby events are transmitted instantaneously but do not translate into solidarity or joint action.52 In his afterword, Baudrillard writes: “In the name of realism and testimony, contemporary photography thus condemns itself (and not just in reportage) to photograph victims as such [...] with the (itself poverty-stricken) alibi of ‘giving’ them a voice, which they will never be able to give back” (“la photographie contemporaine (et non seulement celle de reportage) se condamne, au nom de réalisme et du témoignage, à photographier les victimes en tant que telles [...] avec l’alibi lui-même misérabiliste de leur ‘donner’ la parole—qu’ils ne pourrant jamais rendre”). Baudrillard’s attack on victimizing photography melds sensory registers: a naïve photographer means for the image to speak on the victim’s behalf.53 Despite the best intentions, the anonymous victim is victimized again in the process of being captured on film. The status as silent object is solidified; he or she is robbed of the power of self-signification. Luc Delahaye, in Baudrillard’s laudatory appraisal, escapes this conundrum, moving away from the “silent suffering” of the victim about which Haneke’s protagonist in Funny Games so maliciously chortles. Delahaye transforms the subject–object relationship, finding a “more subtle usage of indifference” (“un usage plus subtil de l’indifférence”). He stresses the emptiness characterizing all interpersonal relationships, the void between people. Both photographer and photographed are divested of any particular identity, removed from the moralizing gaze within which a contemporary rhetoric and aesthetic of victimhood remain trapped. I question whether Georges’s/Delahaye’s photomontage entirely re-evaluates and problematizes the indifference and invisibility, augmented as they are by the media. Baudrillard briefly alludes to this condition of indifference in the quotation presented earlier. His praise of Delahaye’s voiding of individual particularity in favor of a more abstract figuration only reverses the sign under which we consider the ‘indifferentiation’ characterizing society. The new montage, after all, offers a deceptive celebration of individual difference.54 Each face is shown for the same period of screen time, hinting at the interchangeable nature of all individuals in mass society, at the weak and enfeebled difference separating one from another. The

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people are, for all intents and purposes, no more different from one another than the duplicative and re-duplicative contact sheets forming the cover and fly leaves of Delahaye’s The Other. They can only be redeemed from insignificance if they are seen within grandiose terms. Hence Baudrillard insists that these metro riders are “raised from their misery to the tragic, impersonal figuration of their destiny” (“élevés de leur misère à la figuration tragique, impersonnelle, de leur destin”). The process whereby Georges/Delahaye takes his photos—with a hidden camera like the CCTV camera of the police station in Benny’s Video—also mimics the willed erasure of others that society has made into the precondition for its functioning. The photographer pretends not to be looking, feigning the absent gaze of the vacant sitters in front of him. In his photos, he renders the commuters as invisible as they wish to be in a public space. Delahaye’s method also represents a violation, a breach of the “nonaggression pact” (“pacte de non-agression”) regulating social behavior. The photographer is more careful than Baudrillard to admit his breach in his own halfpage introduction to The Other. In Delahaye’s view, the images are stolen from their owners, taken without consent. However, the act of furtive photography, he insinuates, can lessen the violent indifference permeating our world: “We are very much alone in these public spaces and there’s violence in this calm acceptance of a closed world” (“On a très seul dans ces endroits publics et il y a de la violence dans cette acceptation calme d’un monde fermé”).55 With his release of the shutter, the photographer asserts his freedom in looking—“to look is to be free” (“regarder c’est être libre”)—and the liberatory potential of his act of thievery. To sensitize others to their self-instigated, cruel anonymity entails their victimization. In Delahaye’s summary, we find a striking congruence with Haneke’s Janus-faced project. By way of this correspondence, embedded in Code Unknown, Haneke reflects on the potential of his medium to chronicle victimization. As the primary suspect within societal blame games, film is an extension and intensification of photography. Maybe, I speculate in closing, what Haneke envisions as a solution to indifference is more a matter of a tension between visibility and invisibility, rather than some clean break from the invisibility technology advances. As Jean Baudrillard writes: The lens alone “sees,” but it is hidden. What Luc Delahaye captures then, isn’t exactly the Other [...] but what remains of the Other when he, the photographer, isn’t there: the ill-assorted gazes of people who see nothing; who are, most importantly, not looking at one another, obsessed as they are with protecting their own symbolic space. Hence this closeness and this particular distance between faces—a proxemic tension generated by apprehension at seeing and being seen. (n.p.) (Seul l’objectif “voit”, mais il est caché. Ce ne donc pas exactement l’Autre que saisit Luc Delahaye, mais ce qui reste de l’Autre quand lui, le photographe,

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n’est pas là: le regard désappareillé de ceux qui ne voient rien, qui ne se regardent surtout pas les uns les autres, dans l’obsession de protéger leur espace symbolique. D’où cette proximité, et cette distance particulière des visages—une tension proxémique faite de l’appréhension d’être vu, et de voir. [n.p.])

We have come back to the relationship between seeing and being seen that Camille Nevers discusses in relation to Benny’s Video, where the absence of regard is linked to the pain of others. Sight and its correlate recognition are, in the end, no panacea for all social ills. Regard, it turns out, is not only necessary for recognition, but can also add to the violence underpinning society’s functioning—it is, in Baudrillard’s estimation, a cause for apprehension. Conceivably, the pure recognition of absolute immediacy is neither necessary nor desirable in mass society. Society requires a certain degree of non-recognition within mediation. Invisibility is, after all, not always detrimental: it can be the means by which human beings avoid conflict. The absence of concern in metaphorical invisibility guarantees a kind of peaceful coexistence, at least in a horizontally differentiated mass society predicated on violent encounters. At the end of Code Unknown, we are confronted with the violence of invisibility and visibility. Caught in this double bind, we may wish for a modicum of both, for a “proxemic tension” rather than a dialectic, wherein the efficacy of the sacrificial ritual is vouchsafed. The final segment of Code Unknown closes on such a hopeful note, but it is carefully staged so as to avoid any overt optimism. The characters of the film are shown alone, one after the other, as they traverse the Parisian grid (the streets they walk are surprisingly linear). Their paths intersect at certain nodal points, unbeknownst to one another. Although the beggar woman is once again chased away and Georges lacks the code that would unlock the door to his building, the rhythmic drumming that underlies these divergent trajectories hints at a rapprochement. Haneke here again follows his admired model Robert Bresson, who has written that rhythm is all-powerful and sound more commanding than the visual image in suggesting an inner world (51, 61, 68–69).56 Utilizing the sensory hierarchy that the Austrian director has implicitly established in all of his films, the percussive beat adds an emotional climax lacking in the images themselves. The powerful beat, which deaf-mute children produce as part of an outdoor performance, suggests a greater bond between the characters, beyond their particular rivalries and indifferent differences. This ending, too, allows for doubts. Haneke’s filmic continuation of a Walker Evans aesthetic may seem less about the “immortal souls” of the people involved than we first suspect. If factionalism and shifting solidarities split contemporary society, dependent on a nearly impossible balance between visible gestures of recognition and the willed invisibility for peaceful coexistence, how can we believe in a supposed bond between these people, all occasional victims?

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Immediately after the drums fall silent, the last scene closes the frame story established at the outset of Code Unknown. A mute boy, isolated against a white wall, plays charades with his classmates. In contrast to the young girl in the first scene, who had cowered against the wall as she mimicked fright, apprehension, or dread—perfect symbol of the silently suffering victim!—the boy seems to espy something hopeful in a propitious distance beyond the borders of the film frame. He smiles and his hands mime a bird fluttering upward. We can read the long take and the boy’s gesture itself as a meta-commentary on Haneke’s project. With this liberatory sign, we have been released from horizontal indifference into the vertical difference of the art house film.57 The carefully calibrated image and the lack of background music recall us to an entire discourse surrounding a strain of ‘purist’ Occidental cinema. Underneath a façade of avant-garde critique, then, Haneke’s film winds up espousing the rather conservative politics of Girard or Sloterdijk.58 Much in the way Sloterdijk appeals to artistic talent as a solution to contemporary problems, Haneke ends with a plea for a high cultural, autonomous art. His Code Unknown implicitly exemplifies such film art, independent of supposedly mainstream, Americanized film. With his frame’s closure, he condones the auteurism and aesthetic of elite European tradition.59 We are left to wonder whether the film proposes a solution that is in keeping with the immensely complex issues it addresses.

CHAP TER

3

Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer

The Austrian attention to scenarios of victimhood can be put in a (now somewhat clichéd) national modern lineage devoted to the bleak side of human nature. Michael Haneke certainly places himself in this tradition, particularly with his literary adaptations of somber twentieth-century works—ranging from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Three Paths to the Lake (Drei Wege zum See, 1976), Joseph Roth’s Rebellion (Die Rebellion, 1993) to Franz Kafka’s The Castle (Das Schloß, 1997), and Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001). These films have garnered him a series of epithets ranging from “prophetic” to “eschatological” in feuilleton and academic writing, and the tentatively optimistic end to Code Unknown in the last chapter diverges from the dark worldview underpinning his oeuvre to date. Christoph Ransmayr, another award-winning countryman, also presents us with dire scenarios in his novels and short prose. The wellknown German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki has even called Ransmayr a canon-worthy “apocalyptist,” albeit one who “praises existence.”1 Like Haneke, Ransmayr is concerned with victimhood as a master discourse. In his novels in particular, society is an arena of competition, mutual exclusion, and tension between undifferentiated victims and indifferent perpetrators. Like the director, the author has managed to sublate the specifically Austrian component of this concern into more abstract articulations—and for this he has been celebrated on the international circuit.2 In the way in which Haneke occasionally looks to a transcendent sphere for answers to societal frictions (in his excursions into a Pascal-inflected mysticism), Ransmayr projects earthly chaos into a cosmic realm, only to find it reflected back. The writer finds the heavens depopulated, and mankind becomes a victim of physical and chemical forces of decay. In his writings, we find a decidedly this-worldly eschatology, which moves from the minutiae of human life embedded in history to the larger natural forces governing that very existence.

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Such thinking devoted to ‘last things’ has profound implications for the rhetoric of victimhood and the politics of victimization I have been discussing. In this chapter, I will ask whether a shift toward an apocalyptic Weltanschauung, privileging the destructive forces of nature, amounts to a disavowal of history and historical responsibility. Does the completely asymmetrical difference that is posited between man and nature—which cannot be explained with reference either to vertical or horizontal differences (chapter 1)—make a mockery of human agency? Are human beings, aware of a cosmic indifference to their existence, victims per se and thus unable to position themselves historically?

I In 2001, Ransmayr wrote an introductory essay to a volume entitled Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973–2001 (Anselm Kiefer: die sieben HimmelsPaläste, 1973–2001).3 What the art historian Markus Brüderlin saw as a “congenial” correspondence between the author’s literary predilections and the artist’s apocalyptic scenarios turns out to be more than a meeting of like minds (9). “The Unborn or Anselm Kiefer and the Tracts of the Heavens” (“Der Ungeborene oder Die Himmelsareale des Anselm Kiefer”), the piece that resulted from Ransmayr’s visit to Kiefer’s studio in Southern France, continues Ransmayr’s literary preoccupation with human victimization and powerlessness by way of a summary of Kiefer’s development since the late 1960s. Numerous thematic allusions to and stylistic repetitions from the author’s novels punctuate “The Unborn.” Both men, Ransmayr’s essay insinuates, interpret our life in mediis rebus; they do so in view of life’s restricted duration and an imminent, violent end.4 Heedful of mankind’s transience and fragility, they seek a sense of cosmic belonging, where the vicissitudes of historical reality meld with those of a natural apocalypse. They establish concordances with larger mystical goals, even while problematizing both the concordances and the goals themselves. During the visit to Kiefer’s studio in Barjac near the Cévennes Mountains, Ransmayr progresses through the painter’s multi-acre compound like one of his errant protagonists moving through inhospitable fictional environs. Ransmayr’s literary terrains are always hostile, scarred by human intervention as well as geophysical forces. Invariably, these starkly physical worlds are drawing to their ends, and the hapless protagonists go down with them. In The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, 1984), for example, the Triest-born Josef Mazzini reconstructs the travels of the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole in the 1870s and the ambivalent motivations for this quest. Mazzini becomes fascinated with this voyage. When he retraces the crew’s travails a hundred years later, however, he disappears in Spitzbergen, Norway. In

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The Last World (Die letzte Welt, 1988), the young literature fan Cotta traverses the mountains, beaches, and cliffs surrounding the desolate town of Tomis on the Black Sea in search of the exiled poet Ovid. As the stories from the Metamorphoses are retold to Cotta, the natural environment and people around him change to conform to these stories. Finally convinced that no one or “nothing retains its form” (84, emphasis in original) (“Keinem bleibt seine Gestalt” [111, emphasis in original]), he seeks out knowledge of his future transformation and devolves into madness on the mountain slopes. The youth Bering is adrift in the post-World War II town of Moor in The Dog King (Morbus Kitahara, 1995). He survives thanks in part to his mentor, a former concentration camp inmate and the tamer of wild dogs, but nevertheless seeks to escape him. Forcibly expatriated to South America, Bering eventually kills the woman he loves on a Brazilian island that resembles the desolate Moor. Shortly thereafter, he commits suicide. Ransmayr’s strong identification with his peripatetic protagonists is obvious in the essay on Kiefer, and this identification across genres collapses the separation between the victimized and victimizing characters and their author. Like the conflicted Bering, Ransmayr is struck by the larger-thanlife stature of the “dog king” Kiefer, surrounded by Rottweilers within the confines of his thirty-hectare studio.5 The wild topography of the former silk factory of La Ribaute, with its primitive, rough-hewn roads, is reminiscent of postwar Moor’s cratered streets.6 Ransmayr (b. 1954), troubled by the unfamiliar place, seeks shelter in Kiefer’s proximity (b. 1945), much in the way his emotionally stunted, often juvenile protagonists latch onto more mature men. Throughout the essay, the reader senses that Kiefer takes on more and more of the status of teacher for Ransmayr, and in a series of “instructions,” Ransmayr will glean lessons from the only slightly older artist. As such, the words of Kiefer’s own teacher, the artist Peter Dreher—“Do what you want” (16) or “Machen Sie, was Sie wollen” (16)—are altered from the singular, formal address in the course of the essay. The imperative is modulated, becoming the informal, second-person singular command, “Mach was du willst” (“Ungeborene” 17, 18).7 These had been, with slight variation, the dog king’s memorable words to his protégé Bering in The Dog King: “Do as you like …” (75) (“Mach wie du willst ... ” [95]). Ransmayr goes on to thematize any student’s ambivalent relationship to those who shape his thought processes. In this particular instance, the student will have to navigate between the implied freedom and shoulder-shrugging disregard such advice involves (the essay mentions Kiefer’s other teacher, Josef Beuys, in the latter context [16]). As Ransmayr stays close on the energetic painter’s heels (11), the writer imagines the dynamic natural forces at work in the sky above. His extended reflection on these forces and on Kiefer’s work sheds light on some of Ransmayr’s own concerns. In the following passage, the writer involuntarily articulates a sense of transcendental homelessness in a universe hurtling

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toward entropic heat death.8 The section revolves around a meteorological description of a cloudless, misleadingly tranquil May evening, which signals indifference on an incomprehensible scale. As Ransmayr wanders through the wilderness with Kiefer and his retinue at night, the writer zooms out from the situation at hand to reflect on the larger coordinates of Kiefer’s—and his own—search for meaning. The disorder in the universe, which the absence of a clear cosmology to supplement scientific explanations augments, makes man a victim of forces well beyond his control. Overcome by a feeling of absolute abandonment, Ransmayr begins, then stops, only to continue and finally break off, discounting the possibility of a pacific relation to nature. Through this aposiopesis, the writer expresses his sense of being overwhelmed: The May night is calm, cloudless. But peaceful? Peaceful! As if those raging cyclones of gases and columns of atomic fire up there, down there, out there!, light year upon light year away, those tides of electromagnetic rays and rotating furnaces of hell from a nameless billionyear-old-past, those fists of condensing and dispersing matter, clouds pulsing with nuclear fusion and hurling off in all directions... as if this monstrous space, through which whirl spiral nebulae and clusters of stars like dust particles briefly bursting into radiance only to fade again in an icy abyss ... as if this entire frenzied spectacle of an infinity’s illusory grandeur and permanence could have anything to do with security, with peace and silence. The peace of evening! (12) (Die Mainacht ist windstill, wolkenlos. Aber friedlich? Friedlich! Als ob die über Lichtjahre und Lichtjahre hinweg tobenden Gasorkane und atomare Feuersäulen dort oben, dort unten, dort draußen!, diese elektromagnetischen Strahlenfluten und rotierenden Höllenöfen aus einer namenlosen, milliardenjährigen Vergangenheit und in alle Himmelsrichtungen davonjagenden, von Kernfusionen durchpulste Wolkenfäuste aus sich verdichtender und wieder zerstäubender Materie ..., als ob dieser ungeheuerliche Raum, durch den Spiralnebel und Sternhaufen wirbeln als kaum aufglänzende und schon wieder erlöschende Staubpartikel in einem eisigen Abgrund ..., als ob dieses ganze rasende Schauspiel von der illusorischen Größe und Dauer einer Ewigkeit irgend etwas mit Geborgenheit, mit Frieden und Stille zu tun haben könnte! Abendfriede! [12])

The author’s verbal performance cleverly emulates Kiefer’s painterly technique in the cycle that Katharina Schmidt calls his Cosmos and Star Paintings 1995–2001 (Kosmos- und Sternenbilder 1995–2001).9 Ransmayr suggests that these multimedia works of immense dimensions imitate the extremes of nature and thereby offer a “pale reflection” of the “nuclear chaos out there” (“Abglanz des nuklearen Chaos dort draußen”).10 The elliptical structure, adjectival excess, exclamation marks, subjunctive phrasings, substantival couplings, and extended participial constructions

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mimic the break-neck speed of the nuclear fusions, material condensation, and fragmentation that Kiefer “forces” (“gezwungen”) onto the canvas, setting his own violence against that of the universe (12). The incantatory use of the terms “peace” (“Friede”) and “peaceful” (“friedlich”), recurring four times within this breathless paragraph, is at odds with the violent processes Ransmayr describes. In Ransmayr’s estimation, Kiefer’s works since the mid-1990s articulate a longing for a less turbulent relationship between man and nature—for a more “peaceful” one that is simultaneously less fleeting. In this context, we should note Ransmayr’s stress on the duration such tranquility would entail. In the aforementioned paragraph and in those following immediately thereafter, Ransmayr constructs a tentative connection between the fragility of human effort and “permanence” as well as “infinity” (“Ewigkeit” and “Unendlichkeit). At the same time as Kiefer’s works try to balance the ephemeral with the permanent, his works foreground the instability—if not the incompatibility—of this desire for the infinite. The components constituting the works themselves compete with one another; the differences between them are not harmonized. The turpentine oil and the watercolors, the lead and dried plants in the Cosmos and Star Paintings are kept in a proxemic tension. Ransmayr’s text on Kiefer insists that we should not be fooled into complacency when confronted with such irreconcilability. Any human balancing act takes place above an abyss, an “Abgrund” that we try to paper over with pale reflections (our “Abglanz”).11 The tension between the eternal and the ephemeral is one of the themes running through Ransmayr’s texts, as well as the efforts of the artist to create a certain timeless quality over against the passage of time. The question, then, with which Ransmayr—via Kiefer—grapples is this: how to guard against the sense that we are indifferent specks and eminently sacrificeable victims in a violent cosmos beyond our comprehension and control? For Ransmayr, Kiefer’s large-scale, mixed-media compositions depicting the night sky attempt to systematize our random and haphazard experiences within an overpowering universe (12–13). In a work dedicated to the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan and entitled Light Compulsion or Lightduress (Lichtzwang, 1999) after the poet’s final volume of poetry (published posthumously 1970),12 fine lines connect the bright flecks of whiteness on the blackish-grey background, rudimentary indicators of astronomical star signs in the vast expanse of infinity (see figure 3.1).13 The white labels containing numerals and abbreviations next to some of the flecks are the scientific designations for the starry coordinates. However, Kiefer’s order is not one based solely on rational principles, which these alphanumeric designations culled from NASA-transcripts might first lead us to believe—indeed, numerals are only written next to a very limited number of stars in Kiefer’s sky, suggesting the limitations placed on our current knowledge and on our ability to classify. The signs of the Zodiac and astronomical constellations are crossbred with the NASA numbers,

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Figure 3.1 Anselm Kiefer, Lichtzwang/Light Compulsion (1999). Mixed media on canvas, 279.5 cm  759.5 cm.

suggesting another ordering system altogether (K. Schmidt 76, “Unborn” 24). Indeed, in paintings such as Light Compulsion Kiefer is indebted to the writings of the Englishman Robert Fludd (1574–1637), for whom there were distinct mystic correspondences between the micro- and macrocosm.14 Much could be made of the compulsive reconciliation Kiefer attempts between man and the universe. In many of his artist’s books, such as The Secret Life of Plants (1997), or in his large-scale works (The Secret Life of Plants, 1998 and 2001, Every Plant Has His Related Star in the Sky, 2001), Kiefer has picked up on the formal correspondences that Fludd envisioned as existing between all things in nature and divine creation.15 In one such work from The Secret Life of Plants, Kiefer affixes dried plants directly to photos of the galaxy (see figure 3.2). The image on the left shows swirling nebulae; on the right, a humble meadow flower, its redness still intact, conforms to the burst of light caused by a swirl of stars. On the left, traditionally sinister side no connection can be found to a universe that is per se abstract in its distance from us. On the right counterpart, the intimidating expanses of stars have been made to correspond to plant life of a decidedly nonthreatening type.16 In a similar manner, the immense scale of Light Compulsion seems to be motivated by competing desires. The viewer, whom the work dwarfs, becomes aware of his or her fundamental insignificance.17 Nonetheless, the person may feel him- or herself as part of the large-scale composition (and, by implication, as part of a larger composition: the universe). After all, white threads on the canvas guide our path like Ariadne’s thread through the Minotaur’s labyrinth.18 With its heavily textured surface, Light Compulsion also shares something of Jackson Pollock’s chaotic drips, which reconfigure—when viewed at a distance—to create a larger system. Furthermore, the ashes and small vestments Kiefer affixes to the canvas suggest other connections between inorganic and organic nature. These things hark back to the Cabbalistic and preCabbalistic sources that have inspired many of his artworks. His interest in

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Figure 3.2 Anselm Kiefer, The Secret Life of Plants (1998). Sand with dried plants and photos on cardboard. 59  42  2.5 cm (closed).

medieval alchemy also is on display in the nigredo, the stage of the alchemical process base where material is transmuted into a “higher” form (lead, earth, gold, etc.). We are returned to the blackness of pre-cosmological chaos—from which rebirth occurs, with the “appearance on the surface of a starry aspect.”19 As Kiefer has moved from the constricted interiors of his works from the 1970s and 1980s, anxious about the confining aspects of a shameful German history and identity, to the wide exterior spaces of fields (Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom/Lasst tausend Blumen blühen, 1998–2000), deserts (Autumnal Crocus/Herbstzeitlose, 1997), cities (Lilith, 1997), sprawling ruins (Your Age and Mine and the Age of the World/Dein und mein Alter und das Alter der Welt, 1997), and the heavens (Sephiroth, 1990, 1996, 1997), the desire to be taken up into a mystical totality of being seems to have grown.20 The totalizing impetus inspires these words from art critic Ealan Wingate, who relates Kiefer’s monumental Celan-inspired work to the Lurianic cabbala: “Lichtzwang (is) a painting that forces our vision into a celestial realm: a compression of light— the primordial sparks of creation—that traps all loves and all deaths within it” (15). Wingate refers here to the Cabbalist story of the creation through God’s light and of human beings’ responsibility to raise this divine light, scattered through the shattering of the vessels containing it (shevirat ha-kelim), back to its proper, divine sphere (tikkun). While I am tempted to respond with Harold

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Bloom that Kiefer seems more interested in the other moment of shattered chaos than in restitution,21 large-scale works such as Light Compulsion draw from a number of possible mystical sources, which have found increasing expression in the painter’s oeuvre beginning in the mid-1980s.22 Daniel Arasse has argued that these mystical writings fulfill a specific psycho-social function for Kiefer: they open “the way to a poetics of exile,” lending it a “cosmic dimension.” Jewish mysticism provides a frame, in Arasse’s estimation, “for the feeling of existential dereliction which was expressed as long ago as 1970— albeit indirectly and in a parodic spirit” (206).23 Ransmayr acknowledges the lure of Kiefer’s current topics. He, too, is not immune to the appeal of such holistic visions, in which all indifferent differences are taken up into and redeemed by a cosmic wholeness that reaches beyond late twentieth-century scientific principles. Indeed, in Ransmayr’s essay “The Unborn,” he recognizes the vacillation behind Kiefer’s works: although the star signs insist on a cosmological regularity, they are nothing more than human projections that are written into the firmament to offer us something deceptively familiar and intimate (13). They, like the NASA designations that may be no more accurate than astrology, attest to our deceptive sense of security within a universe reduced to our own imaginative measure. These projections seek to reduce the differential hierarchy that necessarily exists between man and the universe. Our phantasmic investment in making sense of the senseless is great; we attempt to reduce the asymmetry that brings with it a sense of absolute indifference and insurmountable victimhood.24 In the German original, Ransmayr uses the word “Trugbilder” (13) or “illusions” (perhaps more accurate than the “phantoms” of the English rendering [13]), indicating the necessarily selfdeceptive nature of these models. For all of Ransmayr’s belief in the transcendent function of art and the artist, there is a distinct skepticism toward our creative capacities. In his writing, we sometimes get the impression that even the most ambitious works of the imagination are inadequate means for wrestling with the question of our place in the universe. It is at this early point in the essay that the question of mastery and the relationship between a German “Meister” and his apprentice comes up. Caught in the enveloping darkness, given over to the discomfiting vision of a universe of “nuclear chaos” and utterly incompatible, mutually repellent elements (12), Ransmayr stresses his position as a follower rather than a leader, a liegeman rather than coequal peer. He describes his status as Kiefer’s disciple with the following sentence: “We are the entourage of a master from Germany” (12). The description in German—“Wir sind das Gefolge eines Meisters aus Deutschland” (12)—with its allusion to Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge,” 1952) gives pause.25 Ostensibly, Ransmayr is building up the medieval imagery in which he couches his allegiance, a dutiful vassal to a more powerful lord. Ransmayr has described Barjac as a “bastion” (“Bastion”) and uses the medieval trope of the

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âventiure to describe the joint foray into the wilderness (11). However, by substituting words within the German-Jewish poet’s original, in which “death is a master from Germany” (“der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” in lines 24, 28, 30, 34), Ransmayr’s declaration is indicative of far more complicated things. Kiefer is inadvertently aligned with the fascist past, for Celan’s “master” is the baton-wielding, blue-eyed German, torturing Jews in the poem “Death Fugue.” It is the Nazi who offers the concentration camp inmates of the poem a grave “in the breezes there one lies unconfined” (“in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng” in lines 4, 15, with slight variation in 26, 33). Ransmayr’s reference allows him to guard Kiefer against possible accusations of mystical obfuscation. Through the strange allusion—for it first strikes a German speaker as infelicitous—we are prodded to imagine Light Compulsion, Kiefer’s painting from 1999 and Celan’s poetry volume from 1967 (published posthumously in 1970), in a constellation with the poet’s best-known and most widely reprinted poem from the early 1950s. Kiefer’s representation of vast spaces in his Cosmos and Star Paintings continues reflecting on the “unconfined” space allotted to those in “Death Fugue” who purportedly blocked the way of a “Volk ohne Raum” (“a people without space”).26 The allusion is, of course, also to a more abstract death, the ultimate master. Implicitly, Ransmayr interrogates Kiefer’s fascination with death and its ability to bestow retroactive significance on events. While in Kiefer’s case we seem to have a movement backward, from the pre-creation chaos of Light Compulsion to history’s specific victims by way of an allusion to Celan, Ransmayr reverses directionality in his own work.27 He eventually melds history’s victims and victimizers in such pre-creation chaos; death gains the power to inscribe meaning into life’s vicissitudes. In his ambivalent allusion to Celan, Ransmayr shifts roles. Rather than dutiful pupil or allied vassal, he becomes the irreverent mocker, imitating what he sees as Kiefer’s grandiose ridicule of societal taboos. The historical specificity of German victimizers and the obsession with a cult and culture of death are certainly present in Kiefer’s work since the late 1960s. In his abbreviated description of Kiefer’s oeuvre, Ransmayr briefly touches on these ambivalent features, poking fun at Kiefer’s detractors.28 Beginning with the 1969-photo series entitled Occupations (Besetzungen) and stretching through the attic-series (including Resurrexit, 1973; Notung, 1973; Parsifal I, III, IV, 1973; The Painter’s Studio/Des Malers Atelier, 1980) and the fascist stone halls of the 1980s (The Stairs/Die Treppe, 1982/83; To the Unknown Painter/Dem unbekannten Maler, 1983; Shulamite/ Sulamith, 1983), Kiefer’s controversial works deal unremittingly with the National Socialist past and the fate of German Jewry. As Ransmayr and others point out, there is in these early works a fascination with the glamorization of death in National Socialist funerary architecture and myth. Because the Nazi instrumentalization of rituals for the dead haunts every later approach

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to the topic of memorialization, Kiefer’s reception has been marked by discussions of his inadequate working through (Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung) of the Nazi past from the beginning, particularly in Germany.29 In a sense, Kiefer’s new expansiveness and openness toward another, supra-historical dimension raises questions about his orientation. Has he forsaken the ‘hard’ differences of history, so to speak, for another kind of difference in nature, perceived as equally ‘hard’? His mystical turn, for lack of a better phrase, is no less equivocal than his fascination with fascism. As Harold Bloom writes, the painter’s “cosmic canopy” signifies “imprisonment as much as liberation” (32). Is the interest in “olam ha-tohu, the world of senselessness and confusion” in pre-Cabbalistic and Cabbalistic thought, an effort to restitute a strain of thought violently expunged from Germany’s culture (Bloom 29)? While Bloom downplays this possibility (21), I cannot help but think that the assimilation of esoteric Jewish beliefs Kiefer undertakes in works such as Light Compulsion arises out of his earlier iterations of German responsibility. Guilt is probably less operative than a desire for accountability. As the multimedia artist navigates between competing and at times conflicting strains of religious teachings, he merges Christian and Jewish mysticism with more synchronous models of understanding—this is done in a spirit of unending working-through. Kiefer’s appeal for Ransmayr, himself concerned with both the staying power of the twentieth century’s tormented history and nature-mysticism, can only have increased. Ransmayr is not quite as submissive to the internationally prominent artist as his essay has us believe at the outset, and the text stresses the refusal of the master to teach. “A teacher?” (“Ein Lehrer?”), Ransmayr asks for rhetorical effect. He immediately answers in the negative, shielding Kiefer against any charges of being a moralistic do-gooder. Note the use of “and” (“und”) in the original to convey Ransmayr’s sense of exasperation with demands that Europeans come to terms with their past in a somehow clearly discernible manner: “No, our host never wanted to teach anyone and never wanted to heal anyone and never wanted to reform the world” (“Nein, unser Gastgeber wollte niemals jemanden belehren und niemals jemanden heilen und die Welt nicht verbessern”).30 In any case, like his protagonists, Ransmayr chronicles his emancipation from Kiefer as well as from these larger demands. Although he does follow Kiefer’s own mantras: “Think what you want. Do what you want ” [18, emphasis in original] (“Denk was du willst. Mach was du willst ” [18, emphasis in original]). By consistently alluding to his own writing in the course of “The Unborn,” Ransmayr presents himself, too, as a “master” from the German-speaking world. In his prose, where a fusion of time levels and spatial coordinates creates landscapes and scenarios that are always indebted to World War II and the instrumental logic it exemplifies, the dubious attraction of the period remains alive. With condescension, Ransmayr disqualifies Kiefer’s critics, who attack the artist for making this very attraction a recurrent theme.

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Many are those who do not understand Kiefer’s satire. Kiefer, Ransmayr writes, [...] would soon learn that in his homeland rituals for remembering the horror had to follow stricter, or at least different, rules from those of a provocative scoffer. Was that permissible—for someone to hail the Atlantic and the Mediterranean with the German greeting and call up again a past barely survived: the murderous lust and rage of a Nibelung army left charred by a firestorm of bombs? The Hitler greeting extended to the surf ! (17, emphasis in original) ([...] mußte erfahren, daß in seiner Heimat die Rituale der Erinnerung an das Grauen strengeren und jedenfalls anderen Regeln zu folgen hatten als denen eines herausfordernden Spötters. Durfte denn sein, daß einer dem Atlantik und Mittelmeer mit dem deutschen Gruß entgegentrat und damit die kaum überwundene Mordlust und Wut einer im Bombenfeuer verkohlten Nibelungenarmee wieder heraufbeschwor? Der Hitlergruß gegen die Brandung! [17, emphasis in original])

The strict “rituals of memory” are presumably those memorial practices supposed to ensure the persistence of history. The author’s words above rephrase passages from The Dog King, a novel that revolves around spurious rites of remembrance that are meant to guarantee a ‘correct’ response to the past and a ‘proper’ relationship with fascism’s victims. The postwar world of Moor, living in the shadow of the concentration camp it once housed, is governed by enforced ritual parties, where the populace mimes scenes of concentration camp life replete with striped costumes.31 The victorious Americans enforce the ritualized memory of past crimes, albeit with decreasing efficacy as the novel progresses. We are told of the “Societies of Penitence” or “Sühnegesellschaften” whom the army supports from afar, interested in maintaining the “organized activities of all penitents” (117). The pervasive requirement to remember is emphasized even more strongly in German with the italics given to the adjective “all,” the “Vereinsleben aller Büßer” (146). Conjuring up less the fate of the victims than the perspective of the victimizers and sharing both their “murderous lust” and “rage” in this book in particular, Ransmayr risks the same censure as Kiefer. An exonerating meta-narrative seems to emerge when he allies his writerly and our readerly perspectives with his protagonists, who perceive themselves as victims of a politics of memory that is meant to instill guilt in them.32 While he never denigrates the suffering of historical victims— indeed he integrates figures suffering from the trauma of the camps in both The Dog King and his earlier The Last World—we are, as in Kiefer’s works, also privy to the emotions of the post-war Germans and Austrians. Ransmayr’s narrative response to Austro-German historical responsibility as victimizer means, ironically enough, embracing the self-sacrifice occasionally

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ascribed to Kiefer by less discerning critics than the Austrian author. The rhetoric of sacrifice that continues to accompany Kiefer’s works—notably in Danilo Eccher’s essay “Anselm Kiefer: A Dark Soul” (“Anselm Kiefer: un’anima oscura”)—interprets the artistic sacrificial act as sublime. In Eccher’s view, the painter traverses the “nothingness of abandonment” (“il nulla dell’abbandono”) to draw near the “heroic redemption [...] of his own self-sacrifice” (72) (“al riscato [...] eroico del proprio stesso sacrificio” [16]). In this solitary act, all contradictions are resolved. Surprisingly enough, while literature on Kiefer has long taken to task critics such as Eccher, who stylize Kiefer into an artist-messiah embracing the transcendent function of art and thereby abet exculpatory narratives,33 Ransmayr has faced no such stylization or criticism.34 At the chronological end of the novel, The Dog King, which is also its narrative beginning, Bering goes up in flames together with the dog king himself, who is overtaken by his memories of the camp. For former concentration camp inmate Ambras, the flames that break into the open and the burning that clears the ground are a continuation of the incinerating fires of the concentration camp in Moor. Briefly our perspective is allied with the interior monologue of the dog king, moments before his and Bering’s demise. The narrator comments on the burning fire: “It has burned all this time in its hiding place, in the ovens behind the infirmary. Now it is free” (354) (“So lange hat es im Verborgenen gebrannt, in den Öfen hinter dem Krankenrevier. Jetzt ist es frei” [439]). Turning back to reread the opening, we realize that the fire has a redemptory, purifying character; “a fire,” in the first chapter’s title, becomes “the fire” in the concluding chapter’s.35 The precious prose luxuriates in the description of the charred bodies, united in death. Victim and victimizer are connected in the blackness of a Kiefer-like nigredo. The novel opens dramatically: “Two bodies lay blackened in the Brazilian January. A fire [...] had freed the corpses from a tangle of blossoming lianas and also burned the clothes from their wounds” (“Zwei Tote lagen schwarz im Januar Brasiliens. Ein Feuer [...] hatte die Leichen von einem Gewirr blühender Lianen befreit und ihnen auch die Kleider von ihren Wunden gebrannt”). All ‘hard’ differences are extinguished—and in the case of the victimization of both the dog king in the KZ as well as the blacksmith’s son by parental neglect/historical defeat it is warranted to speak of such a ‘hard’ difference—in the searing and purifying blaze. Only with the demise of both victim and victimizer can the metaphoric fire be extinguished and the balance of nature restored. The fire burns out as the wilderness reasserts its voraciousness and all-consuming power: A red rope that bound them together guttered in the embers. The blaze swept across the dead men, erased eyes and facial features, moved on crackling, returned once more in the draft of its own heat and danced on the decaying shapes—until a cloudburst drove the flames into the iron-gray

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ashes of toppled quaresma trees, finally forcing all the heat into the moist heart of their trunks. There the fire burned out. [...] At the same time, an airplane was tracing rumbling loops above the Bahia de São Marcos, although gathering storm clouds repeatedly forced it to turn back toward Cabo do Bom Jesus. Scarcely ten nautical miles from the Atlantic coast, the pilot, a surveyor, spotted that rocky, surfbound island across which the brushfire’s ribbons strayed now here, now there—a crazy, smoky path through the wilderness. (3–4) (Ein rotes Seil, das die beiden miteinander verband, verschmorte in der Glut. Das Feuer loderte über die Toten hinweg, löschte ihre Augen und Gesichtszüge, entfernte sich prasselnd, kehrte im Sog der eigenen Hitze noch einmal wieder und tanzte auf den zerfallenden Gestalten, bis ein Wolkenbruch die Flammen in die eisengraue Asche gestürzter Quaresmeirabäume zurücktrieb und schließlich alle Glut in das feuchte Herz der Stämme zwang. Dort erlosch der Brand. [...] Der Pilot eines Vermessungsflugzeuges, das in diesen Tagen über der Bahia de São Marcos dröhnende Schleifen zog und vor aufziehenden Sturmwolken immer wieder nach dem Cabo do Bom Jesus abdrehte, sah auf jener felsigen, kaum zehn Seemeilen vor der Atlantikküste umbrandeten Insel die Bänder des Buschfeuers dahin und dorthin verlaufen, einen rauchenden, verrückten Weg durch die Wildnis. [7])36

Ransmayr, in the essay on Kiefer with which I started this section, makes us aware that Kiefer’s method of building roads on La Ribaute does not conform to generally accepted logic. Instead, he has the bulldozer go this way and that. Kiefer’s “tangled route into the wilderness” (16) (“eine verknäulte Route” [16]) is ultimately nature’s logic—it is the logic of the flames wending their way through the forest and literally erasing human history.37

II In Ransmayr’s work, the assumption of the role of victim within a selfsacrificial context becomes, strangely enough, a manner of acknowledging and asserting one’s individual uniqueness in life. This is not, I should stress, the sacrificial ritual that René Girard outlines or that Michael Haneke employs self-reflexively: self-sacrifice has little to do with the restoration of a sense of community or forging bonds of solidarity between the protagonists and a hostile community (although it may fulfill this function for the aggrieved community). The gesture becomes entirely solipsistic, undertaken by the person in a moment of self-cognition and self-recognition. The victim realizes his own powerlessness vis-à-vis a historical and, more importantly, natural apocalypse and affirms his own extinction within a

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world that is coming to an end anyway. While the desolation of Tomis or Moor represents the dialectical counterpart to centers of instrumental rationality—Rome under the reign of the Emperor Augustus, the city named Brand under the allied victors—both are equally fated to destruction. Ransmayr shapes what strikes me as the most coherent and problematic victim narrative I have encountered so far in his early text Resplendent Decline: A Dehydration Project or The Discovery of the Essential (Strahlender Untergang: Ein Entwässerungsprojekt oder Die Entdeckung des Wesentlichen).38 This largely neglected narrative draws its vigor and resonance from an inherent sense of apocalypse.39 The free verse text, with original line breaks restored in the 2000 reprint and slight syntactic and lexical alterations from the 1982 edition, begins with the knowledge of an impending end and reinterprets the present in light of this foreclosed future. Resplendent Decline centers on an experiment with a gruesome goal: a walled-in desert terrarium is built, where human volunteers are left to die of dehydration. Through this organized disappearance, the New Science—which develops and institutes the project—hopes to counter the entropic, destructive tendencies that man advances within a universe marked by decay from its inception. Exercises in the organization of disappearance, which create the conditions for a “final end” (“Endzweck” [19]), are a travesty of the National Socialists’ Final Solution (Breitenstein 11; Gehlhoff 29). In the later Dog King, the KZ-Mauthausen in Upper Austria is the historical referent for the fictional concentration camp. In Resplendent Decline thirteen years earlier, National Socialism serves as a hazy backdrop for an extended reflection on the excesses of human rationality. Here, the logic behind bureaucratically administered death in specially constructed camps, played down and pawned off on the masses with effective propaganda, is not examined in relation to any historical victims. Instead, the logic turns inward, as the perpetrators stylize themselves as victims and unleash the logic’s aggressiveness against themselves. Launching a full-scale attack on past scientific endeavors, the New Science attempts to check human reason and scientific procedure. Paradoxically, it pushes science into a beyond where it touches on mysticism: Europeans, killing themselves in a purportedly scientific manner, are to rediscover their lost human essence in the terrarium. Having wreaked havoc on the outside world and on themselves, white men now engage in willful self-destruction. The first two sections of the four-part text underline the malevolent and enigmatic character of the human and the natural universe, which creates the impetus for the New Science. The universe’s chaos is mirrored by the proliferation of random data, which do not combine into any meaningful and readable complexity in the first part, “News from the Tanezrouft ” we are given a fragmentary telex (“Nachrichten aus dem Tanezrouft ” [11–14]).40 The fragment is everything other than fragmentary: it is a meticulous eyewitness account of a desert terrarium on the border between Mali and

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Algeria. The Herculean feat of construction required to complete the tightly sealed zone is described in painstaking detail—forty-eight caterpillars, twice as many trucks, and 2,300 workers laboring in shifts are needed. The witness’ puzzlement about the reason behind the construction shows that the ulterior motive remains hidden despite (or as a result of ) the superabundance of factual information. The second and longest section is a speech to an academic delegation, “In Praise of the Project” (“Lob des Projekts”) in the oasis of Borj Moktar; it also abounds in a wealth of data (15–37). Here, a spokesman for the New Science outlines the anabolic forces necessary for the emergence of life, as well as the entropic forces creating greater disorder within the originally ordered system. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy culminates in a universal heat death, when the capacity for change is exhausted.41 The spokesman for the New Science now, finally, offers the rationale behind the construction scheme lacking in the telex. The inevitable natural destruction of entropy has engendered the project. The New Science’s enterprise is born, the loquacious spokesman insinuates, from a twofold recognition. First, the agglomeration of facts in traditional science, which are marshaled only to be disqualified, feeds a general sense of helplessness and victimization. Second, the cultural sphere—whose value would seem to increase proportionally with the discrediting of traditional science—offers no solutions and is as vulnerable to falsification as all other forms of thought. Philosophy, an expression of the cultural sphere, has been weighed down and rendered useless, as questions without answers proliferate.42 Since both science and culture are futile, the solution to the memento mori of entropy is not sought in macroscopic research. Instead, a macabre answer presents itself as the insight gleaned from sharing the microscopic perspective of one of the earth’s humblest creatures, the lemming.43 These arctic rodents embrace their own death without hesitation, as they plunge into the sea. For the Spokesman, the animals’ suicide attests to their perspicacity; through a quick demise, the lemmings circumvent “the tragic gradualism / of inevitable decay, / the uncontrolled loss of identity, / the knowledge of oneself ” (“die tragische Allmählichkeit / des unausweichlichen Verfalls, / den unkontrollierten Verlust von Identität, / des Wissens von sich” [18]). “[T]he tragic gradualism / of inevitable decay” is the finality of blandness. In entropy, the complexly ordered building blocks of the universe are reduced to their simpler components; for the spokesman of the New Science, the sociocultural and economic developments are analogously striving toward destruction—much like the lemmings. Everything and everyone seems to be heading toward a lack of differentiation and ultimate homogeneity. We have confronted this kind of argument in the art and philosophy in the preceding pages, where indifferentiation gives rise to sacrificial crises and societal rivalries. In Resplendent Decline, however, these stages are ascribed

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to other aspects of a cataclysmic modernity: global capitalism as well as scientific and technological modernization are at fault, rather than democratic equality or ubiquitous media. Here, the worldwide expansion of capitalist production and organization modules, and the degradation of the environment have resulted in a high degree of sameness across all longitudes and latitudes (33). The repercussions for the individual are comparable. The slow but sure degeneration has led to the loss of individuality. Once an undifferentiated state has been reached, no singular identity can be asserted. A green agenda inflects Ransmayr’s piece—as the (rather benign) nature photos accompanying the original edition of Resplendent Decline indicate.44 However, this ecological catastrophism has ramifications for the individual rather than society as a whole. This stress on the solitary individual rather than the society within which he moves remains present throughout Ransmayr’s later works. Society is only the backdrop for the Bildung or anti-Bildung of the individual male (hence I use the singular masculine pronoun throughout most of this chapter). Man’s victimization of the planet and his conformism to the destructive Enlightenment-dialectic lead, paradoxically enough, to his own sense of absolute victimization within the larger scheme of a universal heat death. The aggressively proselytizing New Science wants to counter this eschatological outlook and concomitant sense of victimization with a pre-emptive strike. It herds disaffected individuals into the “terrarium” to die a slow, consciousnessraising death. The word “terrarium” itself implies an environmental focus, with the return of the recalcitrant, denatured child to the paradoxically synthetic natural fold. By envisioning death both as an imminent and an immanent end to human life as it is known, Ransmayr’s text resuscitates a paradigm of apocalyptic fiction. The concordance such fiction establishes among the end, middle, and beginning of human life depends on the end alone. Pushing the dialectic of the Enlightenment to its conclusion in stasis, the New Science has to glorify death to heighten the appeal of an even more immediate end than the one entropy, dedifferentiation, and environmental devastation promise. Solely such a death can bestow meaning; however, it can do so only by disregarding any transcendental hereafter. To borrow from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which gives its imprimatur to Resplendent Decline, we could say that the “real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured” (194). Meaningful time, kairos, exists through its relation to an end, as opposed to time’s uniform passage, chronos, which is indifferent to any end.45 In Resplendent Decline such meaningful time contracts to the instant when a victim is extinguished. Death’s contingency is removed, its “open eventuality” abolished, and the human organism is finally brought into line with the universe’s temporality (O’Leary 32). The spokesman boasts that the future’s arrival can be sped up with the New Science’s approach. Its

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contribution, he maintains, is to augur a time to come. The terraria are simultaneously the quintessential image of an entropic future and its dismal “anticipatory realization” (“ihre Vorwegnahme” [17]). Over against diachronic movement, a synchronic future perfect comes into being as an anticipation and foreclosure of all potential futures. Ransmayr’s narrative suggests that redemption is possible now, when the future is collapsed into the present and the experimental subject’s death wish finds instant gratification. The voluntary victim devotes himself to the rediscovery of his true self—“the discovery of the essential” as the subtitle states—by bringing the moment of his future annihilation into the immediate present. In apocalyptic narratives, the past as well as the present order is perceived as deficient and worthy of being overthrown. Only the new, coming order promises fulfilment (Vondung 69). However, the perception of time on the victim’s part depends on the contraction of the experience of chronological time into a single instant. The new order is no order per se, but the extension of consciousness into an expanse that is inf inite in its infinitesimal nature. The role death plays in a culture of victimhood is very different from that in a deceptively heroic culture, such as, for example, National Socialism. Whereas a cult of heroism seeks to de-individualize death and in this way make possible death’s glorification and transfiguration for the benefit of some greater collective such as the fatherland or the nation, Resplendent Decline turns this around. In a sense, Ranmayr’s text attempts the same kind of re-evaluation or transvaluation Kiefer undertakes in his paintings of fascist funerary architecture (Schütz 317–19). The deindividualization of homogeneous humankind in Ransmayr’s brief work requires that death be reinvested with individual significance. Any larger entity becomes irrelevant. The mode of death in the terraria may be standardized, but everyone’s death is his very own. Each person’s death— rather than his life—is the ultimate signifier of his individuality. This element differentiates Resplendent Decline from other twentiethcentury apocalyptic narratives. According to Frank Kermode, apocalyptic fictions find themselves in a quandary as a result of our excessively individualized modernity. In The Sense of an Ending (1966), Kermode maintains that we find it difficult to conceive of a common end when faced with great divergence in our problems and attitudes. The “inconceivable diversity of state” thwarts any “solidarity of plight” (Kermode 173). In Resplendent Decline, this holds true only to a certain extent: there is no real solidarity in a world without difference, although the experimental subjects may agree on a common end and the means to achieve that end (as the project’s wild success bears out). Indeed, an indifference of state is the precondition for this dismal vision. In Ransmayr’s text, the only way to neutralize our predicament is to remove ourselves, collectively, from this world and enter into a concordance with the universal forces of destruction, singularly.

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The fiction of an end that determines and validates all anterior experience has significant implications for the cosmic victim myth that Ransmayr’s text encourages. Perhaps we expect a victimized consciousness to affirm a victimized identity in the face of death, feeling all the more abused by the New Science with the onset of pain. However, when man confronts his own extinction, he is not anymore the victim he felt he was. The inexorable approach of annihilation reverses the victimization from which man desires escape. In the terrarium, he is no longer the casualty of his previous scientific hubris and his inability to impose adequate limits on his thought processes. He finally undoes the decline in comprehension to which his way of thinking led. The benefits of the New Science’s perspicacity are there to be reaped, for in the process of dehydration—seconds before death—man attains the highest form of knowledge: self-knowledge. In death, he asserts the self of which he has lost sight. The New Science, proclaims the spokesman, is crowned with success if it reaches “its exclusive end” (“ihren ausschließlichen Zweck”): “It is I, / I, / who am perishing here” (“Ich bin es, / ich, / der da untergeht” [19]). I note the doubling of the first-person singular pronoun for emphasis, when the spokesman for the New Science articulates the tautological insights awaiting the experimental subject. Interestingly enough, religious overtones infiltrate the second section of the text, despite its concentration on scientific terminology, as mastery is— in this different context—again at issue. I imagine that this comes about from the fact that using the Enlightenment against itself necessitates a mysticism centered on renunciation. The Enlightenment’s secularizing tendencies are subverted in favor of a new Christian mysticism. Genesis must take itself back and be retold in a fashion more suitable to the goals of the New Science. Freedom to rejoin the origin46—of the universe, of the self— in a mystical paroxysm can only occur by limiting and eventually eliminating oneself, as the spokesman intimates. The spokesman’s account of the Big Bang carefully parallels the First Book of the Bible. The incremental phases of development are outlined in the ritualistic form typical of Genesis, and sunlight becomes the incipit (27). However, whereas Genesis culminates in God’s institution of man as the “master of creation” (“Herr der Schöpfung” [22]), the speaker’s retelling ironically concludes with the eradication of the colonizing, oppressive “master of the world” (“den Herrn der Welt”) from the earth’s surface (35, emphasis in original). With its allusions to the National Socialist “Herrenmensch,” the phrase “Herr der Welt” raises the possibility of another kind of implicit mastery or ‘Bewältigung’: the extirpation of the belief in Aryan superiority. Reformulating Genesis relieved of its strict Biblical connotations, the spokesman insinuates his own metaphysics: a metaphysics of absence—or, to put it more accurately, presence in absence. The erasure of man from the earth’s surface and the disappearance of any infinitesimal remainder affirm the entropic processes of the universe and in this way restore self-identity.

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The conditions for the possibility of disappearance have to erase themselves, mimicking the self-erasure of the New Science’s brutal logic. The project measures nothing, and it records nothing. Whatever excretions and corporeal remnants come into being in the process of dehydration are also made to vanish: The project of the New Science [...] produces everything, that has to be produced, and makes what it produces rapidly disappear, because herewith the totality of the possible is realized. (36) (Das Projekt der Neuen Wissenschaft, [...] stellt alles her, was herzustellen ist, und bringt, was sich herstellt, zum raschen Verschwinden, weil damit die Gesamtheit des Möglichen verwirklicht ist. [36])

The implications of this totalizing philosophy are clear—the project itself must disappear the way it has expunged its objects. Its success will only be readable in the absence of any trace of the willing victims, as well as of the science itself. The introduction of a religious subtext into an account of chemical, physical, and biological evolution in Resplendent Decline serves a specific purpose. It allows the speaker for the New Science to shift the question of man’s victimization from responsibility and culpability to sinfulness. Jürgen Habermas discusses this move in relation to Kierkegaard’s philosophy, but his comments are no less applicable to Ransmayr’s text. Habermas argues that any reinterpretation of guilt as sin necessarily changes the terms of debate. We become dependent on a transcendent forgiveness, required to place our hopes in some absolute power. This power is asked to intervene retroactively in the course of history; it is asked to restitute the injured order as well as the “integrity of the victims” (“Integrität der Opfer”).47 The spokesman’s appeal to a mystical union only makes sense against the backdrop of a metaphysical absolute—which would be inconceivable within a purely materialist conception of evolution. The integrity of the victims (“It is I, / I, / who am perishing here”) can be affirmed solely if there is a transcendental order that underwrites the New Science’s intervention. The conception of man’s fallen nature has an additional benefit: it renders irrelevant any discussion of man’s culpability for his actions. For is man not per se sinful in his post-lapsarian state? The New Science draws on the Bible to remove itself from the past and insert the project into an apocalyptic time frame that, by definition, moves within the future—or the future

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perfect, as the case may be.48 When it looks forward to a time where human wholeness has been restituted, a reinterpretation of a negatively conceived evolution from single-celled organisms to homo sapiens becomes possible. The quotation from Danilo Eccher, which I gave earlier as evidence of Kiefer-mysticism, gains a certain validity in regard to Ransmayr. “Sacrifice,” Eccher writes about the artist, “is the sublime act with which it is possible to cross the nothingness of abandonment, sinking into the darkness of thought, giving way under the weight of appearance, to then approach the heroic redemption, not salvation, of his own sacrifice” (72) (“Il sacrificio è l’atto sublime con cui è possibile attraversare il nulla dell’abbandono, affondare nel buio del pensiero, soccombere sotto il peso dell’apparenza, per poi accedere al riscatto, non alla salvezza, eroico del proprio stesso sacrificio” [16]). However, this statement requires refinement to be applicable to Resplendent Decline. The project’s movement from guilt to sinfulness has dual goals: salvation, as the deliverance from harm through the intercession of a higher force, and redemption, as the action of regaining something in exchange for a kind of payment. Salvation from the earthly misery, into which our exploitative ways have thrust us, implies delivery from spiritual isolation and estrangement. It promises entry into a virtual community, not only with God, but also with an equally victimized fellow man. The shift likewise has to do with the New Science’s wish to redeem our ethical integrity through self-sacrifice: a shift from guilt to sinfulness implies exonerating any and every victimizer for worldly wrong-doing. The title giving fourth part, “Resplendent Decline” (“Strahlender Untergang” [45–61]), at first problematizes, but ultimately confirms my reading of Ransmayr’s text.49 We perceive a new voice: the willing victim emerges from anonymity and silent suffering to speak about the course of his dehydration, the subtitle’s “Light Calluses, Blinding, and Dehydration” (“Lichtschwielen, Blendung und Entwässerung” [45]). Unsurprisingly, he criticizes the ideas underpinning the project from his abandoned position in the desert terrarium. The experimental subject recognizes, in fact, the New Science’s false metaphysics. He castigates the speakers from their “pulpits” (“Kanzeln” [48]). They practice Adorno and Horkheimer’s priestly fraud (Dialectic 40), preaching theories of redemption and misleading their followers (48–49, 54). Free associations reinforce the human guinea pig’s skepticism toward the project, as he watches his yellow blisters expand in the sun’s glare. His thoughts move from bulging blisters to other projectiles, and he thinks back to a moment in the past when something was thrown. This object—the dying man cannot recollect whether or not it was a ball—flew through the air, destroying a summer guest’s restful leisure at the end of its trajectory. The man cannot remember, more importantly, whether he himself was the irascible summer guest, who reaches out to strike the guilty party, or the ball player (52). Switching back to his corporeal suffering, the man offers no answers to the questions he poses. A memory surfaces, the question of culpability—and not sinfulness, despite the

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New Science’s intentions—for past action is raised, and a decisive answer is avoided. The man leaves open whether he was the instigator of harm or the enraged victim; the dialectic between victim and victimizer is held in abeyance. Although the dying man’s outline of the thermonuclear transformations of the sun and the biological phases before death (hallucinations, unconsciousness, painlessness) seem to replicate the scientific world-view and instrumental rationality from which he has fled into the enclosure, his summary ends with a perfunctory “idiots” (“Idioten” [54]). His epithet presumably refers to the New Scientists, as well as himself. At this point, he reasserts time as man experiences it, man who conceives of himself as something other than a victim of overwhelming entropic forces. The experimental subject restores time’s human measure, as it slows down and the accelerated future perfect stops. No longer is a universal heat death around the proverbial corner. For this experimental subject at least, the end of the world seems far away. Before such a vast temporal expanse, human comprehension returns to the humility better befitting it (53–55). The conclusion suggests that the question of guilt, reintroduced indirectly in an episode that is difficult to interpret, is evaded in the final section. The text, while questioning the logic it has established, eventually confirms the New Science’s predictions. Turning to face the sun, the experimental subject (or object?) burns a hole into his retina to gain, as he states, another perspective. Is this a final confirmation of the deceptive element of self-sacrificial rhetoric, an acknowledgment that he has been duped? Or does the man, a modern Œdipus, recognize a personal fault for his role within the unfolding drama of destruction? He blinds himself for an inability to mourn: tears, he admits, do not or cannot materialize under these circumstances (56–57). This does not necessarily indicate either an acceptance of personal guilt or involvement, but simply asserts the desirability of victim status in and of itself. The person radically identifies with natural processes and the biochemical phases of decay, as he becomes dehydrated and his blood count begins to change (57–58). Concentration leads to a distillation of corporeal substance, as the New Science prognosticated, as well as a complete identification with the total loss underpinning the project’s logic of erasure. “I am / all-encompassing loss” (“ich bin / der allesumfassende Verlust”), affirms the experimental subject in his dying moments (58). In this last phase, the solipsistic tendencies the text impugns are subverted—a community in mystical wholeness redeems the universe’s supposed victims. Not a singular identity is affirmed in death, but a multiple one, which recognizes in itself the coexistence of victim and perpetrator: Now I know again, that I was the summer guest. I was also the prisoner, the pig,

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and the butcher, and I promenaded along under the parasol. (60, emphasis in original) (“Jetzt weiß ich wieder, daß ich der Sommergast war. Ich war auch der Häftling, das Schwein und der Schlachter und bin unter dem Sonnenschirm Promenaden entlang spaziert. [60, emphasis in original])

Paradoxically, embracing loss entails connecting with a plurality that transcends gender (we note that the victim is a masculine butcher and a feminine promenader). The mystical moment of self-knowledge grants the first and only intimation of commonality with others—within the loneliness of abandonment. Another of the New Science’s predictions is borne out: self-erasure makes possible the acceptance of selfhood. The fourth section moves from a preterit tense that studiously avoids the use of a personal pronoun to the present tense and the impersonal “one.” This part then climaxes in the sevenfold repetition of “I” in the space of three sentences. The speaker seems to accept a historical identity, as apart from a purely physical, natural one, in the shift from the first-person pronoun with the present tense—“I am / allencompassing loss”—to the first-person in conjunction with the simple past tense: “I was the summer guest [...]” (Fröhlich 49). However, acknowledging his historicity does not mean recognizing historical responsibility. A diffuse equivalence between victims and victimizers emerges instead. In the first three examples of summer guest, prison inmate, and pig destined for slaughter, the man stresses his own identification with victims. The italicized “I” in the first case of the injured summer guest emphasizes the subject’s victimhood. By way of the butcher and the vision of the slaughterhouse with which the man concludes, he articulates his position as victimizer. Where does Ransmayr’s Resplendent Decline leave us? Heat death accelerates destruction, furthers the irrationality of instrumental rationalism, and affirms nihilism in order to have the human essence emerge in the paradox and paroxysm of mysticism. Becoming all, one is thereby destroyed; one destroys oneself in order to become all. As man unites victim and victimizer, a coincidentia oppositorum takes place; there is no longer an irreducible historical difference between victim and perpetrator. Man is a victim of universal natural forces, and National Socialism, to which the text clearly refers, is only one of the many permutations of destruction possible in an entropic system.50 Nature conceived cosmically makes moot interventions in history. In it, man has no chance of effecting change. We should be careful when generalizing from Ransmayr’s most definitively eschatological text to all his later ones. Nonetheless, his penchant for

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the earth without form and void—literally, the earth as part of a universal “tohu wa bohu”51—is the end of all human transformative processes, even if it does not foreclose the possibility of other changes. No larger entity outlasts disastrous natural flux. Neither political organization, such as the colonial Habsburg Empire in The Terrors of Ice and Darkness or the fascist Roman Empire in The Last World, nor social community, such as the townsfolk of Moor in The Dog King, can provide a countervailing sense of either belonging or empowerment in the face of a sense of such overwhelming victimhood. It may not be the heat death of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that elides history on a human scale, but an engulfing flora, whose voraciousness is equally detrimental to historicity. How could an all-consuming plant life be more amenable to human intervention than the desert terrarium of Resplendent Decline? Where regeneration occurs after an apocalypse, it is always devoid of humanity, as in the close of The Dog King.

III Let me turn to the essay on Anselm Kiefer with which I began my reflections and elaborate on my caveats about tone. In regard to Anselm Kiefer’s paintings from the 1980s, Andreas Huyssen has argued that the interpreter’s dilemma lies in the works’ ambiguity.52 Huyssen questions whether Kiefer’s paintings of fascist architecture remain beholden to the past in melancholic fixation or criticize the spectator’s own conflicted feelings such as melancholy or repression in regard to this past (223). The scholar absolves Kiefer of such uncertainty in the particular case of Shulamite (1983), which references history’s victims. Analyzing this painting of Wilhelm Kreis’s Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldier, Huyssen writes about Kiefer: [H]e evokes the terror perpetrated by Germans on their victims, thus opening a space for mourning [...]. By transforming a fascist architectural space, dedicated to the death cult of the Nazis, into a memorial for Nazism’s victims, he creates an effect of genuine critical Umfunktionierung, as Brecht would have called it, an effect that reveals fascism’s genocidal telos in its own celebratory memorial spaces. (227)

It is a similar ambiguity that gives Ransmayr’s writing its double edge. But to read his texts as engaging in “Umfunktionierung” is somewhat more difficult. There seems to be an ambivalence toward victims, be they implicit in Resplendent Decline or explicit in The Dog King. An inhuman teleology of destruction compounds the ambivalence. Although Ransmayr charges that German reactions to Kiefer’s Occupations photos lack an understanding of irony, his high literary tone seems to purposefully weaken

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or obfuscate such irony in his own writing.53 Satire and irony are, of course, present in the disquisitions of the New Science’s spokesman or in the narratorial voices of the novels. But there is a way in which the irony reverses itself when foregrounded too strongly, according to a kind of affirmation through double negation. In the end, an underlying melancholic, apocalyptic telos seems to dominate, making full absolution of the author tricky. It is this teleology that is at odds with Kiefer’s shattering of historical models of progress or downfall (Richter 118). While it may be specious to condemn an author on such grounds—which always entail a personal measurement of what “enough” or “too much” irony means—Ransmayr’s conceit in certain texts regarding the relationship between art and human existence within a universe of decay is distinctly questionable. What Peter Sloterdijk termed the ‘hard,’ lasting difference of artistic talent defies the indifferent differentiation and natural obsolescence taking place in Ransmayr’s fictional worlds.54 Through a stress on the everlasting quality of true art, Ransmayr’s writings try to compensate the asymmetrical difference between man and the universe (which resists spatial metaphors of the kind I employed earlier) with the more traditional vertical difference we saw in The Contempt of the Masses. Humans and things may be subject to the eternal law of mutability, but the nunc stans of art redeems them. The protagonist Cotta, following on the trail of Ovid in The Last World, is overtaken by madness; nonetheless, in his ultimate moments of lucidity he recognizes the transformative power of the Metamorphoses. The Roman regime may be subject to eventual decay, but art removes man from the pressures of dismal political reality. Similarly, the three ethers that surround humans in “The Third Ether or A Stage by the Sea” (“Die dritte Luft oder Eine Bühne am Meer”), Ransmayr’s speech at the opening of the Salzburger Festspiele 1997, are not those of Irish history sung about on the stage of Glaisín Àlainn in Southern Ireland (to which Ransmayr expatriated in the 1990s, when Ireland was booming as the “Celtic Tiger” in the European Union). According to his Irish friend, the ethers are, first, a person’s earliest diffuse memories of mother and home, then, the larger realm of Ireland and its natural environs, and, finally, narratives. These are narratives wherein the vicissitudes of life are transmuted into art. In a convoluted sentence, Ransmayr conjures up both the enchantment and exponential possibilities of art: But only in the third ether is added and addended what is missing for a complete image of the world, only in the ether of platforms, dance halls and theaters, cinemas and maybe smoky pubs, too, in the ether of stories and in the enchantment of life into songs, a whole sea, for instance, is transformed into a single word, into a melody, and rushes out of that single word again. (26) (Aber erst in der dritten Luft werde ergänzt und hinzugefügt, was zum vollständigen Bild der Welt noch fehle, erst in der Luft der Plattformen, Tanzsäle und Theater, der Kinos und wohl auch rauchiger Pubs, der Luft der Geschichten

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und der Verzauberung des Lebens in Lieder, verwandle sich beispielsweise ein ganzes Meer in ein einziges Wort, in eine Melodie, und rausche aus diesem Wort wieder hervor. [26])

Even the bedridden, Alzheimer-plagued mother, at whose bedside Ransmayr and his Irish friend Eamon engage in these reflections, is eventually swept up in the embrace of this pure vision of art. The waves outside her window, symbolizing the shipwreck, flight, and bounty around which many stories revolve, now carry to her bedside Glaisín Àlainn’s receding applause (27). Although the paragraph envisions both highbrow and lowbrow art as potentially transformative, the precious literary tone suggests otherwise. The fullness of art is only to be had for those epic narratives set against a backdrop of decay and disappearance (such as the disappearance of the old, impoverished Ireland here). In The Invisible Woman: Tirade on Three Beaches (Die Unsichtbare: Tirade an drei Stränden, 2001), we find a comparable progression from historical vicissitude to artistic beatitude. In this three-act drama about a souffleuse, she alters her existence in the shadows into dramatic art in the limelight. The locale changes in the darkened theater, from the Arctic Ocean near Greenland, to Sri Lanka and the Bay of Bengal, and eventually the Aegean Sea, replete with the ruins of an amphitheater and a tragic chorus. In concluding, let me come back to “The Unborn or Anselm Kiefer and the Tracts of the Heavens.” Here Ransmayr advocates neither a timeless realm of art nor a teleology of universal annihilation. His tone is generally more subdued, and he leaves unanswered the questions that arise in the course of the essay. The writer’s pessimistic outlook comes into conflict with the painter’s faith in human and metaphysical potential, and the text oscillates between apocalyptic despair and hope. Kiefer suggests that we must live in the seriousness of our potentialities, inherent in our fallible and aggressive natures, “playing, forever playing, and yet living with the serious fact of our possibilities, in the middle of the drama of our own violent nature” (21) (“spielen und spielen immer weiter und leben doch im Ernst unserer Möglichkeiten, mitten im Drama unserer gewalttätigen Natur” [21]). We must dwell in the knowledge of unlived promise, of a potential reality that will always be only a fragment of some larger unrealizable whole. Thus, while Kiefer’s monumental works are subject to the dictates of temporality, the destructive course of time eating away at the natural materials (lead, straw, ashes, flowers, seeds) he fastens to his canvases, the artist nevertheless resists time’s corrosive flow. His may be a Sisyphus task, in Ransmayr’s view, for even the creation of leaden sculptures is no guarantee against disappearance (19). While Ransmayr occasionally glimpses the vistas onto which Kiefer’s neo-Platonic concept of the unborn opens—myriad possibilities set against irrevocable obliteration—the writer cannot, in the end, deny

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his eschatological view. When he comes to Kiefer’s book, Grass Will Grow over Your Cities (Über euren Städten wird Gras wachsen)—which could serve as an alternative title for The Last World or The Dog King— he returns to the catastrophic vision I quoted at the outset, with its incantation for peace: Over everything that lies beneath the heavens—or so we have understood Kiefer’s leaden books to say—over all these roads, paths, and glass buildings lying at last in shards and rubble, over these olive groves that will have sunk back into the earth, grass will grow, until, with the disappearance of the last shard of glass, the last trace of wall, everything will be as it once was without us. More peaceful? Yes, more peaceful. Perhaps. (22) (Über alles unter diesem Himmel, so haben wir Kiefers bleierne Bücher verstanden, über alle diese Straßen, Wege, schließlich in Trümmer und Scherben gefallenen Glashäuser und in die Erde zurückgesunkenen Olivenhaine wird eines Tages Gras wachsen, bis nach dem Verschwinden der letzten Mauerreste und Scherben alles wieder sein wird, wie es ohne uns war. Friedlicher? Ja, friedlicher. Vielleicht. [22–23])

From this quotation, it becomes apparent that for Ransmayr, only the temporal negation of “no longer” might create a serene cosmos. It is one in which man no longer resides on earth; one where man is no longer subject to the forces of universal destruction that victimize him as he victimizes other things and beings; one where the dialectic of victim and victimizer or its sublation no longer pertains. In “The Unborn,” meaningful difference cannot be restored through art in a universe indifferent to man and his dreams. Such difference ultimately falls prey to the impossibility of comparing human artifact and natural formation. Even Kiefer’s monumental works become insignificant by comparison with the Cévennes Mountains or the gorges near the Ardèche River, Ransmayr’s text implies.55 The asymmetry between man and nature knows no measure, and allows no relations of difference, and no proxemic tension. This factor neutralizes the transformative potential of art. “How large or small can works of art be in the presence of reality’s dimensions—or according to the scale of our dreams?” Ransmayr asks with resignation (“Wie groß oder wie klein können Kunstwerke vor den Dimensionen der Wirklichkeit sein—oder vor den Maßstäben unsrer Träume?” [23]). Kiefer, on the other hand, is capable of imagining relations of difference in the same situation. In a quick reversal, the innumerable possibilities open to humans dwarf reality. For Kiefer, in this “sheer possibility, everything [is] still waiting to be given form, to be realized and perfected, both here in our lives and out there, in space” (“die bloße Möglichkeit,

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alles, auf seine Gestaltung, Verwirklichung und Vollendung noch Wartende, hier, in unserem Leben wie dort draußen, im Raum”). The infinite possibilities and the possibility of poiesis within that infinity are, for Kiefer, something he finds wondrous, “marvelous” (24) (“wunderbar” [25]). The realization and completion of that which awaits us as humans here and (or) beyond is only a theoretical prospect carrying little conviction for Ransmayr.

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CHAP TER

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Mourning is Moot: A Brief Reprise of Freud

So far we have encountered backward-looking fantasies of restored difference, nostalgic recollections of bygone ideals, and apocalyptic visions of an inhuman future—all rather questionable solutions to a “victim society.” We are, in these texts, presented as agglomerations of victimized neurotics, hypochondriacs, and melancholics.1 Having evoked momentary solidarity in victimization (when the desire for retribution undermines consanguinity and institutes new bonds of communality) and ended with an appeal to the sphere of autonomous art, Haneke and Sloterdijk desert us at a critical juncture in our reflections. Kiefer and especially Ransmayr embrace a kind of mystical union through art, when they remove undifferentiated victims from entropic, earthly history. Melancholia, the final term of the above trio, is borne out in the texts and art works under discussion.2 We gaze intently at a ‘lost’ high culture that appears to epitomize an absolute, lasting difference. Even in the moment we feel driven forward by the implacable march of chronological, empty time, we return to this cultural attachment without surcease (if not necessarily to the art itself) and are otherwise paralyzed as regards an uncertain outlook. There is certainly something seductive about such an image of oneself, as we identify with Paul Klee’s Angelus novus via Benjamin’s often cited allusion in the ninth of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”3 The previous works under discussion do not conjure up this ambivalent self-image in a facile manner, and their complex participation in a multifaceted rhetoric of victimhood attests to the intricacy of the problems at hand. In this short chapter, I would like to propose that the very melancholy that makes thinkers such as Sloterdijk disrespectful of current differences (which the no-brow, homogenizing culture of today promises) is actually an exit strategy from the millennial malaise. Melancholia can be re-evaluated, so that it transcends the fixation on victimization and victimhood and provides something other than a quick fix.

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As I did in the Introduction, I turn to Freud in order to clarify this other melancholia. With his help I hope to explain why this term is particularly useful in the present situation and should not fall prey to the fatigue that overexposure causes. The skewed movement between victims-cum-victimizers can be explained with reference to the psychoanalyst’s ideas about humans’ simultaneously melancholic and repetitive natures. According to Freud, we persistently revisit those moments when we have felt like victims and those in which we have victimized without consciousness. I will stake out my hypothesis before continuing: the pattern Freud elucidates for our iterative dispositions—forever caught in a dialectical movement between victimhood and victimization—is profoundly related to melancholia’s selfdevaluation and fixation on past suffering. This inner mechanism creates a confining tradition, from whose restrictions only a reconsideration of melancholia offers release. Before delineating the connections between Freud’s totemic rituals and the rites a profound grief occasions, I myself have the desire to retread the terrain I covered in preceding chapters: I will re-examine the repetition compulsion of the totem meal and its symptomatic aspects. In Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that our behavior necessarily requires the repetition—albeit in distorted form—of seminal events lying in our onto- and phylogenetic prehistory. In a sense, this compulsion to repeat is tied to the character of ritual I elucidated in the Introduction. Ritual for Freud, as it is for Girard in the later twentieth century, is directly related to the expression of symptoms that have arisen from our regress to a past shrouded in unconsciousness. Of course, every ritual is by definition repetitive, occurring at distinct intervals. If a symptom moves according to the pattern “trauma—defence—latency—outbreak” (23: 80) (“Trauma—Abwehr—Latenz—Ausbruch” [16: 185]), as Freud states in Moses and Monotheism, so does victimhood and victimization. The ritual itself—together with the violence it entails—then corresponds to the final phase, the outbreak. In Moses, Freud writes more about the dynamic behind a symptom’s expression. He argues that an instinctual impulse, which repression has inhibited from gratification, recrudesces. Unbeknownst to our conscious selves, the impulse now seeks an alternative articulation: The instinctual impulse [...] renews its demand, and, since the path to normal satisfaction remains closed to it by what we may call the scar of repression, somewhere, at a weak spot, it opens another path for itself to what is known as a substitutive satisfaction, which comes to light as a symptom, without the acquiescence of the ego, but also without its understanding. (23: 127) (Die Triebregung [...] erneuert dann seinen Anspruch, und da ihm der Weg zur normalen Befriedigung durch das, was wir die Verdrängungsnarbe nennen können, verschlossen bleibt, bahnt er sich irgendwo an einer schwachen

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Stelle einen anderen Weg zu einer sogennanten Ersatzbefriedigung, die nun als Symptom zum Vorschein kommt, ohne die Einwilligung, aber auch ohne das Verständnis des Ichs. [16: 235–36])

In order for there to exist “the scar of repression” there must have been an open wound caused by the fact of repression itself. This wound, which scar tissue now covers, is linked to trauma (in Greek, literally, a bodily injury), designating an experience that is not consciously assimilated in the moment of its occurrence. It returns with delay and in displaced form to haunt the victim.4 The scar may block the direct realization of the same impulses in later times, but certain weak spots—connected perhaps in their enfeebled state to the psychic wound victimization inflicts—reveal that unstilled wishes remain in displaced or distorted form. Another action (“substitutive satisfaction”), repeated with regularity, becomes the surrogate outlet for these unsatisfied wishes. For example, the sons do not live out their paternal hatred a second time; instead, they transform their violent impulses into the ritual of the totemic festival.5 This abstention from direct violence is nothing less than a form of self-sacrifice and selfrenunciation, Freud writes, bringing the double German meaning of Opfer into play.6 The symptomatic totemic rite, I might add, attests to the perpetrators’ desire to reassert their position as ethically justified victims. In the ritual, we confront simultaneously the prerogatives of the erstwhile victim, who upholds his right to rebel on the occasion of the feast, and now perpetrator, who has usurped power by arrogating and abrogating the father’s victim status as well as his former might.7 Freud closes the paragraph from which I quote earlier with a direct linkage between the development of a symptom and its repetitive expression in the sacrificial ritual, indicator of an anterior repression: “All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’ ” (23: 127) (“Alle Phänomene der Symptombildung können mit gutem Recht als ,Wiederkehr des Verdrängten’ beschrieben werden” [16: 236]). This return of the repressed signifies nothing other than the re-emergence of tradition. The connection that Freud postulates between compulsion, repetition, and the foundation of tradition in this section of Moses and Monotheism is important, because he also broaches the question of source. An outside source, impinging on a child’s mind, forms a “compulsive influence” (23: 126) (“zwangsartige Beeinflussung” [16: 234]), which instigates the instinctual demand that later can find no satisfaction; this influence becomes a determining factor in the grown adult’s actions. The id is here presented as a victim: the repression of its wishes, for which the id bears no responsibility, is a form of victimization. Freud insists that the child’s mind is like a photographic negative, an inverted receptor of impressions that will return later on in the person’s life as a black-on-white image (this is a much simpler

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mechanism of distortion than Freud uses elsewhere). More significant, however, is the role that these “compulsive influences” coming from without play in transmission. They give rise to the person’s “obsessional impulses” (“Zwangsimpulse”) and thereby create a subterranean set of habits and customs—the “tradition” (“Tradition”) to which the person remains tied despite its adverse or constraining strictures.8 The combination of biology and history lends deterministic overtones to Freud’s description, where he negates randomness and chance in human development. Adult patients will learn of these compulsive influences when the past experience at some later time “will break into their life with obsessional impulses, it will govern their actions, it will decide their sympathies and antipathies and will quite often determine their choice of a love-object” (“es bricht zu irgend einer späteren Zeit mit Zwangsimpulsen in ihr Leben ein, dirigiert ihre Handlungen, drängt ihnen Sympathien und Antipathien auf, entscheidet oft genug über ihre Liebeswahl”). In this symptomatology Freud comes to see, expressis verbis, the emergence of tradition, to which he returns throughout the text: “We expect to find an analogy in this with the state which we are seeking to attribute to tradition in the mental life of the people” (23: 126) (“Wir erwarten hierin eine Analogie mit dem Zustand zu finden, den wir der Tradition im Seelenleben des Volkes zuschreiben möchten” [16: 234–35]). Whenever Freud is speaking of religious tradition, tradition in a larger sense (as customs, habit, literature) is always also implicit—his references to Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann in this section lend eloquent testimony to this expanded meaning. Victimization is thus coupled with the creation of any tradition that has transmuted compulsive influences. The analogy of a mental wound, with which I began my discussion of repetition, crops up not only in Moses, but also in the seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie,” 1917) and is a further indicator of tradition’s malevolent aspects. In “Mourning” the wound analogy recurs twice within the span of five pages (14: 253, 258). At first glance, the image here bears little resemblance to the scar of repression or the weak spots enhancing the return of the repressed. In the initial passage where such an injury is described, the “open wound” appears in combination with other psychical and physiological manifestations.9 About the symptomatology of the pathological form of grief he labels with the medieval concept of melancholia, Freud carefully explains: The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes necessary for sleep. The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies [...] from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. (14: 253, emphasis mine) (Die Schlaflosigkeit der Melancholie bezeugt wohl die Starrheit des Zustandes, die Unmöglichkeit, die für den Schlaf erforderliche allgemeine

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Einziehung der Besetzungen durchzuführen. Der melancholische Komplex verhält sich wie eine offene Wunde, zieht von allen Seiten Besetzungsenergien an sich [...] und entleert das Ich bis zur völligen Verarmung. [10: 439–40, emphasis mine])

This inflexible condition, which permits no sleep, no distance, indeed, no change at all, save the impoverishment of the self, would seem to be at odds with the symptom. The symptom, after all, manifests itself in cycles of latency and eruption, which have been linked to the delayed temporality of trauma (Caruth, Unclaimed 7). However, I wonder if the symptomatology of melancholia generally applies to the culture of victimhood, without the temporal delay, but with the non-referentiality ascribed to the articulation of trauma.10 The “rigidity of the condition” (“Starrheit des Zustands”) that the texts under discussion impute to Western society—unable, on a figurative level at least, to see a resolution to victimhood and feeling all the while psychically destitute—can be compared to a perpetual return of the repressed, a persistent fear of outbreak, or a sacrificial crisis with increasingly brief respites.11 No significant time span needs to elapse, since victims are caught, like the characters of Michael Haneke’s films, in what feels like an endless now of suffering. This suffering is intimately bound up with tradition. Tradition grips us forcefully and malignantly, despite all salutary interventions to date; it is both source and indicator of the victim’s anguish. This perhaps explains the tinny ring of any appeal to this selfsame tradition (see, for instance, the Leitkultur-debate in Germany in the late 1990s).12 When Freud, with his interest in ascribing to tradition a powerful, subterranean existence that allows it to emerge from the dark at intervals,13 also speaks of the object’s “shadow” (14: 249) (“Schatten” [10: 435]) cast on the ego in melancholia,14 we are further warranted in linking the two terms of tradition and melancholia. It will be remembered that melancholia, as opposed to mourning, comes into being when a lost object has been loved for largely narcissistic reasons, when its difference from the “I” has been denied in favor of an imagined similarity. The loss may be metaphorical or otherwise very vague, as Freud argues in “Mourning and Melancholia,” with the person possibly aware of “whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (14: 245) (“wen, aber nicht was er an ihm verloren hat [10: 431, emphasis in original]). A deprivation is felt only after an experience in which the ego sees itself as having been harmed. The self’s perceived victimization in “all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed” (14: 251) (“alle die Situationen von Kränkung, Zurücksetzung und Enttäuschung” [10: 437]) is answered with the persecution of the other in the guise of the self. Once the object is lost from the self’s purview, the self engages in masochistic self-tormenting and self-abasement. But it concurrently takes its sadistic revenge on the lost object, with which it has so strongly identified

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on the basis of a secondary narcissism. The self now tortures the loved object it has introjected. In this manner, the “I” demonstrates the ambivalent feelings it harbors toward the disappeared loved object. As Eric Santner explains Freud’s concept, the melancholic individual does not see the other as someone or something to be esteemed as a separate entity, worthy of love for specific and unique features. Instead, the melancholic loves and grieves for a holistic fantasy: no “edges” divide the self from the beloved other, the “I” from the “you.”15 This theory of a morbid—as opposed to a salutary—type of grief has had an immense impact on how we think not only of individuals’, but of entire societies’ approach to past events. The most familiar case is probably that of post-war Germany and its supposed “inability to mourn” (“Unfähigkeit zu trauern”). Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s memorable phrase designates Germans’ collective denial of their attachment to Hitler and his genocidal goals, the populace’s bizarre identification with fascism’s victims after 1945, and the people’s immobilism in relation to contemporary challenges in the late 1960s and 1970s.16 A whole popular discourse continues into the present centered on nations’ and people’s capacities for a purportedly healthy work of mourning (“Trauerarbeit”), which would allow former perpetrators to leave behind their self-stylization as victims and accept their personal, historical responsibility for a primary, incommensurable victimization. The question, however, arises whether Freud’s distinction between different kinds of good and bad grief actually holds. If there is only one type of grief, namely melancholia, the psychological edifice for this line of reasoning crumbles.17 Freud’s question at the beginning of part IV, section 5 in Totem and Taboo—“What are we to make, though, of the prelude to this festive joy—the mourning over the death of an animal?” (13: 140) (“Was soll aber die Einleitung zu dieser Festesfreude, die Trauer über den Tod des Totemtieres?” [9: 170])—sets in motion the entire scene of the patriarchal murder and the sacrificial dialectic. It obscures any possible boundary between benign and malignant grief. From the perspective of Opfer, mourning is indistinct from melancholia, since both forms of grief cannot loosen their relation to the past. Compulsive by nature, mourning also returns to the repressed over and over again. Mourning stems primarily from the unconscious knowledge of culpability for murder and only secondarily from the conscious obligation of the commemorative ritual (hence the ambiguous adjective “compulsive” [“zwangsmäßig” (9: 170)] in the German original as opposed to the English “obligatory” to designate the mourning of the feast).18 The totem feast is a means of identifying with the parental victim and a way to avoid the deceased father’s vengeance. In Totem, the victim, as is so often the case, has become more powerful in his phantasmatic afterlife than in life (13: 143). The murderous sons’ melancholic grief, in my interpretation of their elegiac ritual, is as

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much a part of society’s foundation as the violence inherent in their sacrificial victimization (from this insight stems, perhaps, Freud’s aversion to ceremony, which I discussed in the Introduction). Melancholia is as integral to society’s functioning as the violent sacrificial dialectic seems to be integral to human relations. However, if the distinction between mourning and melancholia is moot, the possibility of an “ability to mourn” is precluded. Let me compare further the melancholia in Freud’s early essay and the mourning process in Totem. The translator, James Strachey, hints at a connection between Freud’s thoughts on the victim dynamics in Totem and Taboo and melancholia in his introduction to “Mourning and Melancholia.”19 The sons’ identification with the primal father is, Strachey indicates, predicated on a narcissistic identification, in the way the melancholic ego feels narcissistically inclined toward the love-object.20 To elaborate upon his point, Strachey juxtaposes the allusions to totemic ingestion, such as the consumption of the primal father and the later victim surrogates, and the melancholic ego’s corporeal stance in regard to its beloved and lost object. Freud writes in Totem that the bestial sons, “cannibal savages as they were [...] devoured their victim as well as killing him [...] in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength” (13: 142) (“Daß sie den Getöteten auch verzehrten, ist für den kannibalen Wilden selbstverständlich. [...] Nun setzten sie im Akte des Verzehrens die Identifizierung mit ihm durch, eigneten sich ein jeder ein Stück seiner Stärke an” [9: 171–72]).21 The melancholic individual in “Mourning and Melancholia” desires to “incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it” (14: 249–50) (“Es möchte sich dieses Objekt einverleiben, und zwar der oralen oder kannibalischen Phase der Libidoentwicklung entsprechend auf dem Wege des Fressens” [9: 436]). The injured parties identify with their victim in a corporeal, animalistic (“fressen”), and gluttonous manner, both in totemic repetition—the sons have to repeat the crime of patricide symbolically to adapt their powers and their status as victims to life’s vicissitudes—and in melancholic ambivalence. To push further the similarities between the sacrificial repetition and melancholia, I am drawn to the order and type of affect manifest in the sacrifice and in the process of grieving. During the totemic feast a jubilant triumph follows grief, parallel to mania’s joy, euphoria, and triumph after melancholia in “Mourning” (14: 254). In the repetition of the totem meal in Totem and Taboo, the mourning of the slaughtered victim gives way to “festive rejoicing” (note Freud’s superlative: “lauteste Festfreude”) where “every instinct is unfettered and there is license for every kind of gratification” (13: 140) (“die Entfesselung aller Triebe und Gestattung aller Befriedigungen” [9: 170]). I infer that Freud overstates the case for his dichotomy from the

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lack of distinction between the mourning in Totem and the melancholia of the 1915 essay. If this conjecture about their indistinguishability holds true, as I suspect it does from Freud’s hedged bets at the end of “Mourning and Melancholia” (14: 253–58),22 implications arise for the cultural condition I have been describing. Melancholia, which I will use in preference to mourning to designate the grief that knows no edges and only paralyzing wounds, probably exists in a continuum, like that formerly posited between mourning and melancholia (Santner, “1967” 737). If we are located at the farther, more extremely melancholic end of the spectrum, this position helps explain Sloterdijk’s, Girard’s, and Haneke’s aversion to certain types of difference at the basis of social movement. For them, it becomes preferable to repudiate “indifferent differences” that seem to be the result of a melancholic fixation and narcissistic identification which wipe away distinctions. Instead, they champion supposedly irrevocable differences, the ‘hard’ edges, so to speak, separating individuals and groups, victims from perpetrators, and non-culture (in Girard’s words) from high culture. Implicit in their arguments is also the idea that the forward-driving temporality of a victimizing modernity—even when this is short-circuited in an apocalyptic future anterior or conceived of as broken—is not compatible with the recursive looping of melancholia. They thus denigrate modernity’s unstoppable effects. Ransmayr’s and Kiefer’s art instead welcomes the lack of separation underlying contemporary social existence. Their appeal to a quasi-medieval unio mystica, achieved through complete self-sacrifice and the collapse of difference in the coincidentia oppositorum, resigns itself to melancholic fixation.23 They find in it a possible secularized redemption.24 Particularly in the case of Ransmayr’s early work, Resplendent Decline, all differences between historical, embodied, and particular victims are sublated in an atemporal, disembodied, and universal fraternity. Circling around melancholy, the theories, philosophies, and art works I have examined inadvertently gesture to the heart of the matter: melancholia inflects distinctions in a culture that seeks to establish clear-cut victims but cannot do so. For good reason, much scholarly writing on mourning/melancholia places emphasis on the side of an open, unending working-through, which does not abnegate historical responsibility (melancholia, with its fixation on a moment of injury, seems to deny this historicity). Let me offer a single example at the end of this brief return to Freud. In Yve-Alain Bois’s book, Painting as Model, he reflects on the end of modern art. With its apocalyptic discourse that must perpetually espouse novelty as its raison d’être, modern art at the same time falls prey to the logic of the commodity as it strives for newness. Against what he perceives as the exhausted discourse of ends and of ends of ends—which he equates with Baudrillard’s simulacra— melancholia has become generally accepted. He describes the new abstract

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painters (Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe) who wish to respond to “our simulacral era” as “manic mourners.” With a twist on the terms of the Freudian dichotomy I have also tried to bring closer to one another, Bois talks about the role of incorporation: Their return to painting, as though it were an appropriate medium for what they want to address, as though the age of the simulacral could be represented, comes from the feeling that since the end has come, since it’s all over, we can rejoice at the killing of the dead. That is, we can forget that the end has to be endlessly worked through, and start all over again. But this, of course, is not so, and it is in flagrant contradiction to the very analysis of the simulacral as the latest abstraction produced by capitalism [...]. (243)

He goes on to argue on behalf of mourning work, which must not necessarily be pathological. A reconciliation with our historicity means foreswearing elaborate defensive mechanisms against historical tasks (this is, after all, what mania and melancholy are about). In line with such a view melancholia could—like the purifying violence Girard and Haneke foreground in their work—be interpreted as a panacea rather than a difficulty.25 What might be the literary counterpart to Bois’s art, which would answer his call for a new mode of mourning/melancholia? This is the question I pursue in chapter 5.

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CHAP TER

5

Feminization and Impoverishment: Friederike Mayröcker

I find an allusion to Freud’s melancholic festival in Friederike Mayröcker’s work, whose oeuvre answers some of the questions I ask in the preceding chapter.1 Mayröcker (b. 1924) has been a female presence in the German literary sphere since the 1950s, and, with Elfriede Jelinek, one of its most important voices since the 1970s. From her early beginnings with radical experimental techniques on to her longer prose pieces, her work has remained resolutely innovative.2 This helps account for the fact that she is widely hailed as a grande dame of literature in German-speaking countries and is hardly known beyond their linguistic borders (her America Award in 1997, I dare say, did not do much for her popularity in the United States). Mayröcker’s prose, as soon will become clear, resists easy summary and translation. Since her work is little known in the Anglophone world, I should explain at the outset that my inclusion of her in this book is motivated by a dual desire. First, I hope to show that the victim rhetoric I outline in earlier chapters is not allied strictly with what could be defined as a form of representational “realism” (I put this genre designation in quotes, realizing that it has long been questioned as an adequate categorization for what we perceive as narrative verisimilitude). Second, I would like to highlight a resolutely melancholy strain to her books from the last twenty years, which dovetails with the concerns I outlined in the preceding chapter.3 For the first time so far, we are dealing with an oeuvre that transcends the conditions of victimization that it posits as the conditions for its possibility.

I In the short prose piece on which I will focus, The Communicating Vessels (Die kommunizierenden Gefäße) from 2003, an excerpt from Freud’s Totem and Taboo appears in italics. The fragmentary quotation near the

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beginning of the text arrests attention, caught as it is in the flow of the lyrical prose. The speaking self has just adumbrated, in associative fashion, the concerns animating The Communicating Vessels. It has amalgamated memories of jazz concerts, recollections of dreams, reflections on the German language, a lost love, and on the ideal, but impossible title for this book, “how sweet are comprehensible words” (“wie süß sind verständliche Worte” [10–12]). Eight pages into the text, we are already caught up by the recurrent themes (jazz concerts, the potentialities of writing, cats, sex) that Mayröcker has woven together. At the beginning of this section, she mentions the concerts with which she began her book: […] the daily cat (Minou) we went to concerts almost daily I had almost no power of judgment, had to first read my direction from his face, that’s how it was in order to be able to applaud, wasn’t it. This morning I suddenly wished that someone should kiss the part of my hair, strange enough, great happiness. It was almost 1⁄4 past 2 in the morning and I had not slept yet, rather I took old manuscripts and noted my nerves on their versos (andantino) in shorthand, Hemingway was also at the concert. I was starting to feel ill from the many angels that cropped up everywhere in the program notes, took DEMETRIN in the hope that I’d be able to sleep, maybe mankind’s earliest festival (Sigmund Freud). Whether it was the grim cold from the previous evening which my heart completely OUT OF ITS RHYTHM, etc., in any case I crowned the evening (abhorrence) with this heart-mood, was excited and suffered anxiety : no one here who could have stood by me […]. (15–16, emphasis in original) ([…] die tägliche Katze (Minou) wir gingen fast täglich ins Konzert ich besaß beinahe keine Urteilskraft, mußte meine Richtung erst von seinem Gesicht ablesen, so war es um applaudieren zu können, nicht wahr. Heute früh wünschte ich mir plötzlich es sollte mir jemand den Scheitel küssen, seltsam genug, großes Glück. Es war schon 1⁄4 3 früh und ich hatte noch nicht geschlafen, vielmehr nahm ich alte Manuskripte und notierte auf ihrer Rückseite meine Nerven (andantino) Stenographien, Hemingway war auch im Konzert. Mir wurde schon übel von den vielen Engeln die überall im Programmheft auftauchten, nahm DEMETRIN in der Hoffnung, schlafen zu können, vielleicht das erste Fest der Menschheit (Sigmund Freud). Ob es vielleicht die grimmige Kälte war am gestrigen Abend, die mein Herz vollends AUS DEM TAKT, usw., jedenfalls krönte ich den Abend (Abscheu) mit dieser Herzens-Stimmung, war erregt und litt Angst : niemand da, der mir beistehen hätte können […]. [15–16, emphasis in original])

Mayröcker’s allusion to Freud is set within a longer paragraph—one of approximately 140 sections comprising the slim book (drawings and line breaks are often inserted between single sentences or sentence fragments). It moves from a recollection of the narrator’s lover to the distortions caused by loneliness, from the speaker’s insomnia and isolation to communication with the dead and contact with a passer-by. In choosing this

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citation from Totem and Taboo, Mayröcker eschews her usual specificity in regard to sources.4 “The totem meal,” writes Freud, “which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion” (13: 142).5 The festival for the victimized father, the repetition compulsion leading back to an original victimization, and the commemorative ritual that surround the primary and secondary victimization become the prerequisite for the ensuing social order, its moral and religious underpinnings. But what is the purpose of obliquely referring to the sacrifice and its results in The Communicating Vessels, especially in the case of an author who regards Freud as her only “scientific” source (qtd. in S. Schmidt 275)? With her typical associative rhythms, in which the iteration of certain words and images from preceding segments generates connections among and within the heterogeneous fragments, and her predilection for German’s multifaceted possibilities for creating compound nouns,6 Mayröcker cites Freud to encapsulate her poetological program.7 Willingly blending the recognizable public persona and the textual “I” as she does in all of her works since The Farewells (Die Abschiede, 1980),8 the author-narrator here alludes to the totemic meal, to Freud’s “Totemmahlzeit,” by metonymic implication. She also metaphorically evokes a wake in the paragraph’s context, a “Totenmahlzeit” or “meal for the dead.” As Robert Paul has persuasively argued, Freud’s account retains its sexual bias against women, while otherwise articulating a democratic perspective on equality (23).9 What Mayröcker makes of Freud’s theory, both in this particular passage and in the work as a whole, is a variant of a ritualistic and anthropophagic feast for and on the dead, an elegiac celebration that cannot distance itself from the melancholic conditions of a life and writing predicated on a sense of victimhood.10 It is “1 writing behind writing” (“1 Schreiben hinter dem Schreiben”), in which haunting memories of the important men of her “primal horde” are verbalized. These remembrances are set down in alliterative, allusive, streaming prose and mesh with attention to small daily occurrences, “the corporeality (materiality) of my texts,” as the autobiographical narrator states—“das Leibliche [Stoffliche] meiner Texte”). Salvador Dalí’s concept of “edible sparks” (“eßbare Funken” [34]), which the narrator links to her corporeal writing, adds substance to my concept of a commemorative festival.11 Mayröcker, modeling her method of artistic influence on Freud’s concept of incorporation, metaphorically ingests the male artistic spirits of yesteryear, absorbing their strength wholesale.12 In consciously foregrounding the continuities between speaking self and authorial persona, Mayröcker’s The Communicating Vessels re-evaluates the mourning-work that historically has been considered women’s work. Taking her cue from André Breton’s The Communicating Vessels (Les vases communicants), with its call for the interpenetration of waking and dream

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life, Mayröcker in her book also tries to imagine a permeable boundary between life and death, between lived and dreamed reality, between victimization and its transcension. In an effort to conceive the life of the writer within conditions of victimhood, Mayröcker’s book consciously stresses the loving labor that unrelenting grief produces and its necessary relation to creativity.13 Mention is made, with increasing frequency as the text progresses, of Mayröcker’s deceased partner, “EJ” or Ernst Jandl (1925–2000), one of the originators of Austrian avant-garde poetry in the 1950s and also a widely known public personage. Trauerarbeit dissolves the attachment to the love-object slowly and laboriously, bit-by-bit (Ricciardi 26–27, 32). Mayröcker hews closely to Freud’s clinical conception of melancholia, creating both an abbreviated stand-in for her partner and a narcissistic masculine counterpart for her ego in the figure “EJ.” As such, The Communicating Vessels continues the commemorative effort begun in Mayröcker’s liturgically inflected Requiem for Ernst Jandl (Requiem für Ernst Jandl) two years prior.14 The proximity of melancholia and indifference, on which I have not yet commented, is in evidence in this latter text from 2001. In Requiem, itself a variant of a “Totenmesse” or “mass for the dead,” a friend warns of the indifference that melancholy may bring with it and to which Mayröcker fears falling prey. The friend advises her to begin writing and re-reading to escape the “Mongolia melancholy monochromaticity” (“Mongolei Melancholie Monochromie”). Melancholia’s indifference leads to desolation (paradigmatically corresponding to Mongolia) and colorlessness (the blandness syntagmatically corresponding to monochrome things): I have seen, I have heard how the bird’s voice DROWNS in a WHATEVER bush, because I no longer had the eyes for it, nothing but WHATEVER bushes and twigs and shrubs and the WHATEVER gaping mouths of passersby and the WHATEVER talking of friends and the WHATEVER chirping of global plenitude—everything WHATEVER, didn’t have eyes or ears for thing and word and image and bush and book and flower […]. (5: 473–74) (ich habe gesehen, ich habe gehört, wie die Stimme des Vogels UNTERGEHT in einem EGALEN Busch, weil ich die Augen nicht mehr hatte dafür, lauter EGALE Büsche und Zweige und Stauden und das EGALE Mundöffnen der Passanten und das EGALE Sprechen der Freunde und das EGALE Zirpen von Weltfülle—alles EGAL, hatte nicht Augen noch Ohren für Ding und Wort und Bild und Strauch und Buch und Blume […]. [5: 473–74])

In the neologistic use of “egal” in the quotation, where it comes to modify every important noun, the sweeping indifference that grief engenders is underlined. The indifference I discussed in a larger social context in the films of Michael Haneke in chapter 2 is here given a particular lineage and a specific reason. It is related to a particular instance of bereavement as

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well as a melancholic status quo. There is a progressive widening of the circles of indifference: an intensely private experience radiates outward, and in the process its characteristics are affixed to larger and larger spheres of public existence. We begin with the bird’s voice, go on to nature, unknown passers-by, friends, and from these to the “chirping” of “world plenitude.” From the personal experience of loss, the loss of a poetic, public voice ensues (I will return to the metaphor of birdsong as poetic voice later). The dialogue between the poetess, with her permeable boundaries, and the outside is shut down, and her own song cannot answer the world’s poetic address.15 In this seemingly brief episode, we find encapsulated a warning: in melancholic bereavement, radical dissociation from human society and natural environs is a distinct danger, with the concomitant indifference we encountered in other chapters. However, in The Communicating Vessels, Mayröcker’s lyrical self has surpassed the earlier “whatever” attitude expressed in Requiem. As such, it seems to illustrate very nicely the traits Freud ascribes to the mourner in “Mourning and Melancholia”: after a period in which the self dissolves its attachments to the lost object, it becomes capable of interacting with society again (14: 243–46). Most sections of The Communicating Vessels contain snippets of conversations between the Mayröcker-self and the “EJ”-Jandl figure, which emphasize the pronounced ambivalence toward the man who is both mentor and lover. Inquit phrases (e.g., he says, I say), typical for Mayröcker’s late prose, distinguish these parts. In line with his role as adviser, the majority of the conversations revolve around Jandl’s criticism of her texts.16 We read of his supervision and censure of her distensions: “If you inflate the pages, you’ll never get to the end, says EJ, who watches over my work” ([…] wenn du die Seiten aufblähst, kommst du nie an ein Ende, sagt EJ, der meine Arbeit überwacht” [38]). He offers words of advice, suggesting she listen to Anton Webern (33). He later on maintains that a “halting” (“holprig”) writing style is more exciting than a harmonious one. However, it is also related to disease, including the clichéd morbus austriacus I mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2: EJ refers to style as a “morbus” (60, emphasis in original). Some of his criticisms move beyond her artistic (in)capacity and focus on her life more generally. Jandl comments on her inability to communicate with others and her resultant solipsism (68). This is an important criticism, reinforcing an earlier complaint in the text (21). Given Breton’s title-giving image of communicating vessels, where the gaseous or liquid contents remain in perfect balance when vessels are attached to one another by tube,17 EJ’s criticism takes on particular weight. According to him, Mayröcker’s “externality” (“Auswendigkeit”) in dealing with people who interrupt her thought processes is an effort to sever communication with them (68, emphasis in original). Against her “communicating” conception of the artistic ego, which perpetually restores equilibrium with others, the male voice in the text postulates that Mayröcker’s “I” is an inside out, rote entity.

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At stake in the fragmented conversation with EJ running through the ninety-page text is nothing less than the role of a feminine artistic self in relation to a dominant male tradition that provides the models with which one “communicates.” In this context, we have another variant of the differential, victimizing hierarchy I dealt with in other chapters. The asymmetry that is present between the female writer and her male models parallels that between the artistic couple. In their relationship, the very inquit phrases I mentioned earlier indicate this differential: while Mayröcker usually speaks to EJ specifically, he just “says” without addressing her. Although many of her memories and dreams are suffused by tenderness, most of EJ’s reported comments attest to Mayröcker’s profound cessation of interest in the outside world.18 She articulates a string of complaints against the lost object, resenting his moralizing and interdictions (37), as well as his secrecy and coarse opinions (45). She even twice imagines that he philanders (46, 58). Her self-abasement is related directly to her creative production, which EJ, to her mind, has so vociferously disparaged: […] over and over again the ruinous doubts during work, the deadly hours of dosing, bawling, cursing oneself, self-laceration, screaming and raving, the unproductive way, no word and no sentence present, the absolute collapse of the mind, the absolute skeletonizing of the soul, the folding-over and contorting of the body, until nothing left anymore, expansion no longer possible, my self shriveled to a dirty and naked POINT, 1 negligible POINT on 1 greasy drawing paper, etc. I myself a meaningless, impoverished thing, and that sparkles in the heart (while bathing), this eternal dislocation.. (50, emphasis in original with double period at the end) ([…] immer von neuem die ruinösen Zweifel während der Arbeit, die tödlichen Stunden des vor sich Hindösens, Heulens, Verfluchungen seiner selbst, Selbstzerfleischungen, schreien und toben, der unergiebige Weg, kein Wort und kein Satz vorhanden, der absolute Zusammenbruch des Gehirns, die absolute Skelettierung der Seele, das sich Zusammenfalten und Zusammenkrümmen des Leibes, bis nichts mehr da, keine Ausdehnung mehr möglich, mein Selbst geschrumpft zum dreckigen und nackten PUNKT, 1 übersehbarer PUNKT auf 1 schmierigen Zeichenblatt, usw. Ich selbst 1 unbedeutendes armseliges Ding, und das funkelt im Herzen (während des Badens), diese ewige Dislokation.. [50, emphasis in original with double period at the end])

Recall, by comparison, Freud’s description in “Mourning and Melancholia.” A thorough self-depletion lends testimony to her “profoundly painful dejection” (“eine tief schmerzliche Verstimmung”) and “the lowering of self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings” (14: 244) (“die Herabsetzung des Selbstgefühls, die sich in Selbstvorwürfen und Selbstbeschimpfungen äußert” [10: 429]). The ability for expansion and expansiveness, which EJ earlier in

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The Communicating Vessels associates with Mayröcker’s writing (38), is now countermanded, and the deflation occurs to offset any previous inflation. The self shrinks to a single dot on a greasy piece of drawing paper as the writing self vacates both physical body and her material production. The “Geist” or “spirit,” which for EJ is a function of matter and physis, seems utterly extinguished (53). The German adjective “armselig” beautifully captures this state, with the adjective’s connotations of both psychic wretchedness and physical paltriness; at the mid-point of the text, her impoverishment is complete. Or is it? An ambivalent striving manifests itself in the emphasis placed on the word “point,” capitalized as “PUNKT.” On the one hand, there is the self’s movement toward self-reduction within the text. On the other hand, there is the dialectical reversal, with the enlargement and emphasis of the very point that has come to represent Mayröcker herself.19 In the very moment of masochistic self-abasement, this form of self-victimization and self-renunciation becomes the condition for the possibility of asserting a sense of self. Within the diminution driven by self-abasement, self-renunciation, and self-extinction—all related to the victim dialectic I described in the Introduction—the trend from Requiem for Ernst Jandl turns back on itself. Within the state of grief, a counter-tendency augmenting the self is recovered. The paragraph from which I just quoted begins with a long list of things to be found in the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies’s multimedia canvases. Mayröcker has made mention of his works earlier in the Communicating Vessels, describing him as her favorite painter in the “wild months” (“wilden Monaten” [28]) of grief (also 30–36, 40). Stepping back from the world’s material plenitude—the strings, rags, dust, sand, straw, ashes, fur, earth, mud, wall, dirt, and so on—the first-person narrator asserts a paradoxical sense of self at the moment when the self most fears diminution and extinction. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the font that Mayröcker has requested for the publication of her manuscripts, which simulates the appearance of her typewritten texts. In the substitution of the Roman numeral “1” for the German pronoun “ein” or “a”/ “one,” the English “I” resurfaces in place of the German “ich” in the quotation given earlier, befitting the word-and-number games of a writer who for many years was an English teacher in the Austrian school system and who has steeped herself in Derrida’s works. A sparkling “I” emerges as trace where there was only a monochrome “one.” By so clearly foregrounding the oft-rehearsed facets of Freudian melancholia, the “I” in The Communicating Vessels performs a kind of selfgendering within victimization: Mayröcker clearly portrays herself as a victim and goes on to ascribe feminine characteristics to this subject position. A feminized victim emerges, in line with the one Freud inadvertently construes in his essay on “Mourning.” After having mentioned the vacillating literary character of Hamlet, he postulates a real-life exemplar. For him, the

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“good, capable, conscientious woman” (“brave, tüchtige und pflichttreue Frau”) is a budding melancholic. His German description is quite condescending, a fact lost in the standard English translation of the childlike adjective “brav” as the ethical descriptor “good” and the subservient “pflichttreu” as the positive “conscientious.” She will “speak no better of herself […] after she develops melancholia than one who is in fact worthless,” Freud surmises (“wird in der Melancholie nicht besser von sich sprechen als die in Wahrheit nichtsnutzige”). Indeed, Freud is keen to link the capable woman with melancholia. In his estimation, she is even more prone to illness than another, incapable woman: “[T]he former is perhaps more likely to fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say,” he comments (14: 247) (“[V]ielleicht hat die erstere mehr Aussicht, an Melancholie zu erkranken, als die andere, von der auch wir nichts Gutes zu sagen wüßten” [10: 432]). The capable wife—for “Frau” in German is both woman and wife, and Freud has a wife in mind— recurs a little further on in his essay, when the psychoanalyst writes: “The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable […]” (14: 248). (“Die Frau, die laut ihren Mann bedauert, daß er an eine so untüchtige Frau gebunden ist, will eigentlich die Untüchtigkeit des Mannes anklagen” [10: 434]). Freud’s association of woman with bereavement is not altogether surprising, considering his admiration of classical antiquity, where mourning is, as I mentioned earlier, the domain of women.20 The speaking self in Mayröcker’s text participates in this transhistorical kinship. Mayröcker purposely melds autobiography and biography, author and narrator, to present her “I” as such a melancholic, “brave, tüchtige, pflichttreue Frau.” She thereby makes her victimization and self-victimization more apparent.

II The Communicating Vessels is, as I also suggested, melancholic on another level, one related to Mayröcker’s reflections on the writing self and its relation to the artistic canon. The self ’s constant devaluation and her return to moments in which she openly displays her victimization suggest another problem apart from personal loss or narcissistic investment in an ego ideal. In my two long quotations from The Communicating Vessels, the speaker’s lack of judgment and need for male guidance intimate a profound selfabasement that results from writing within a tradition which male and masculine models dominate. In her thematization of the anxiety of influence, the ossified structures of narrative fiction victimize the female and feminine writer seeking alternatives. The constrained author requires new paradigms to battle the “f lat narration” (“plane Erzählen”) she professes to hate (84, italics in original). However, she cannot separate herself

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entirely from the male-dominated tradition, since it testifies to nothing other than the repetition compulsion of instinctual repression. The tears of loss, the prejudices against and attacks on the self, the fixation on an ambivalent canon lead to a new melancholic mode, one that transcends the debt to Ernst Jandl’s experimental writing, Jacques Derrida’s The Postcard (La carte postale),21 or André Breton’s surrealist text Nadja—all of which are invoked at regular intervals in The Communicating Vessels. An exhibition catalogue in honor of the writer’s seventieth birthday extracts from numerous texts that return, over and over again, to Mayröcker’s self-insertion into a male canon. This seems a strange tactic on the part of the catalogue’s editors, who thereby emphasize Mayröcker’s debt to this tradition instead of her departure from it (Riess-Berger). The autobiographical self that Mayröcker reveals here already takes on the hesitancy and self-denigration of the feminized, melancholic victim we confront in her later works. For instance, at the beginning of a speech in 1982—when Mayröcker was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for literary achievement—she reflects on her artistic development. She defines her early writing as a timid and reverential approach to illustrious predecessors, as nothing more than an “approximation of models,” “a tasting, trying, imitating” (“zuerst nur […] eine Annäherung an Vorbilder […], ein Verkosten, Probieren, Nachahmen). Mayröcker continues, adding that her initial work was simultaneously “a bashful and hopeful admiration of those that wrote and had written” (“ein zugleich scheues und hoffnungsvolles Bewundern jener, die da schrieben und geschrieben hatten”).22 This poetically naïve and innocent period is imagined as a phase within an emancipatory process. She envisions her imitative mode in Romantic terms, admixed with a playful variant of telescoping from Surrealism.23 Her development as writer is conceived as an asymptotic approximation to a transcendent state of ever-increasing interpenetration.24 However, despite the fact that she later shuns the optimism this view of writing implies (“Mail Art 7,” 2: 281–82), I suspect that her writing has never entirely left the early impulse of ritualistic imitation behind. If anything, her search for a beyond compulsively leads her back to that tradition from which she has sought inspiration—and escape. In her speech, “See-Through Image World: Attempt at a SelfDescription” (“Durchschaubild Welt, Versuch einer Selbstbeschreibung”), on the occasion of her acceptance into the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Poetry) in 1986, I again note an appeal to a predominantly male tradition—“Beckett und Brecht, Roland Barthes and Breton, Max Ernst und Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Arno Schmidt, Michaux, Claude Simon and Duras.”25 With the sole exception of Marguerite Duras, this incantatory list with its alliterative couplings manifests a devaluation of the self in relation to these influential “blood brothers” (“Blutsbrüder”). Although these supposedly kindred spirits elicit

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a correspondence, they also make the writer, this “weakling” (“Schwächling”), “silent one” (“Schweiger”), and “questionable marginal existence” (“fragwürdige Marginalexistenz”) aware of her un-homely status as an untimely “stranger to the world.”26 “Fremdling der Welt” is the archaizing eighteenth-century expression she uses rather than the more contemporary “Fremde” to express her non-synchronous, diminutive, and alien being. The progressive dematerialization of the poetess, who also defines herself as a “writing woman” (“eine[…] schreibende Frau”) reacting almost exclusively through feelings, ends in self-marginalization and even self-estrangement. However, this result is perceived neither as debilitating nor paralyzing. Mayröcker finds refuge in the realm of sound, closing with the traditional image of birdsong as poetic voice. She avoids the clichéd full-fledged nightingale warbling, however, when she picks up on the image of herself as a “Vogelbekümmerer” (a “bird troubler”). Instead she conjures up a young bird just learning to sing. The whisperings of the revenants haunting her poetic productions are rejuvenating: it is the young birds in traditional lore and antiquated idiom that “compose” (“DICHTEN” [3: 131, emphasis in original]). The ambiguous word “durchschauen,” “to see through,” in the title of her talk thus suggests Mayröcker’s ambivalent stance concerning a Western tradition that is, for all salutary interventions to date, still largely male. Perhaps the title suggests that her piece is less about giving us privileged access to her worldview and her image world (“Durchschaubild Welt”), but more about having “seen through” her male predecessors and their aura. As such she can articulate her critique reverently. Her own work at the time of this speech—by 1986 more than forty works had appeared in print—is still placed in its infant stages, with a view toward future maturity. Mayröcker’s assimilation of predecessors is, however, given a more Freudian and less Romantic turn in other instances, where she describes her technique as a type of incorporation. In the context of a literary colloquium on “Women Writing: An Other Literature?” (“Frauen schreiben: Eine andere Literatur?”), she evokes the selfsame “blood brothers” and relates them to the process of transcribing bits and pieces from them.27 Here excerpting implies narcissistic identification with anterior models that is dependent on melancholic illness. In Vessels the act of excerpting is described as an internalization of EJ’s “morbus.”28 Another time, she speaks of the interference and disturbance excerpting can cause (“Mail Art 7,” 2: 281, 283). For this colloquium, she emphasizes that she has always been indebted to a masculine tradition, both literary and extra-literary. In the photographic dark room of her childhood—she brings into play Freud’s image from Moses and Monotheism for the repression and renewed emergence of early compulsive influences—and in the writing life of the adult, the ritualistic imitation and incantation has serious consequences for her gendered development. She comes to consciously disregard gender, as she

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writes in “Mail Art 6”: Working with excerpting! the feverish selection collection reexamination! and letting oneself be eclectically respired, and tracing the magical signature: BRETON! MICHAUX! LAUTRÉAMONT! JEAN PAUL! ARNO SCHMIDT! […] I have to admit that I owe nearly everything to the male human beings around me, not least of all my longtime confidant and comrade-in-arms in the field of literature, Ernst Jandl. : This, however, does not mean, that I might have always wanted to see myself as particularly feminine […] in early life there was, rather, a developed disregard for the consciousness of my own gender— (2: 278–79, emphasis in original) (Das Umgehen mit dem Exzerpieren! das fieberhafte Auslesen Anhäufen Wiederprüfen! und sich eklektisch beatmen lassen, und den magischen Namenszug nachzeichnen: BRETON! MICHAUX! LAUTRÉAMONT! JEAN PAUL! ARNO SCHMIDT! […] ich [muß] gestehen, daß ich beinahe alles den männlichen Menschen um mich zu verdanken habe, nicht zuletzt meinem langjährigen Vertrauten und Mitstreiter auf dem Gebiet der Literatur, Ernst Jandl. : Was nun wieder nicht bedeutet, daß ich mich etwa immer besonders weiblich hätte verstehen wollen, […] es war eher eine schon in frühen Jahren ausgebildete Unbekümmertheit des Bewußtseins des eigenen Geschlechts— [2: 278–79, emphasis in original])

The spell of male tradition, however, with the capitalization of proper names and the invocation of masculine pneuma to inspire the female writer, gives lie to her assertion about her indifference to gender.29 Klaus Kastberger has linked Mayröcker’s pneumatological writing to a desire for self-presence in the act of linguistic creation—lending her writing a privileged relation to transcendence.30 I would argue that her “magical” relation to male predecessors makes necessary the play with self-presence without espousing it as such. The work of the historical personages must be literally retraced in the mourning process of the “elegiac temperament” (“elegische[s] Temperament”) as which she describes herself. The bit-by-bit labor moves between the desire for a natural, good, hieratic, interior, vocalized, present language and its artificial, bad, bodily, exterior, written, absent counterpart. For Mayröcker, the “magical signature” takes effect only when the famous predecessors are ritualistically incorporated in an anthropophagic feast, where the materiality of their writing becomes the corporeality of her texts. I noted earlier her description of imitating predecessors as “ingesting” and “tasting” in her acceptance speech, the artificial respiration here in “Mail Art 6,” and the reference to Dalí’s “edible sparks” in The Communicating Vessels. The admired forerunners are love objects, whose incorporated ghosts haunt

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the author with their material and immaterial presence, and are transmuted into the texture (“das Leibliche [Stoffliche]” [34, 38]) of her prose.31 There is an element of violence to such an act of incorporation, which does not leave the writer herself unscathed. However, it is a necessary violence, responding to another violence. It emerges in a moment of transcendence that is of a different order than Kastberger suggests. Mayröcker’s artistic persona is extinguished in the doubled victimization of the artistic process, by an artistic tradition that victimizes the constrained author and by her self-sacrifice in the very process of incorporation. In The Communicating Vessels, the ritualistic “ceremonies” when she starts to write demand renunciation of the self: “The motifs are always the same, I say to EJ, on the one hand the skeined [clumsy] ceremonies of beginning-writing, on the other the renunciation of myself ” (“Die Motive sind immer die gleichen, sage ich zu EJ, einerseits die versträhnten [plumpen] Zeremonien des Schreib Beginns, andererseits das Aufgeben meiner selbst” [77]). However, Catholic images infiltrate the text, making evident that any Opfer instigates a dialectical process. Even at the beginning of The Communicating Vessels, she introduces Biblical parallels and images from the Eucharist in the Catholic mass for the poiesis of her texts. Self-sacrifice to language is the precondition for language’s own sacrifice to the writer.32 Like the sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament or the apostrophe of Jesus as the “lamb of God” in the New Testament, the “word-lamb” (“das WORT-LAMM”) sacrifices itself up to the author. It is immolated on the natural substrate upon which ritual fires burn: “until this moveable dove heaven thrusts down on the plantation, until the WORD-LAMB [lilac brush] sacrifices itself ” (“bis dieser bewegliche Taubenhimmel auf die Plantage herniederstößt, bis das WORT-LAMM (Fliedergehölz) sich selbst opfert […]” [15]).33 In the case of “Mail Art 6,” the writing ceremonies lead to a disavowal of gender concerns.34 How are we to read Mayröcker’s conscious disavowal of gender in writing? Is this admitted disregard for gender issues coterminous with sentences in the second section of The Communicating Vessels, where she discounts linguistic efforts to specifically address female readers? Here she addresses the reader/listener, specifically leaving out the feminine form of the noun: “[…] how would you like that, dear reader, valued listener? No, without the feminine address, the —INNEN, added to the masculine form, it’s ridiculous, I come upon for eg ‘scribe’ and ‘INNEN’ but what are you doing with the poor German language” (“[…] wie gefiele Ihnen das, verehrter Leser, geschätzter Hörer? Nein, ohne weibliche Anrede, das —INNEN, der männlichen Form angehängt, ist lächerlich, stoße zB auf ‘Schreiber’ und ‘INNEN’—was macht ihr bloß mit der armen deutschen Sprache” [10]). The recent addition of the German suffix “innen,” Mayröcker implies, makes the German language ridiculous. Interestingly, she uses the word “Schreiber” as her example, which could

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literally be translated as writer, but is more accurately rendered with scribe. A “Schreiber” is the one who writes down something; it would never be used for an author like Mayröcker herself, who often uses the German “Dichter” or “poet” to describe herself. To my mind, she here discounts recent linguistic efforts to highlight the differences between masculine and feminine nouns.35 While she does not think equality of the sexes in a larger sense unimportant, the addition of the “innen” or “inside” supplements feminized nouns with an unnecessary interiority. In this short section of The Communicating Vessels (in conjunction with her explicitly autobiographical statements), Mayröcker is making a subtle argument. Foregrounded efforts to decrease the differential between men and women or to erase hierarchies between masculine and feminine falter, because they leave the basic conditions of inequality untouched. The addition of a feminine suffix to words inadvertently reifies distinctions between men and women, where women are coded as emotion-driven introverts. In this regard, it is again worth noting Mayröcker’s self-description in “SeeThrough Image World,” where she talks about her reconciliation of ecstasy and discipline when she writes. After professing that there is truth to the statement that she primarily reacts from her emotional side, she appends a self-reflective comment in parentheses. She notes that such a confessional statement is particularly ambivalent when a woman writer makes it, rather than a man. Its believability is implicitly vouchsafed by the speaker’s being a woman (“Durchschaubild” III: 130–31). She, too, is a scribe, a writer, eine “Schreibende.” But to undo the historical constraints, limitations, and preconceptions placed upon women requires a greater revolution than one that could be achieved through the additions of suffixes. She seeks to transcend these victimizing conditions—which are always implicit in her ambivalent and ambiguous comments36—by imagining a revolutionary project along the lines of André Breton in his Communicating Vessels (135–48).37 Bringing together the incorporated spirits of yesteryear with the material conditions of life, her impoverished art aims at a general reconciliation of all spheres of existence.

III To those German-speakers familiar with Mayröcker and her linguistic pyrotechnics, my claim that her lyrical prose delves into melancholia and victimization might elicit slight puzzlement. Her vast oeuvre has avoided the direct or indirect confrontation with historical problems relating to victims or victimizers, in contrast to that of her compatriots such as Christoph Ransmayr or Thomas Bernhard. She has also recoiled from Elfriede Jelinek’s focus, who satirically dissects women’s victimization in the nexus of capitalism and commodity culture and whose historical materialism is opposed to Mayröcker’s mundane materiality. In essays she

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has explicitly distanced herself from diachronic political concerns.38 Mayröcker’s preoccupation seems oriented toward the repetitive aspects of a prosaic human nature within very limited confines. Such life also moves in a historic register whose determinants are highly personal. This is particularly noticeable in the myriad publications following her turn away from shorter, experimental work toward longer, more cohesive prose in with each clouded peak ( je ein umwölkter gipfel, 1973).39 The domain of the everyday, of the home—traditionally coded as the realm of the housewife and homemaker—is the one she represents repeatedly. Of course, the home is also the writer’s castle. But in Mayröcker’s case, it is the domicile of a writer soaking her feet and puttering around.40 Journey through the Night (Reise durch die Nacht, 1984) illustrates her concern with the minutiae of everyday life, specifically as these microconcerns feed into the creative process (2: 366–464). In this prose work, the first-person narrator explicitly thematizes both the melancholic and repetitive nature of contemporary existence, as her literal journey becomes a metaphorical expedition through life. The novel charts an excursion to the center of her universe. It travels back to her “Schreibplatz,” the place where she writes, and her “Schreibarbeit,” the work of writing she undertakes (2: 372, emphasis in original).41 Mayröcker’s first-person narrator, leaving Paris on a night train, interweaves recollections of her two (fictive) deceased children and (real-life) late father: “I cried into old age, cried after my children growing up after” (“ich habe bis ins hohe Alter geweint, meinen nachwachsenden Kindern nachgeweint” [2: 368]). Hypnotically drawn to our dismal, impoverished condition, which serves as a symptom of and an escape from the self’s evacuation in melancholic victimhood, Mayröcker consistently lambastes canonical narrative paradigms as her texts foray into charted and eventually uncharted linguistic terrain, and this criticism surfaces here.42 It is as impossible to have a reliable narrative style any longer, she maintains, as it is to want to listen to a story or to want to tell one. The inherited tradition is injurious to those it leaves out; those authors who search for a solution to contemporary melancholia are put in a narrative straitjacket. The narrator shifts to the plural “we” to further underline the validity and generality of her rhetorical questions and gnomic phrases. The social fragmentation to which victim rhetoric responds is in evidence here, when Mayröcker writes about our “torn emotions” (“zerrissenen Gefühle”) and “collapsed gestures” (“die eingebrochenen Gesten”): To have a method of narration ? on which method of narration can one still rely, which method of narration is still acceptable, we no longer want to have a story told to us, we no longer want to have to tell a story, the torn emotions, the collapsed gestures take refuge in a mechanism of repetition, hypnotic encircling, a repetition principle overheard from life . . (2: 441; double period at the end)

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(Eine Erzählweise haben ? auf welche Erzählweise ist überhaupt noch Verlaß, welche Erzählweise ist noch vertretbar, wir wollen nicht mehr eine Geschichte erzählt bekommen, wir wollen nicht mehr eine Geschichte erzählen müssen, die zerrissenen Gefühle, die eingebrochenen Gesten nehmen zu einer Repetitionsmechanik Zuflucht, hypnotischer Kreisgang, ein dem Leben abgelauschtes Wiederholungsprinzip . . [2: 441; double period at the end])

We take refuge in a “repetitive mechanism” (“Repetitionsmechanik”) and a “hypnotic encircling” (“hypnotischer Kreisgang”), when we no longer are able to coherently relate stories of ourselves. In Mayröcker’s poetological reflections, an unusually causal relation between a broader cultural condition, with its inversion of the perception of victors into that of selfperceived victims, becomes manifest (2: 440). While her dislike of plot is related to stylistic proclivities and preferences elsewhere in the book (2: 376), there seems to be a direct link between social anomie, fragmentation, indifference, incommunicability and the impossibility of narrative coherence in the quotation presented earlier.43 Life lived according to a “repetitive mechanism” has become the norm, and as a result, we suspect, the stylistic repetitions in Mayröcker’s prose take on a mimetic function. The “repetitive mechanism” and “principle of repetition” (“Wiederholungsprinzip”) are linked to the compulsion of tradition. Together, they drive our emotional economies and harden our gestures. Gestures have become inexpressive, thwart mutual recognition, and further solipsism and aggressiveness (chapter 2). The fabricating, fictionalizing tendencies at work in the storyteller thus have a direct relationship to victims and victimhood. Creativity is the victim’s prerogative: “man fingert ich meine fingiert eine Geschichte also fabriziert man sie, wie ein Opfer wie ein Uhu” (“one fingers I mean fictionalizes a story and so one fabricates it, like a victim like an owl” [2: 451, emphasis in original]). Again it is the writer who must sacrifice herself in the process of committing her disparate impressions to paper. Opening oneself to the world is equated with self-sacrifice: “[O]pening oneself, I mean sacrificing oneself ” (“offenhalten, ich meine opfern” [2: 463]).44 The process of rethinking melancholia, which Mayröcker undertakes to do justice to our repetitive natures attached to previous models and predecessors, does not simply accept the whisperings of past writers and the ongoing, complex texture of a masculine writerly tradition. While she explicitly claims to enjoy “being melancholic, since writing then is easier : 1 f lood of tears!” in The Communicating Vessels (“ich bin gerne melancholisch, weil da das Schreiben besser geht : 1 Tränenstrom!” [54–55]), she does not simply encourage apathetic tears.45 How, then, does Mayröcker transcend the constraints of the masculine tradition? How does she reinstate a melancholic victimhood as the genius loci of her oeuvre, like the protective spirits accompanying life’s journey in her illustrated story,

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“16 Protective Spirits for a Journey” (“16 Schutzgeister für eine Reise,” 1: 315–22)? What makes The Communicating Vessels a profoundly poetological work of melancholia? I believe the key is contained in impoverishment. When Mayröcker belittles herself in The Communicating Vessels, calling herself an “unimportant impoverished thing,” she evokes the concept of impoverished art that her prose advocates.46 The idea of an inherent simplicity in certain physical objects—combs, pliers, scissors, crosses, eyeglasses, dust, sheets, plates, mud, rain, rice—that can fortify and sanctify through repeated contact is something about which EJ alerts Mayröcker. She comes back to this in her examination of the Spanish abstract expressionist Antoni Tàpies (b. 1923).47 A special affinity exists between the Spanish painter and sculptor and the Austrian writer: they share a joint proclivity for unusual juxtapositions and collages, as well as an interest in the routine occurrences that constitute human life. In the pages leading to what Mayröcker in Journey through the Night calls an “UMKEHR,” the dialectical moment of “REVERSAL” (Reise 2: 440, emphasis in original), her preoccupation with Tàpies in The Communicating Vessels reaches its acme (30–36). A kind of Franciscan aesthetic, replete with Catholic overtones, inheres in both of their art.48 Discussing his works in the context of her own psychical poverty, Mayröcker emphasizes the care rather than indifference these works exhibit for mundane objects.49 A long description of Tàpies’s “poor meager materials” (“ärmlichen armseligen Materialien”), of the greatness of this production of the poor, ends with Mayröcker’s apostrophe of herself as a paltry or meager thing that I quoted near the outset of the chapter (49–50, emphasis in original).50 Mayröcker’s reception of “impoverished” art objects such as those integrated in Tàpies’s paintings complicates the entire discourse of incorporation to which I have only referred in passing. We remember that in Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” he describes melancholia as a state in which the ego has become “poor and empty” (“arm und leer”). It has suffered “extraordinary diminution” (“außerordentliche Herabsetzung”) and “impoverishment” (14: 246) (“Ichverarmung” [10: 431]). The essay on “Mourning” abounds in adjectives and nouns relating to smallness, lessening, lowness, and inferiority. For the psychoanalyst, the poverty of the (feminized) subject in melancholia—on a metaphoric and literal plane— attests to the impoverishment of psychical energies and the transposition of a vague consciousness of this mental destitution onto more concrete fears of pauperization.51 Emphasizing its penury and self-devaluation, the ego affirms its victimization and posits a moral superiority arising from its absolute weakness. Its attacks on the self are, after all, actually directed toward the love-object masquerading as the self. In Mayröcker’s case, the high value accorded to indigent things within the larger sphere of art is a way to narcissistically affirm her state of being. These objects are so appealing

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precisely because they refract and remind the ego of its own decrepit state. More importantly, they insist that this state is not necessarily lamentable. It is no coincidence that her laudatory words about Tàpies’s “poor meager” materials immediately precede the description of her own abjection. The cannibalizing impulse behind melancholia—the victimization of a figure or figures seen as more powerful—is unleashed on the other disguised as the self, with Mayröcker’s “self-mutilation.” The ego is thereby reduced to one among many “meaningless meager” things. We return in these moments, not to the exorbitance of the totemic festival, which celebrates the triumph of the self over its victimization, but to the self-humiliation and expression of torment that the return of the repressed warrants—and which is another sign of the self’s triumph over adversity. For this reason, humiliation should not be confused with humility, which the descriptive term “Franciscanism” might misleadingly imply. By embracing impoverishment, the self absorbs the strength of the tradition from which this conception of poverty is drawn. The minimal, almost crude sketches within The Communicating Vessels are inseparable from Mayröcker’s own arte povera.52 Dadaism, with which she also allies herself, is linked to this impoverishment, paradoxically enough, through its extravagance; it represents the manic unleashing after the melancholic devaluation.53 Beginning with works such as Sawdust for My Heart’s Bleeding (Sägespäne für mein Herzbluten, 1967) and Blue Epiphanies (Blaue Erleuchtungen, 1973), Mayröcker has employed the technique of juxtaposing simple, often humorous drawings with her writing from the beginning of her publishing career.54 She has even participated in the creation of children’s books such as my dreams a winged dress (meine träume ein flügelkleid, 1974; 1: 307–22), and Ernst Jandl illustrated her text Hot dogs (Heisze hunde, 1977).55 In the case of her own illustrations, a few lines in marker or ballpoint pen will suddenly interrupt the stream of associations. They depict people and objects that have been mentioned in the text. In The Communicating Vessels, they often are outlines of Tàpies’s works. The opening illustration takes the place of an illuminated letter in medieval manuscripts and suggests an illustration of the title’s connected vessels. The sketch—basically two rectangular boxes with circular head-shapes placed next to one another and linked with dotted lines—recurs in five permutations (see figure 5.1). Its repetition suggests the ‘translatability’ of Mayröcker’s conception of communication (9, 10, 14, 17, 18). Mayröcker communicates not only with EJ, with whom she leans shoulder on shoulder, but at one point also with the day (“Tag”) itself—“TAG” is written prominently next to the now solitary stick figure, and dotted lines connecting word and figure suggest that the “day” has taken the place of EJ (14). Her drawings are simple line drawings, lacking three-dimensionality, cross-hatching, shading, or other characteristics of the skilful draughtsman. The little stick figures with their uneven outlines suggest quick jottings, as which Mayröcker herself describes them in a letter to Georg Jappe. She calls them “innocuous

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Figure 5.1 One of the simple line drawings in Mayröcker’s The Communicating Vessels/ Die kommunizierenden Gefäße (2003), which illustrates the physical principles expressed by the title.

marginalia” (“harmlose Randbemerkungen”), “spontaneous poems with pencil or marker” (“Spontangedichte mit dem Bleistift oder Filzstift”) “scribblings, without richness of form” (“Kritzeleien, ohne Formenreichtum”) and, finally, “games” (“Spiele”).56 The sketches, with their quirky captions and marked humor, share more with caricatures than with illustrations from children’s books, to which they have sometimes been compared. For Siegfried J. Schmidt, in a telling analysis, Mayröcker’s drawings attest to a now rare authenticity and become a marker of difference. Over against the “indifference of sight” (“Indifferenz des Sehens”), they stimulate our undiminished curiosity and satisfy our growing “fascination with authenticity” (“Faszination durch Authentizität”). He argues that they should be seen as a response to our overly mediated, overly visual world of designer culture. Schmidt lambastes the enfeebled “difference between reality and fiction” (“schwächer werdende Differenz von Realität und Fiktion”), between “reference and simulation in technically generated image-worlds” (“von Referenz und Simulation in den technisch generierten Bildwelten”). He continues that Mayröcker’s drawings attract our brief attention (generally devoted to superficial phenomena) with their “courage” (“Mut”) and the “charm of undisguised subjectivity” (“Charme unverkleideter Subjektivität”). In his estimation, their spontaneity goes beyond any illusion that aspires to perfection. Once again, the criticism leveled against our epoch is similar to Haneke’s or Sloterdijk’s. The surfeit of images in our media-driven society impoverishes our ability to perceive and leads to indifference. Indifference brings with it, implicitly, problems of mutual recognition and, explicitly, the desire for an anterior realness. We desire a blemished, imperfect, but profound thing or being. Precisely because these drawings defy description, Schmidt closes, they open up a middle ground, an in-between space filled with authenticity.57 Under the guise of dismantling rough categories—Mayröcker’s drawings are neither

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reproduction (“Abbild”) nor allegory, neither skilful nor dilettantish, neither protest nor posing, neither coincidence nor necessity—Schmidt again consigns these sketches to the space conventionally occupied by folk art, naïve art, the art of the insane, and women’s art.58 It is an in-between space that winds up being a non-place devoid of liberating potential. Mayröcker herself suggests a different interpretation, one that hints at her overall poetological efforts. In the same letter to Jappe she writes (and I quote her closing remarks in their entirety): “Overall, my drawings are actually games that I play with myself, when I am totally empty, I mean written out, or in situations too elaborate or too banal for words” (“Insgesamt eigentlich sind meine Zeichnungen Spiele, die ich mit mir selbst spiele, wenn ich ganz leer bin, ich meine ausgeschrieben, oder in Situationen, die fürs Wort zu hoch oder zu banal sind”).59 Reaching a zero point—the absolute emptiness of melancholia—the drawings are fillers, simultaneously “above” and “below” words. The drawings return to the materiality of the writing process itself, to the calligraphic element of all writing, and are part of the process of emancipation through melancholic impoverishment that Mayröcker’s works chronicle. Concerned as she is with translating the immateriality of a destitute psychological state into the prose of poetic language, the drawings mark an intermediate stage within the conversion process, a gesture toward the transmutation of her art. With their unevenly thick lines, flavor of spontaneity, and refreshing humor, drawings such as those reproduced here are interventions in the status quo, as much as her experiments with punctuation marks. They are the interwoven stenography that Mayröcker mentions in The Communicating Vessels (9). They convey an irony about the self-renunciation, self-abnegation, and impoverishment of the feminized victim. To the broken woman depicted on one page (20), the corresponding drawing on the facing page—where the same woman is sucked away from her machine by forces beyond her control (21)—lends a touch of laughter in the darkness. For further explanation we could look to the following lines in “Mail Art 6,” coming shortly after the invocation, in capital letters, of male writers mentioned before. Mayröcker lists a number of mundane, haptic-optic activities, and she condones their paradoxically fruitful and enervating quality, when the altered state of consciousness opens itself to the outside world. These actions, from walking and standing to smelling and tasting, cast their own magical spell, which allows that of the male tradition to be broken. Like the sister arts, which she examines for their “magical utility” (“magische Tauglichkeit”), the mundane elicits a salutary distance from the indifference of the melancholic mind and allows an alchemical process to begin: […] the breathless vigilance, calculated hunt for the fruitful irritation from outside : FOR THE ERRORS OF THE SENSES—in this way trained in collecting loneliness, I start all over every morning, to concern myself with

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the translatability of matter into language—as if it sufficed to disrupt the rules of punctuation a little bit in order to be overwhelmed by a new magical deviation. (2: 278, emphasis in original60) ([…] die atemlose Wachsamkeit, kalkulierte Jagd nach der fruchtbringenden Irritation von außen: DEN IRRTÜMERN DER SINNE—solcherart nämlich geübt im Versammeln von Einsamkeit fange ich jeden Morgen von neuem an, mich mit der Übersetzbarkeit von Materie in Sprache auseinanderzusetzen—als genügte es schon, den Kanon der Interpunktion ein wenig zu stören um einer neuen magischen Abweichung zu erliegen. [2: 278, emphasis in original])

In the case of The Communicating Vessels, the drawings transform the material substrate of life into language. The small illustrations in The Communicating Vessels take seriously the translatability of tradition. Mayröcker returns to it to reconfigure the traces of the past, inscribing her own works on the outlines that are already present. The sketches interrupt the return to the scene of victimization, restate the issue of influence in Mayröcker’s own terms, and become the instigators of an emotion that transcends the indifference of contemporary culture with its pervasive non-recognition or even contempt. Mayröcker’s translation often involves repetition, in immense simplification, of the outlines of Tàpies’s paintings, lithographs, and drawings. The little drawings in The Communicating Vessels, however, do not solely follow Tàpies’s injunction to see God’s hand at work in the lowest things and instill in impoverishment a religious dimension (33). Instead, they lead the author-narrator to affirm her sense of self as an artist and engender empathy for the world around her.61 For example, the image Black Marks and Fan (1965), one of the works Mayröcker names, is reduced to the scrawled title and a black outline. Her drawing bears only the faintest resemblance to Tàpies’s thick impasto work.62 The reference comes amidst mention of another painting, Brown and Floorcloth (1975), and her own triviality: “I am like plywood, 1 thing for everyday use, 1 simple lowly thing” (“ich bin wie Sperrholz, 1 Ding des täglichen Gebrauchs, 1 einfaches niedriges Ding”). The drawing is not further explicated. Instead, the “I” turns attention to the work Brown and Floorcloth, whose distressed, rough texture touches and affects the narrator physically.63 The distressed material mounted on the canvas unleashes empathetic commiseration with the picture itself: “this thirsting image is totally wrung-out” (“dieses dürstende Bild ist ganz ausgewrungen”). The empathy is Mitgefühl, literally, a “feeling with” something else— “I feel, on the insides of my hands that wring out the rag, how rough this picture, […] stripes from bloody fingers on this picture, I have cold and red fingers” (“ich spüre an den Innenflächen meiner Hände, die den Scheuerlappen auswinden, wie rauh dieses Bild, […] Streifen von blutigen Fingern auf diesem Bild, ich habe kalte und rote Finger”). The cycle of

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indifference is broken, as Mayröcker transfers her feelings from the art object to another human being, to whom she ascribes similar powers of empathic communion. Finally, Mitgefühl leads to an emotion-laden act of creation, which takes place within parameters set by tradition: “I wring out my soul […] you too (CORA), your soul also so wrung-out, […] I have written you so many letters” (“ich wringe aus meine Seele […] auch du, auch deine Seele so ausgewrungen, […] ich habe dir viele Briefe geschrieben […]”).64 The gesture of letter writing, from Mayröcker’s novel The Farewells onward through The Communicating Vessels, alludes simultaneously to the Romantic novel of letters, recreating its atmosphere, and the act of written communication, even when the addressee no longer responds. The narrator celebrates this outmoded, often feminine means of communication in the moment of its disappearance under the pressures of electronic media.65 The previously rigid form becomes the springboard for an innovative, more fragmented, email-like stream of reflections and an aesthetic end in itself (Vogel, “Nachtpost” 71–85). While the simplicity and awkwardness of the drawings in The Communicating Vessels may elicit in the reader or viewer a sense of dilettantism on Mayröcker’s part (Jappe 323–25), they surmount the problems that melancholia’s separation between self and other, world and I, poses. They take to heart Ernst Jandl’s admonition to suspend the action and make “diverging spheres of life coincide poetically” (she should advance the “poetische Überlagerung divergenter Daseinsbereiche” [76]).66 Through “Überlagerung”— the superimposition of difference—Mayröcker brings together that which seems to resist assimilation or congruence. In her all-inclusive conception of art, differences are always present. Yet they do not cause discord or establish insurmountable barriers between people and styles. The impoverished melancholic ego is capable of absorbing and transmuting heterogeneity through an act of love. “[O]ver and over the transpositions/transferences of love” (“immer wieder die Liebesübertragungen” [51]), are what she carries out, the narrator explains, when she relates everything she experiences to herself (also 65). The oscillation between “Überlagerung” and “Übertragung,” between superimposition and transposition, allows differences to be harmonized, but not erased in the process of identification. The coincidentia oppositorum is never realized so as to extinguish differences (as it was the case in Christoph Ransmayr’s Resplendent Decline). The narrator can identify with an anterior, largely masculine tradition, which the transposition of text and sketch, of referent and reference, demonstrates, and yet also move beyond its constraining elements. Paradoxically, openness to the outside world brings with it fullness within emptiness, as the melancholic self assumes the plenitude only impoverishment permits. The ambivalence implicit in the Freudian term “transference” or “Übertragung” is, of course, an issue here. However, while the impossibility of separation from the lost love-object occasions the transference of ambivalent impulses onto the self as other, the partial coincidence between “I” and “you” becomes the condition for the possibility of poiesis.67

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Mayröcker’s melancholic self approaches the predecessor as an invigorating encounter within creative production. Her act of translation, rescuing fragments of the old, is the kind of integration only empathic communion can bring about. In Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1921 essay, “The Task of the Translator” (1: 253–63) (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” [4.1: 9–21]), the critic-philosopher resolutely dismisses a kind of fidelity that values the transmission of plot over freedom in interpretation. In his essay, another definition of fidelity to the original, a paradoxical, other-ing type of fidelity, emerges—one that approaches the original not as a restrictive element, but as an energizing one. In short, Benjamin abjures the stress on the content’s verisimilitude in the manner Mayröcker does. The translator’s job, according to Benjamin, is one of estrangement and distance. Rather than seeking complete identity between the translation and the original, the translator emphasizes the foreignness inherent in every language, which must be carried over into the translation. Mayröcker’s artistic translations, borrowing from the divergent spheres of artistic expression and transmuting these experiences into rudimentary sketches (which bear little resemblance to the original), arrest the flow of the text. They thereby generate new impulses for reflection, emphasizing the foreignness inherent in the object as well as the self that has incorporated the admired masterwork. As Benjamin writes and Mayröcker exemplifies, translation is a labor of love dependent on the act of incorporation: “In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language […]” (1: 260, emphasis mine) (“[…] so muß, anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen, die Übersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne hinein dessen Art des Meinens in der eigenen Sprache sich anbilden” [4.1: 18, emphasis mine]). While Benjamin’s German original does not contain the word “einverleiben,” or “incorporation,” but opts for the more organic, Romantically tinged “anbilden”—something more like “developing in accordance with”—the English translation offers a fortuitous coincidence to read melancholia and translation in tandem. After all, what is such an act of translation, but the manifestation of melancholic love with all its ambivalences and its devouring manner? The melancholic writer undertakes her labor knowing that the object must necessarily be lost—she cannot incorporate it wholesale—while nonetheless feeling that this is the condition for the possibility of new art. The impoverishment of melancholia is indispensable for the loving translation Mayröcker undertakes.68 Mayröcker’s The Communicating Vessels also indicates how we can look at repetition not as a debilitating factor in melancholia or in tradition, but as a life-affirming compulsion, as a positive “obsessional looping” (“obsessionelles Looping” [77]). Repetition, as Mayröcker remarks in a section devoted to writing, personal loss, and translation, allows the writer

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to linger as she mediates between past and present. We note the shift in tenses: “[O]n the sheet in the typewriter in capital letters WHERE WERE YOU?, not : WHERE ARE YOU—inserted lingering (repetitions) while fuchsia-red the moon, bent concavely or convexly” (“auf dem eingespannten Blatt in der Maschine in großen Buchstaben WO WARST DU?, nicht : WO BIST DU—eingeschobene Verweilungen [Wiederholungen] während fuchsienrot der Mond, einwärts oder auswärts gebogen” [64]). She assumes an impoverished position, where lingering is possible, a movement hovering between the inherited weight of past tradition and the superabundance of today’s commodity culture with its presentist orientation. The return to Freud, revisiting what has congealed into orthodoxy, is necessary for such translatory, melancholic work. The emphasis on a casual lingering serves as an exquisite counterpoint to the excessive, almost fetishistic attention literary criticism has paid to Mayröcker’s high-energy and material-rich writing practice. Many an exhibition and book jacket revels in the heaps of papers and books littering every surface in her apartment.69 Against this concrete image of her praxis stand the abstract simplicity and renunciation of her poetic design. From the narcissistic identification with the past victimizer and the compulsive influence of his tradition surfaces a sense of “irremediable vulnerability” that lives in the lingering state of suspension (an “unaufhebbare Verletzlichkeit”).70 In this regard, Mayröcker deserves pride of place in my study as one who transmutes the culture of victimhood. The rigidity of our cultural condition gives way to an awareness of the inherent fragility of all life and art. In the process, the victim’s self-renunciation exemplifies an indulgence, leniency, and forbearance toward others. Let me end with Mayröcker’s own words in a self-description, excerpting in the manner she advocates. As I retrace her “magical signature,” I hope that a renewed tradition may emerge beyond indifference and contempt: I have learned forbearance, I have exercised forbearance, to the limits of self-renunciation. With increasing age [I] acquired a non-contemptuous attitude toward all humans, all creatures, also all things, for which I have also been reproached as uncritical, because it can be interpreted as an indifferent attitude toward the world. But at times I recognize the palette, I discover the play of colors, I discover so many facets, namely the multiplicity of dimensions. (3: 127, emphasis in original) (Ich habe Nachsicht gelernt, ich habe Nachsicht geübt, bis zur Selbstverleugnung. Mit zunehmendem Alter eine unverächtliche Haltung allen Menschen, aller Kreatur, auch den Dingen gegenüber erworben, was mir auch schon zum Vorwurf gemacht worden ist der Kritiklosigkeit, weil es als indifferente Haltung der Welt gegenüber ausgelegt werden kann, aber ich erkenne zuweilen die Palette, ich entdecke das Wechselspiel der Farben, ich entdecke so viele Facetten, nämlich die Vielfalt der Dimensionen. [3: 127, emphasis in original])

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CHAP TER

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The Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq

Repetition, as a melancholic working-through (durcharbeiten), ‘translates’ impoverished paralysis in victimhood into a condition for poietic possibility. It thereby releases a person from debilitating gender roles and confinement within tradition’s compulsive strictures. This is, in short, what we found in chapter 5, in Friederike Mayröcker’s oeuvre. What we witness in her lyrical prose accords with a number of late twentieth-century theories of post-structuralist provenance that embrace iteration as the expression of movement and change within human life. Ranging from Jacques Derrida to Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze, these theoreticians espouse repetition as a (re)generative principle. In their view, it leads to vital flux and questions hegemonic socio-cultural foundations; it departs from the superabundance of the identical and the nausea of over-familiarity. For many of them, iteration is an indispensable element of individuation, enlarging the domain within which a person can express a self or selves diverging from contingent, even arbitrary norms—at the same time as the person partially upholds them through his or her participation. In Mayröcker’s valuable example, repetition allows for a margin of uncertainty and creates a space for critical intervention in a victimizing paternalistic tradition, along the lines of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “breaks” discussed in the Introduction. A far more ambivalent view of iteration is offered in the oeuvre of the French author Michel Houellebecq, whose novels have consistently explored the victim society of the last decades. In books ranging from his debut Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994), to his award-winning The Elementary Particles (Les Particules élémentaires, 1998), on to his controversial novel Platform (Plateforme, 2001), his brief prose work, Lanzarote (2000), and his book The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d’une île, 2005), he explores the ramifications of a pervasive sense of victimhood for individual freedom and all-round well-being.1 Houellebecq’s novels adumbrate the Darwinian, neo-liberal consumer culture of the 1990s, which requires repetition to guarantee its efficacy and

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efficiency. The author’s presentation of man—I emphatically use the word here to denote the Caucasian male2—as a victim of the socio-cultural and sexual marketplace has made him, for some, a scandale à succès in France and abroad. L’Affaire Houellebecq, as one of the most talked-about publishing events in recent French history, has been compared in scope to the hullabaloo surrounding Céline or Camus half a century earlier.3 Houellebecq’s novel, Elementary Particles, was the subject of legal proceedings even before its publication (ironically, the liberal New Age camp site featured in the novel wanted to thwart its printing) and a series of articles, interviews, and even television appearances fueled the novel’s visibility and commercial success. The whole affair highlights the workings of mediatized society (Cruickshank 107)—in which the controversial author cleverly plays a spectacular game with incendiary statements, ostentatiously demonstrated indifference to the media, ironically lachrymose webpages, and other multimedia projects.4 He collaborated on the screenplay for his novel Whatever with director Philippe Harel and traveled the country singing his poems set to the music of Bertrand Burgalat (recorded as Présence humaine [Human Presence] in 2000). L’Affaire Houellebecq also draws attention to the French public’s investment in a kind of modernist discourse of ends I analyzed earlier (chapter 4). As Ruth Cruickshank has noted, the furor focalizes around the question of the “crisis of the novel” (“crise du roman”), where the demise of the novel is equated with the collapse of political commitment. “[A]s the century drew to its close,” she writes, “the apocalyptic rhetoric changed, identifying a final, fatal blow to the survival of the novel: the mass media, whose invasion of the field of cultural production heralded the subjugation of the literary arena to market forces” (101; Patricola 9–27). For some observers, Houellebecq’s novel and its success validate analyses like that of Peter Sloterdijk’s The Contempt of the Masses —capturing the mediatized masses’ fickle attention guarantees public visibility irrespective of talent.5 The controversy surrounding Houellebecq’s novels demonstrates something besides the proxemic tension between high and low culture, and between print culture and the mass media: it reveals our psychological and emotional investment in a certain kind of victim. We remain attached to the idea of the innocent, hapless creature with whom we can empathize; as such, we like to evince a kind of Mayröckerian Mitgefühl with other ‘impoverished’ beings. Houellebecq’s novels play with this deep-seated desire, often vacillating between the pitiable and the distinctly guilty, unlikable, and collusive victim. In presenting white, middle class men as such victims, he has been seen, quite convincingly, as the vanguard of a larger trend in contemporary Western fiction—the “male novel of ressentiment” dealing with men who feel disempowered within the consumerist spectacle of Western capitalism (McNamara).6 His extremely body-oriented male protagonists will help revise some of the conceptions of ‘soft’ differences

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we encountered in other chapters. In returning to humans’ physical substrate, Houellebecq shows how any rhetoric of victimhood cannot be separated from reflections on the body. In doing so, the French author corroborates some of the provocative theses Giorgio Agamben has advanced about the paradigmatic homo sacer, caught in a zone of indistinction and indifference, while revising others.

I While Houellebecq’s protagonists are writers at heart, they work either in the competitive private sector or public sector (that despite its job security is quite similar to the former). In these sectors, far removed from the rarefied atmosphere of an author’s study, repetition manifests itself as a problem.7 The middle-aged anti-heroes, who have already earned the epithet of “Houellbecqian types” (“de type ‘houellebecquien’ ”),8 are aware that differences among people today are negligible, at least from an ‘enlightened’ contemporary perspective. People repeat a general behavioral pattern and diverge from it only slightly. For Houellebecq’s men, the minor horizontal differences people exhibit are nonetheless crucially important in separating out the victims, even if these indifferent differences mask a stultifying sameness, foster vituperation, and engender resentment. The men—white, well-educated, and well-paid—define themselves as victims because they realize their lack of the very characteristics on which society places a premium, such as extreme good looks, extraordinary sexual prowess, overweening ambition. Thematizing their status as ambivalent victimae, they do occasionally admit that they should not feel like victims (for they themselves largely do not believe these characteristics should be necessary for access to social opportunities). On the whole, they are not interested in claiming a state of exception for themselves, but rather in proclaiming the generality of their condition. The only thing that distinguishes them from others is the degree to which they recognize the social predicament that arises from such a state of comprehensive victimhood dependent on repetition.9 Repetition taking place within a horizontal paradigm relies on minimal differentiation to effectively maintain social equilibrium—this is at variance with the pessimistic theory of societal functioning we have encountered in previous chapters. Sloterdijk, we remember, saw these repetitive and hence indifferent differences as a cause of perpetual strife. Writing on Girard, he comments admiringly on our democratic form of life (“Lebensform”), which manages to transmute and bind the emotional surpluses such erotically charged differences set free (“Erwachen” 243–44).10 However, a paragraph from Houellebecq’s Whatever shows a contrastingly intricate view on such horizontal differences within socio-democratic capitalism. The thirty-year-old computer engineer wearily muses about the distinctions among men, as he ponders a business appointment that is to take place

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between himself and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture. In this chapter, entitled “Making Contact” (“Prise de contact”), the narrator prefaces his thoughts on difference by expressing apprehension at an impending client meeting: Of course experience has quickly taught me that I’m only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes, their general way of approaching life. Theoretically, then, there is nothing to fear inasmuch as the professional nature of the meeting guarantees, in principle, its innocuousness. Despite that I’ve also had occasion to remark that human beings are often bent on making themselves conspicuous by subtle and disagreeable variations, defects, character traits and the like—doubtless with the goal of obliging their interlocutors to treat them as total individuals. (19) (Bien entendu l’expérience m’a rapidement appris que je ne suis appelé qu’à rencontrer des gens sinon exactement identiques, du moins tout à fait similaires dans leurs coutumes, leurs opinions, leurs goûts, leur manière générale d’aborder la vie. Il n’y a donc théoriquement rien à craindre, d’autant que le caractère professionnel de la rencontre garantit en principe son innocuité. Il n’empêche, j’ai également eu l’occasion de me rendre compte que les êtres humains ont souvent à cœur de se singulariser par de subtiles et déplaisantes variations, défectuosités, traits de caractère et ainsi de suite—sans doute dans le but d’obliger leurs interlocuteurs à les traiter comme des individus à part entière. [21])

Similitude reigns among white-collar workers—they are “if not exactly alike, [...] at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes.” While we have grown accustomed to seeing such typically middle class similarity as something negative (identity itself has long ago been done away within critical discourse, equated among other things with the bourgeois ideology and the instrumental rationality we encountered at the outset), the paragraph portrays increasing homogeneity as favorable. Similitude makes human contact less threatening than it would otherwise be in a society that is an expression of the service sector’s economic dominance. In a rhetorical gesture common to Houellebecq, the narrator moves from gnomic present-tense generality to specify, differentiate, and give substance to his reflections on the state of man. Unexpectedly, an element intrudes that imbues the earlier, occasionally banal construct with emotional specificity and sensitizes the reader to the narrator’s personality in the abstractions (in the quotation that follows this abstraction is evident in the movement from the “cadres supérieurs” to the “cadre général”) being expounded. Here it is the poetic exclamation “alas,” “hélas”: Thus one person will like tennis, another will be mad on horse riding, a third will profess to playing golf. Certain higher management types are crazy about

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filleted herrings; others detest them. So many varied destinies, so many potential ways of doing things. Though the general framework of ‘first customer contact’ is clearly circumscribed there nevertheless remains, alas, a margin of uncertainty. (19) (Ainsi l’un aimera le tennis, l’autre sera friand d’équitation, un troisième s’avérera pratiquer le golf. Certains cadres supérieurs raffolent des filets de hareng; d’autres les détestent. Autant de destins, autant de parcours possibles. Si le cadre général d’un « premier contact clientèle » est donc nettement circonscrit, il demeure donc toujours, hélas, une marge d’incertitude. [21])

For this narrator, confrontations with strangers are not as anxiety-ridden as one might suppose, precisely because a degree of pre-calculation is possible. In a capitalist world it is disadvantageous to be taken by surprise, and the ability to catalogue the person across from us at a glance steels us against the unforeseen. In my Introduction, I surmised that victimization is linked to a person’s harmful experience at the hands of an oppressive or destructive agency that intrudes unexpectedly. In such instances, the random nature of the encounter adds to the perception of malevolence: a person sees himself as a passive victim, having fallen prey to a socio-economic field—with its attendant institutional culture—that exceeds individual control. An increase in predictability could therefore be beneficial for all. Whatever’s narrator indicates that we are not inadvertently moving toward greater similarity. Instead, Western society openly pursues similitude to diminish the risk of the unpredictable and lower the chances of becoming victims. However, the narrator reveals that we are not willing to wholeheartedly accept this drive toward increasing similarity (diminished risk within a predictable society means diminished returns on all fronts—economic, sexual, and social). We instead rely on indifferent but conspicuous difference to act as a guarantor of individualism, since our society stigmatizes sameness as a menace to this core principle. Thus the managers in Whatever employ what are essentially matters of fashion or taste, such as horseback riding, golfing, and eating preferences, to distinguish themselves from others. They brand themselves through negligible but visible horizontal differences. Even flaws can be transformed into markers of distinction; shortcomings represent an authenticity of failure that delimits one person from the next.11 Differences create a “margin of uncertainty” (“une marge d’incertitude”), which decreases the beneficial aspect of homogenization I outlined earlier. The senior management is simply quicker, or maybe just more forthright, to realize the advantages of an ostentatiously professed individuality within a society that is not rigidly stratified. Everyone implicitly understands that only a ‘soft,’ superficial difference is at issue, but there is a need for such surface differentiation nonetheless. Together with a wide-ranging similarity, we need small differences; both help us typecast in order to create society’s skeleton. The narrator’s ironic tone acknowledges as much.

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If man in the West is per se a victim—and the text, with the narrator’s eventual acknowledgment of an absolute unhomeliness in the world implies that his suffering is of this larger order12—this kind of horizontal differentiation establishes provisional bonds between such victims. It also may create distance from others, to distinguish from those with lesser refinement without explicitly resorting to more vertical differences such as class. We could picture Houellebecq’s manager disdainfully dismissing another manager: “He has no clue what a good filleted herring is.” Houellebecq’s achievement is his ability to capture succinctly the dynamic that underlies a Western nation like France (ordered around a blend of work, leisure, and consumption), which is dependent on the drive toward superficial individualization, while it simultaneously strives to keep greater differences of class, race, wealth, and gender at bay. To some degree, Occidental society opts for difference of an innocuous form, to avoid the open strife that the inequalities of ‘hard’ differences engender. This is similar to what I described, beginning with Freud, as the society of sons after the death of the father: the formerly victimized sons require a modicum of similarity (guaranteed through the institutionalization of certain binding norms) so that their newly instituted society can function. Houellebecq’s textual world is also decidedly post-patriarchal; his most clearly defined protagonists in Elementary Particles are two brothers, Bruno and Michel, who have no father worth mentioning. Houellebecq’s novel considers what occurs when the “recognition of mutual obligations ” and “introduction of definite institutions” that I discussed in the Introduction come into conflict with a society that no longer places a premium on the fettering of desire (23: 82, emphasis in original). In this world, we are faced with the necessity of distinction through indistinction, indifference with difference, limited visibility despite invisibility (chapters 1 and 2). In Houellebecq’s novels this situation is presented as one we somehow already know. In Whatever, the narrator moves from the déjà vu to the déjà dit and back again, inflected momentarily, as I hinted, by a highly personal, cogent, and only occasionally unhinged tone.13 In the depiction of this paradoxical movement toward individualization within a society that is invested in being similar, Houellebecq seems to have accurately measured the pulse of our “stupid modernity” with all its victimizing aspects (Crowley 18)—even in the very moment he produces literature that perpetuates the stupidity of the modernity he describes. In his novels, the desire for individualism produces a sense of overwhelming malaise, which further augments the need for an ultimately useless differentiation. In a review of Houellebecq’s novels, Mark Lilla argues that the development toward a centrist French Republic based on a liberal consensus went hand in hand with the millennial, dystopian view of “an atomized world of disconnected individuals, spinning in space without attachments to history, the nation, family, or friends.”14 The feeling of

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anomie despite an unprecedented period of peace and economic stability is of course not limited to France: it is no less the case for other Western nations after 1989.15 The loss of clear enemies, the increase of supranational ties, the lack of an ideological alternative to socio-democratic capitalism, and the effects of globalization combine in this nervous vision of the present and future.16 May 1968—with its ardent expressions of social solidarity—also meant the triumph of democratic individualism (Lipovetsky “May”), and this sobering realization has taken some time to surface. The socio-political tendencies I allude to here engender and exacerbate the ill-defined apprehensions and the depressive lucidity (“lucidité des dépressifs ”) characterizing Houellebecq’s protagonists.17 “Whatever,” Frank Wynne’s exceptionally free translation of Extension du domaine de la lutte, encapsulates this attitude, one we have come across previously. However, as the French title emphasizes— more accurately rendered with the English Extension of the Domain of the Struggle—not the indifference of contemporary existence, but its aggressive and volatile nature is the problem for the bathetic anti-hero. Houellebecq shows how a “whatever” attitude contributes to an “enough already” attitude: although the protagonists evince indifference toward their colleagues, family members, and acquaintances, interactions with these indifferent others fray their nerves nonetheless. As such, the narrator can comment on the various acquaintances and former friends with whom he has sporadic contact: “Basically we’d never really clicked. In any event people rarely see each other again these days, even in cases where the relationship begins in an atmosphere of enthusiasm” (40, emphasis in original) (“Au fond, nous n’avions pas vraiment sympathisé. De toute manière on se revoit peu, de nos jours, même dans le cas où la relation démarre dans une ambiance enthousiaste” [42, emphasis in original]). Of course, those familiar with the polarizing Houellebecq will insist, it is not the logic linking the free market, individualism, and the disaggregation of the social sphere that is shocking; it is the link to a victimizing sexuality that divides readers into staunch defenders or stalwart detractors (Cruickshank 108–09). In a typical paragraph linking sexuality to the unfettered marketplace that has had many critics profess skepticism toward Houellebecq’s project (see van Renterghem 10), the narrator of Whatever clarifies his progressively articulated world-view. At the end of the second and longest section of the novel, the narrator confirms what he had ironically presented earlier in the form of an adolescent philosophical discourse between a poodle and a dachshund (83–95). “It’s a fact,” he muses, [...] that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute

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pauperization. [...] It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’. (99, emphasis in original) ([...] dans nos sociétés, le sexe représente bel et bien un second système de différenciation, tout à fait indépendant de l’argent; et il se comporte comme un système de différenciation au moins aussi impitoyable. Les effets de ces deux systèmes sont d’ailleurs strictement équivalents. Tout comme le libéralisme économique sans frein, et pour des raisons analogues, le libéralisme sexuel produit des phénomènes de paupérisation absolue. [...] C’est ce qu’on appelle la « loi du marché ». [100, emphasis in original])

He goes on to concretize his views, into which he has integrated the language of economic liberalism with its Darwinian assumptions about “the survival of the fittest” without Darwin’s concomitant “sympathy” (Introduction). The melancholic impoverishment we encountered in chapter 5—and could characterize as an aesthetic transcension of psychological victimhood—is replaced with a corporeal impoverishment of desire. The title-giving phrase occurs at this late juncture of the short novel, clarifying that the sexual domain is at issue. The narrator employs clever parallelisms to build up to the climax, only to then deflate them with a humorous understatement at the end: In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. [...] Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable. (99) (En système économique parfaitement libéral, certains accumulent des fortunes considérables ; d’autres croupissent dans le chômage et la misère. En système sexuel parfaitement libéral, certains ont une vie érotique variée et excitante ; d’autres sont réduits à la masturbation et la solitude. Le libéralisme économique, c’est l’extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société. De même, le libéralisme sexuel, c’est l’extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société. [...] Les entreprises se disputent certains jeunes diplômés ; les femmes se disputent certains jeunes hommes ; les hommes se disputent certaines jeunes femmes ; le trouble et l’agitation sont considérables. [100–01])

We should beware reading this string of parallelisms as a platitudinous syllogism. He is not saying: because money matters for superficial differentiation (status symbols, a taste for herrings) and superficial differentiation matters for sexual attraction, money matters for sex. The role of superficial differentiation among the “cadres supérieurs,” the higher management, has

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no relation to sex.18 The frustrating thing, for the narrator, is precisely this independence of the two systems from one another—they are discrete realms functioning according to strictly congruent but non-intersecting economic principles (Abecassis 810–16). While businesses and single men and women compete in both the economic and sexual sphere, success in one is irrelevant to success in the other. People, in a society that functions according to this schema, may be smart and rich, as well as sexual failures. Few have a comparative advantage in both spheres—most do not. This is what is so frightening to everyone and instills a sense of emotional pauperization amidst material wealth and career success. Although a “complex, multiform” rule exists and is common knowledge, it carries with it an arbitrariness for which there is no compensation. It is worth noting the French singular “rule,” which implies that there is one all-encompassing rule that permits no conceptual Archimedean point outside the system: “La règle est complexe, multiforme” (12, emphasis mine). The fact that Houellebecqian men, like Whatever’s protagonist, can see through the rule’s mechanics is insufficient for a sense of well-being or possible commonality. “The problem is,” as the narrator apodictically avers at the outset, directly addressing and including the reader as one of his kind, “it’s just not enough to live according to the rules. [...] you haven’t any friends” (“La difficulté, c’est qu’il ne suffit pas exactement de vivre selon la règle. [...] vous n’avez pas d’amis”). Insight has man sink into a state of “total isolation” (“absolue solitude”) and “all-consuming emptiness” (“l’universelle vacuité”) that combine in a “state of real suffering” (10–11) (“un état de réele souffrance” [12]). Life in homologous but unrelated systems engenders the sense of being completely solitary within the mass, empty within plenitude. It is the lacking ability to pre-calculate and the impossibility of extrapolating from one sphere of life to another that leads to such an encompassing and incapacitating sense of victimization. There is no need for a backdrop of constant threat, an atmosphere pregnant with catastrophe, or a milieu of imminent explosions. An environment of general uncertainty and the concomitant understanding of its “rule” suffice to feed a perception of victimhood.

II Now we could, with the French historian Gilles Lipovetsky, argue for the benign aspects of superficial differentiation within repetition, which are simply not apparent to the psychically labile protagonists of Houellebecq’s textual world (Abecassis 807). As I indicated in the first quotation in this chapter, differentiation proceeds according to what we could call ‘soft’ differences rather than ‘harder’ ones such as race, class, or gender. In the case of the former, we are dealing with matters of personal taste, changing fads, local or regional trends—with everything that could be subsumed under the rubric of fashion. Precisely because so little is at stake, these shorthand

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indicators are effective. They subtly mark an individual without necessarily having the stigma of racism or discrimination attached to them, and they are seldom an affront to political sensitivities. Lipovetsky goes further in arguing for their benign nature. In The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (L’empire de l’éphémère : la mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes), fashion’s ephemerality becomes the paramount force consolidating Western-style democracies. He departs from customary views, which see fashion as either a superfluous aesthetic embellishment that style mandarins impose on the duped masses or as an expression of class rivalries and competition for prestige (3–12). Instead, Lipovetsky espies fashion’s truth in its ability to expand the participatory scope of democracies, deflect the rise of extremist ideologies, and augment social cohesion. Surprisingly fashion strengthens both democratic institutions as well as personal autonomy. “[T]he more seduction is used as a tool,” he writes, “the more people face up to the reality; the more triumphant the element of playfulness becomes, the better the economic ethos is rehabilitated; the more progress the ephemeral makes, the more stable, profoundly unified, and reconciled with their pluralist principles democracies become” (7) (“[P]lus la séduction se déploie, plus les consciences se convertissent au réel ; plus le ludique l’emporte, plus l’ethos économique est réhabilité ; plus l’éphémère gagne, plus les démocraties sont stables, peu déchirées en profondeur, réconciliées avec leurs principes pluralistes” [17]). In this account, fashion-driven consumerism is no longer the bane accompanying democracy, as intellectuals of all political persuasions have stigmatized it. No longer does fashion lull people into apolitical torpor and disinterested apathy or seduce them with politics either as spectacle or as simulacrum. Tracing the rise of fashion from the mid-fourteenth century up to the present, the historian reveals how the conditions for changing trends become inverted: the aristocratic monopoly on taste ultimately cedes to impulses coming from the street. A modern cult of originality and personality that eschews essentialism deflects the drive toward homogenization implicit in ready-to-wear and mass fabrication: I am what I wear and that is something different from everyone else; my depth can be ascertained from my surface. Indirectly, Lipovetsky ascribes to fashion the potential to protect people against a sense of victimization: fashion protects contemporary individuals from the complete bureaucratization and administration of everyday life and prepares them for the global changes currently underway. The expansion of the market, which functions according to the assumption that more choice is always better than less, guarantees that we can fully come into our own as beings of free will as we make choices. The “consummate stage of fashion,” Lipovetsky maintains, has “forced individuals to inform themselves, to embrace novelty, to assert subjective preferences” (“le terminal de la mode [...] a contraint l’individu à s’informer, à accueillir les nouveautés, à affirmer des préférences subjectives”). In the process, the individual has

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become a porous entity, a “permanent decision-making center, an open and mobile subject viewed through the kaleidoscope of merchandise” (148) (“un centre décisionnel permanent, un sujet ouvert et mobile au travers du kaléidoscope de la marchandise” [207]). Charging scholars with a willful blindness to the positive implications of a society dependent on consumption, the historian argues that only the kinetic, flexible person, the indeterminate subject, can quickly respond to the ever-shifting demands of a social modernity dependent on rapid global transformation.19 Lipovetsky admits that there are drawbacks to fashion’s ascendancy, such as the particularization of interests, the waning bonds of solidarity among large groups, and the selfishness of narcissism. Nonetheless, his defense of capitalism’s merciless evolution remains resolutely unapologetic.20 In The Empire of Fashion, we indeed find an underlying logical syllogism that encapsulates this enterprise: capitalism furthers fashion; fashion shores up the modern democratic value of individual autonomy; hence capitalism supports democracy based on such values as individualism.21 What are the benefits, other than a refreshingly new perspective, of looking at superficial differences from Lipovetsky’s vantage point? Can his optimistic schema dovetail with Houellebecq’s depressive lucidity on victimhood? Houellebecq is certainly sensitive to the interpenetration of fashion and individualism. In his essays for newspapers and journals, which evince lines of continuity with his novels and further complicate the separation of Michel, the author, and Michel, the character, he develops some of the arguments I have just summarized. In these texts, however, Houellebecq eschews Lipovetsky’s optimism and reveals himself to be an even more refined analyst of current social reality than a pungently astute writer of psychosexual dysfunction. He, too, does not shy away from reevaluating keywords such as “freedom,” “responsibility,” “free choice,” or “transparency” when discussing the repercussions of superficial differentiation. His willingness to distill the twentieth century’s response to such differences into a large meta-narrative of decline can be quite bracing, for all its admitted querulousness and tendency toward generalizations. In “Approaches to Disarray” (“Approches du désarroi”) from 1997, for instance, architecture, social structure, and individual choice constitute one another in complex and disconcerting ways. Houellebecq ties contemporary architecture’s sudden proclivity for metal, glass, plastics, as well as transparent or translucent surfaces to the metaphorical erection of “shelves of the social supermarket” (“les rayonnages de l’hypermarché social” [63]).22 Not only do clear materials serve the unhindered sale of goods, but they also create neutral, permeable spaces. In these spaces, information and advertisements, the indispensable henchmen of fashion, spread without block or stoppage. The transparency is, however, at odds with the actual state of affairs. For the employees and managers whom the flow of infotainment and advertising traverses, the production processes have become

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opaque and inscrutable. In the way in which a sense of place—atmospheric, embodied, characteristic—has been lost to the pulsation of the transitory, the people who work in these spaces have been subjected to a similar process of de-individualization (63–65). In a section that reads like a blend of Siegfried Kracauer’s analyses in The Mass Ornament (Das Ornament der Masse), in which the brilliant early twentieth-century theorist relates surface, employees, and mass distraction, and Lipovetsky’s porous subject, Houellebecq charges that modern employees are transformed in an analogous manner: Modern employees—mobile, open to transformation, and available—undergo an analogous process of de-individualization. The techniques to learn change popularized by New Age workshops have as their goal the creation of individuals endlessly changeable, rid of any intellectual or emotional rigidity. Liberated from the constraints that feelings of belonging, loyalty or rigid codes of behavior constitute, the modern individual is thus ready to take his place in a system of generalized transactions, in which it has become possible to attribute to him in an unequivocal and unambiguous manner an exchange value. (65, emphasis in original) (Mobiles, ouverts à la transformation, disponibles, les employés modernes subissent un processus de dépersonnalisation analogue. Les techniques d’apprentissage du changement popularisées par les ateliers New Age se donnent pour objectif de créer des individus indéfiniment mutables, débarrassés de toute rigidité intellectuelle ou émotionnelle. Libéré des entraves qui constituaient les appartenances, les fidélités, les codes de comportement rigides, l’individu moderne est ainsi prêt à prendre place dans un système de transactions généralisées au sein duquel il est devenu possible de lui attribuer, de manière univoque et non ambiguë, une valeur d’échange. [65, emphasis in original])

Paradoxically, those characteristics that we have come to consider an augmentation of personal freedom and liberation from bourgeois strictures actually result in a diminution of individuality, an increase in exchangeability, and an intensified pressure toward sameness. Concomitantly, the possibility of commonality is diminished.23 Houellebecq’s trouble—more accurately, that of his characters, who are first and foremost typical “modern employees”—lies in seeing the ephemeral nature of fashion as a renewed tyranny over the individual rather than as an empowering phenomenon. Because an exchange value can be assigned to the modern person, fashion becomes an indicator of the absence of free choice in Houellebecq’s novels. The greater the degree of freedom allowed the individual, the less he or she makes use of it: this fact gives an entirely new meaning to the cliché “fashion victim.” Rarely has a novel that is explicitly dedicated to brevity spent so many words on the fashionable or dowdy looks of people

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as Whatever (14). The narrator’s obsession with those small markers of social distinction and his simultaneous cynical appraisal of his own looks as a distinguishing criterion are present from the first page onward, from the employees’ discussion of a miniskirt to the narrator’s self-presentation as computer geek in a “Weekend in the Hebrides”-pullover (4–5, 53).24 In the manner in which the glass walls of the Parisian business district La Défense signify certain principles about global capitalism, so too does the chunky sweater send out signals. If the transparent constructions reveal capitalism’s investment in furthering a “consumer fluidity based on an ethic of responsibility, of transparency and of free choice” (“une fluidité consumériste basée sur une éthique de la responsabilité, de la transparence et du libre choix” [63]), as Houellebecq writes in “Approaches to Disarray,” the sweater displays the je m’en fiche attitude of the wearer toward social conventions (not caring about fashion by wearing a chunky sweater is also a fashion statement). The problem with fashion, for the narrator and others, does not lie in its hindering a person’s mobility on the social ladder. The problem is the very expansion of the horizontal room it makes available for self-expression and self-definition. In the end, overwhelmed by a plethora of choices, a person repeats prevalent models—to some extent at least. Hence the narrator’s fascination with types in Whatever: the bespectacled company fossil, the dynamic and disheveled manager, the mustached striver, the obese sycophant, the geeky computer expert. The fashionable individual might add a dosage of ‘personality’ to the palette of types. From the shelves of the social supermarket, products A and B are taken; a tad of obscure designer label C or a bit of vintage product D is added from the wardrobe to guarantee singularity. Our fashion-inflected mentality may accommodate elements of a recyclable past; however, it does not look into the future. Openness toward the future would be at odds with the present-tense nature of capitalist consumption, embedded in the “pseudo-cyclical time” (“le temps pseudocyclique” [118–21]) typifying the generalized spectacle.25 We are dealing, once again, with the orientation toward the present that characterizes the victim’s perspective. It is here that we can discern a reason for Houellebecq’s peculiar use of temporality in Whatever. His victimized protagonist lives doggedly in the present despite his ensnarement in a teleological history writ large. The first-person narrator has no past, apart from a failed relationship with a woman named Valérie; he has no conception of a possible alternative future aside from vague statements about the imminent destruction of mankind. As the protagonist sinks more and more into a febrile mental state (when, e.g., he begins to dream of sacrificial murders) and then depression (he has himself committed to an institution), he undertakes one last symbolic journey in the concluding section. His departure for Saint-Cirgues-en-Montagne is meant to be temporal as well. “The very nature of this journey is undergoing a change,” he explains, “in my mind it

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becomes something decisive, almost heroic” (153–54) (“La caractère même de ce voyage commence à se modifier: il acquiert dans mon esprit quelque chose de décisif, presque d’héroïque” [155]). Such an orientation toward the future, however, cannot be maintained within the time frame of the consumerist society in which he lives. Since its smooth functioning relies on the absorption of everything except the immediate future into the present, the novel ends with the disintegration of the blissful vision of a new departure: “And of a sudden all this evaporates. [...] For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I’ve long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That’s done with” (154–55) (“Et soudain tout disparaît. [...] Depuis des années je marche aux côtés d’un fantôme qui me ressemble, et qui vit dans un paradis théorique, en relation étroite avec le monde. J’ai longtemps cru qu’il m’appartenait de le rejoindre. C’est fini” [155–56]). The self-awareness of victimhood creates a ‘hard,’ immanent difference, when existence no longer holds the promise of redemption, reconciliation, or even happiness. In the tormented individual, the knowledge of an inescapable victimization in the present and the foreclosure of the future produce an unbridgeable difference marked by a bifurcation that is experienced as imprisonment: “[...] from now on I am imprisoned within myself ” (155) (“[...] je suis désormais prisonnier en moi-même” [156]). This doubled view—a sense of being a part of mundane reality and yet standing completely alongside it—is noticeable in the protagonist’s reaction to the architecture of Rouen and the behavior of its inhabitants. The world-as-supermarket logic that we witnessed in “Approaches to Disarray” is evident in this Whatever episode. The beautiful medieval town has been ruined, as the narrator notices on the occasion of a business trip. The old market square where Joan of Arc was burned has been converted into a strange mélange of concrete and green space, a hybrid recreational area that leaves one in doubt as to its purpose—is it a church? a park? a ramp for skateboarders or handicapped parking spaces? Displaying his sociological bent, the narrator turns sleuth. Observing the perambulating pedestrians, his conviction about the interpenetration of social struggle, differentiation, and consumerism solidify. People band together in little groups, where each group differs only slightly from the next. The description recalls the narrator’s ratiocinations on similitude among white-collar workers: No one group is exactly the same as another, it appears to me. Obviously they resemble each other, they resemble each other enormously, but this resemblance could not be called being the same. It’s as if they’d elected to embody the antagonism which necessarily goes with any kind of individuation by adopting slightly different behaviour patterns, ways of moving around, formulas for regrouping. (68)

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(Pas un groupe m’apparaît exactement semblable à l’autre. Évidemment ils se ressemblent, ils se ressemblent énormément, mais cette ressemblance ne saurait s’appeler identité. Comme s’ils avaient choisi de concrétiser l’antagonisme qui accompagne nécessairement toute espèce d’individuation en adoptant des tenues, des modes de déplacement, des formules de regroupement légèrement différentes. [69])

An amiability and contentedness prevails, despite the potential for conflict that disaffected teenagers display—some wear T-shirts with slogans like “Kill them all ” and “Fuck and destroy ” (rendered in English italics in the French original). Secure in their position as consumers engaged in the “consolidation of their being” (“au raffermissement de leur être”), the inhabitants of the Norman city conform to the behavioral pattern Lipovetsky proposes. They mark their difference from one another through their consumer choices. The sense of common purpose within capitalist consumption defuses any aggressiveness. In the temporal here-and-now, the narrator again recognizes his difference from the crowd of pedestrians. For him, the harmony attests to a kind of false consciousness of safety and certitude. The English language T-shirts and anomic public space work together: a degree of disaffection is palpable, but the cohesive force of consumer individualism overrides this disaffection. The disaggregation of the open forum, part religious center, part recreational park, part marketplace, mirrors the guises of today’s protean individualism. The Houellebecqian, anti-heroic victim stands apart from the crowd, defining his case as one of an irreducible difference: “I observe, lastly, that I feel different from them, without however being able to define the nature of this difference” (69) (“J’observe enfin que je me sens différent d’eux, sans pour autant pouvoir préciser la nature de cette différence” [70]). He remains true to an anterior conception of individualism and subjectivity that is as outmoded as the fashion trends he recognizes, but in which he does not participate (and, if so, only by negation).

III The questions animating the protagonist’s architectural ruminations in Whatever, as the paradigmatic market square indicates, are related to Houellebecq’s concern with contemporary society’s form of life—what in German we call “Lebensform”—and with human life qua political life. To some degree, the “perfectly transparent and communicating society” (44) (“parfaitement transparente et communicante” [46]) a computer theoretician envisions in conversation with the narrator at the end of Part I is already actualized in the milling cliques of people in Rouen’s public square, operating according to the “complex, multiform rule” that the narrator discerns. By calling into question the viability of this socio-political

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democratic form of life, however, Houellebecq seems to ask us to reflect on the quality of human life that such a rule implies, even if this life already has passed over into the extended domain of the struggle (11–12). Consumer individualism only appears to placate the masses and dampen latent rivalries by feigning the participation of all; an insidious and inescapable sacrificial logic is still operative. This is very much in evidence in the second and third parts of Whatever, with mention of Joan of Arc’s public burning in the square itself (68), Michel’s reflections on the “sacrificed generation” of thirty-somethings incapable of love (“une génération sacrifiée [114]), and his effort to convince his colleague Tisserand to “sacrifice” an amorous couple in order to obtain mastery over women (117).26 In so decisively calling attention to the sacrificeable nature of human life in our empire of the ephemeral, where the economic has largely melded with the political, Houllebecq’s thoughts link up with those of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Both share an interest in and are influenced by the Situationist movement (ca. 1957–72) and its critique of Western capitalism, in particular Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle, 1967).27 More importantly, both men are concerned with the bases of community today and its ‘ungrounding.’ In their view, human sociability can only be conceived (or reconceived) if one takes into account the ephemerality and porosity I analyzed earlier, and both Agamben and Houellebecq point out the grounds on which the ungrounding of community takes place.28 Furthermore, the two men set high stakes on Opfer: while Agamben in Homo sacer tries to redefine what it means to be a victim of an act that appears to operate according to sacrificial logic, Houellebecq forces us to imagine a transcension of Opfer that still grounds itself within the parameters of sacrifice. Where Agamben would argue that the lack of identity must be the core of any coming community, Houellebecq attempts to reinstate the lacking grounds of community in a last-ditch effort to “save” Western man. In order to make clear their commonalities as well as their differences, let me briefly delineate some of the concerns in Agamben’s best-known writing.29 His reflections on the homo sacer (literally “sacred man”) in his multivolume work—I will focus on the first volume bearing the same title—revolve around a person who is set “outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of the divine law” (82) (“posta al di fuori della giurisdizione umana senza trapassare in quella divina” [91]). In a definition Agamben distills largely from Pompeius Festus’s treatise On the Significance of Words (71–74), the homo sacer can be killed without incurring penalty or punishment; however, his killing also cannot be a sacrifice to a deity. Homo sacer is thus caught in a “zone of indistinction” (21, emphasis in original)—or, more precisely, a “zone of indifference” (“zona d’indifferenza” [25, emphasis in original])—belonging neither fully to life nor to death. What is at issue in this threshold position is that the

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homo sacer is reduced to bare life—a mute, undifferentiated, simultaneously pre- and post-human state—over which others dispose. For Agamben, this figure from ancient Roman law becomes the cipher through which the paradoxical logic of modern sovereignty and human life can be explained.30 Political authority, operating in a state of exception, depends upon the exclusion of bare life from its domain; however, by virtue of its exclusion, this bare life is inadvertently included, becoming the ungrounded ground on which politics rests.31 Modern political thought has been taken to assume that man becomes truly human through his ability to live more than just bare life; since Aristotle, the good and just life within the polis has been distinguished from naked life (1–10, 109). However, in the dimension of politics to which Agamben draws attention, he takes leave of this view. Man’s political capacities do not exist as a sort of supplement to a prior, properly human life.32 For Agamben, the politicization of bare life itself is the metaphysical task par excellence at the heart of Western culture.33 Politics, as Andrew Norris has written, must repeatedly define itself through the negation of this bare life—“a negation that can always take the form of death” (5). In the figure of the homo sacer, however, this other, metaphysical dimension insists with regularity, forcing us to confront what it means when properly human life is reduced to such bare, naked life (“la nuda vita”). Agamben’s dense theory is, to my mind, most comprehensible when he moves into the twentieth century, relating the homo sacer and political power not to archaic Roman texts, but to Kafka’s fragmentary novel, The Trial (Der Proceß, 1925). Houellebecq, describing his protagonist’s sacrificial and self-sacrificial efforts, seems to have in mind something like the state of abandonment to the law that Agamben perceives in Kafka. In activating a similar abandonment in relation to the “rule”—and to its extended “domain of the struggle”—Houellebecq creates an analogue to the exposure Agamben’s “naked life” entails. Concerning the parable “Before the Law” (“Vor dem Gesetz”) contained within The Trial and the book more generally, Agamben argues that the “pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force” occurs “at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything—which is to say, as pure ban” (49–50) (“la forma pura della legge, in cui essa si afferma con piú forza proprio nel punto in cui non prescrive piú nulla, cioè come pure bando” [57]). This ban is nothing other than being abandoned by the law, “exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (28) (“esposto e rischiato nella soglia in cui vita e diritto, esterno e interno si confondono” [34]). There is, moreover, no outside to the law, which could give meaning to this state of abandonment.34 The hapless country bumpkin, who cannot enter the open door that would be his particular entry into the law, is trapped in the exclusively inclusive or inclusively exclusive relation Agamben outlines for the homo

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sacer: “The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him” (50) (“La porta aperta, che è destinata soltanto a lui, lo include escludendolo e lo esclude includendolo” [58]). Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben explains this zone in which the country fellow finds himself as one in which law “is in force but does not signify” (51, emphasis in original) (“che vige, ma non significa” [59, emphasis in original]).35 In one of the hyperbolic passages to which we will return in chapter 7 on Elfriede Jelinek, Agamben makes clear that “law” for him is an inclusive term, making no distinction between religious law or jurisprudence. In this regard, there are definitive connections to be drawn to the concept of “tradition” I discussed in preceding chapters. With the term “law” (“legge”), Agamben writes: “We mean [...] the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or the profane nomos” (51) (“intendendo con questo termine l’intero testo della tradizione nel suo aspetto regolativo, che si tratti della Torah ebraica o della Shariah islamica, del dogma cristiano o del nómos profano” [59]). What is at issue in my discussion is the “form of life” that abandonment entails. For Agamben, along avenues different from Sloterdijk’s, the Lebensform that emerges in modernity has to correspond to the “form of law” (49) (“forma di legge” [57]) that does not signify. Any such life, where its way or form becomes coincident with the regulation of that very life, takes on an ominous prospect. It is assimilated to “life in the state of exception, in which the most innocent gesture or the smallest forgetfulness can have most extreme consequence” (52) (“alla vita nello stato di eccezione, in cui il gesto piú innocente o la piú piccola dimenticanza possono avere le conseguenze piú estreme” [61]). This is, in sum, what Kafka portrays with his innocent-guilty victim Josef K, whose body comes to coincide with the trials to which he is subjected (53). Law that ceases to have any content coincides with life, that is, no distinction is possible between the law that would abandon an individual to an all-pervasive power and a life that has ceased to know where the power comes from but lives according to it nonetheless. Before law in this pure, inhuman form, bare life is allowed merely to “subsist” (55) (“lascia sussistere di fronte a sé la nuda vita” [64])—it ekes out a survival that always moves on a threshold to death.36 When Houellebecq, then, thematizes the “multiform, complex rule,” which organizes life without being in any way, shape or form articulated positively, he suggests that his peripatetic protagonist in Whatever searches in vain for a position outside this multiform rule that would make another form of life possible. The way of life has become coincident with the law, or, more accurately, with the position of the always innocent and guilty victim before the law. The protagonist at the beginning of the novel does suggest that one must surpass the “domain of the rule” (“le domaine de la règle”) in favor of the “domain of the struggle” (11) (“le domaine de la

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lutte” [14]), but the conclusion of the novel shows us that there is no outside to the rule, and that domain of the rule is that of the struggle. Agamben gives concrete examples of such bare life before the law: the comatose patient in a state of irremediable brain damage, the inmate on death row subjected to medical experiments, and—most significantly—concentration camp inmates, the Versuchsperson (human guinea pig) and the utterly apathetic Muselmann (154–59, 160–65, 184–87). Houellebecq, by contrast, imagines all the individuals of Western consumer democracies, both the skeptical protagonist and his ugly colleague Tisserand, on the way toward such bare life. It is also an extravagant claim, to be sure, albeit not quite as extreme as Agamben’s assertions about the paradigmatic status of the ultimate victim in Homo sacer. This exaggerated gesture is, however, why Houellebecq’s book touched a cord that propelled it to cult status (it also helps explain why Agamben’s figure from ancient Roman law has “assumed such purchase on recent political and philosophical thought,” as Peter Fitzpatrick critically notes).37 With his characters in their depressively lucid state, hyperconscious of the invisible law that places them simultaneously inside the order and excludes them from it, Houellebecq shows how sacred, non-sacrificeable life is imaginable along other avenues, avenues closer to most of our daily experiences. Agamben’s concern is with the non-substitutability of the homo sacer, and it is in this regard that I will return here briefly to some of the arguments I have made in my initial discussion of Opfer.38 In ritualized communication with the gods the homo sacer cannot be a substitute, and this ensures his place outside the divine order. He also does not belong to the profane. He is unable to live in the world of object relations, and he cannot become the human “exchange value” Houellebecq sees as the telos of Western capitalism.39 But his life is not purely immanent either, since he becomes sacred only through his relationship to a beyond. Despite Agamben’s asseverations of the homo sacer’s immanence, where he tries to divorce the sacred from its religious context (114–15), I would like to argue with Peter Fitzpatrick that bare life gestures toward a transcendent realm: Homo sacer is still of the profane. He fugitively occupies an all-too-solid world in which he can be killed without sacrifice. Yet homo sacer is also of the transcendent beyond. He has already been sacrificed. These two dimensions can only combine in homo sacer because of the confident reference beyond, because of a sacrifice that has brought the beyond into the measure and contingency of a profane world. The life of this sacred man is “bare,” then, only because it has been consigned to an empyrean, leaving nothing for it in the profane world but to be killed. (52–53)40

In counter-intuitively asserting the impossible relationship of the homo sacer to the divine as well as to the profane and in stressing his

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non-substitutability, Agamben is demystifying sacrificial logic despite his express intentions and showing us why sacrificial logic cannot remain in operation (114).41 Andrew Norris briefly directs our attention to Agamben’s proximity to Girard in this regard (10). Norris’s comment explains why the homo sacer gets us into even more problematic terrain than the usual thinking on Opfer that Agamben is averse to demystifying: “Instead of an act of self- protection on the part of the community, sacrifice is the performance of the metaphysical assertion of the human: the Jew, the Gypsy, and the gay man die that the German may affirm his transcendence of his bodily, animal life” (10). The effort to transcend bare life, as the metaphysical operation of politics that seeks to negate the ground on which it is erected, offers the justification for the extinction of that bare life. This reference to a beyond, which still could endow human life and its sacrifice with meaning, occurs in Houellebecq’s novel in the repeated episodes revolving around the Catholic Church, in addition to the episodes from Whatever mentioned earlier. Religious tradition appears in episodes with a befriended priest and in the dream where the protagonist circles the spires of the Chartres Cathedral like a divine herald (137–43). While he admits to not believing in God (126), the intrusion of an empyrean realm, figured in a Catholic mold, lends meaning to the protagonist’s endeavor to conceive of sacrifice as a redemptive activity, one that would bestow significance on his victim status. As such, he can dream of murdering old women or emasculating himself and perceive this as something “magical, adventurous, libertarian” (142) (“magique, aventureux, libertaire” [142]). Houellebecq’s first novel is the initial step in envisioning the victimizing character of life lived according to a permanent state of exception, which is the trajectory Agamben outlines for the movement between politics and bare life. The state of exception is coterminous with life within the “rule” as well as life within the “domain of the struggle.” It remains beholden to a sacrificial logic that seeks a kind of immanent sublimity through violent acts of sacrifice and self-sacrifice (LaCapra, History 146–47). It is only in his later work, particularly in Elementary Particles, that Houellebecq seeks to transcend the parameters of victimhood and victimization he adumbrates in Whatever. As he reconceives the very naked life Agamben has moved to the center of our attention, he attempts to restore this “nuda vita” as a possible ground for politics—but to do so, he must negate the human remnant within bare life.

IV In Houellebecq’s novels, sexuality is subject to the same laws of fashion and consumption as all other human endeavors; we recall that the narrator of Whatever describes sex as a “second system of differentiation.” In the domain of sexuality, in fact, the conflicting historical forces that make

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victims of men reveal themselves in unadulterated form. The New Age outposts and pseudo-hippie colonies of Houellebecq’s later novels, where the counter-culture emphasizing individual sexual pleasure lives on, replicate the tenets of bourgeois capitalism and consumer individualism they sought to avoid. In the manner in which the marketplace mandates a profound indifference toward the object to be consumed, such free-love places encourage the consumption of indifferent sexual partners. Attachment to anyone beyond a short temporal span would mean limitations on one’s freedom.42 Houellebecq’s explicit and repetitive sex scenes, for which he has become notorious (charges of pornography are repeatedly broached), are intimately related not only to his critique of consumer individualism, but also to the larger argument he is making about Western victimization.43 By espousing freedom of choice in terms of relationships, the visitors of these places inadvertently affirm the individualism and indifference of a modernity by which they feel victimized and to which they seek an alternative. This inverted Hegelian development, which remains vague in Whatever, is specified in Elementary Particles,44 the award-winning novel that launched the author to the forefront of the French literary scene.45 The narrator clearly attributes the current decay of mores and the devaluation of human attachments to the efforts of psychosexual ‘liberation’ in and after 1968. He more explicitly unmasks the West of the 1960s and 1970s as a bastion of hypertrophied individualism rather than an epicenter of communal love and collective experience in the teleological account of the declining twentieth century. Discrediting the sexual revolution’s claims to having liberated love and strengthened solidarity, the narrator describes these decades as supremely narcissistic, devoted to the selfish gratification of private desires. In the desire for desire in the 1990s, he postulates a clear continuity between the present and the preceding decades, an assessment the main character Bruno echoes. The narrator lambastes the prurient popular entertainment of North American provenance infiltrating Western Europe, which spurs rampant profligacy, and attacks the aid this “libidinal, hedonistic American option” (“l’option hédoniste-libidinale d’origine nord-américaine [55]) receives from the notionally left-leaning French press (47). In its hunt for a culprit behind social disaggregation, the novel—with its narrator sounding every bit the conservative sociologist-philosopher-historian—is no more progressive than the theories I examined in earlier chapters. The anti1968 spirit evinced is hardly innovative on Houellebecq’s part and certainly not new to Europe.46 The year 1968 ushered in, for many, the end and not the beginning of revolutionary energies: rather than melding public and private to propound an anti-institutional, anti-technocratic thrust, the era helped solidify the victory of modern individualism.47 However, Elementary Particles does acknowledge that the New Age ideas of this period express an authentic desire for radical change, for a transcendence of the suffering to which human beings—reduced to a variant of bare life—are prone in a

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materialistic world (260). People’s fault lies in their self-willed blindness to the dynamics of domination and victimization that inhere in the system they themselves uphold and enforce. While the novel revolves around the miseries of the two-half brothers Bruno and Michel, it circumscribes their personal suffering with a theoretical framework, where the state of bare life is transformed into a post-human life devoid of suffering. The alternately apocalyptic tone (the embedded stories from the 1960s through the turn of the millennium) and post-apocalyptic tone (the frame story in 2079 CE) in Elementary Particles is in no small part due to the West’s failure to capitalize on the collective aspirations of 1968. The promise of solidarity in and through victimization—hints of which we saw in Freud’s communal scenario—is never fulfilled. In the sexual arena, where group sex has again become fashionable in the 1990s, the individual and his consumerist attitude triumphs over the collective. In Bruno’s experiences in the New Age camp with group sex and his visits to swingers clubs with his lover Christiane, he witnesses that the individual’s pleasure is paramount. The swingers clubs and gang-bangs may devote violent attention to every orifice, but leave the core longing for a sense of community untouched. When New Age clubs do manage to supersede such parameters, Bruno expounds at length about the Scandinavian model of a “sexual ‘social democracy’ ” that such an organization exemplifies (179) (“une ambiance sexuelle ‘social-démocrate’ ” [217]). As the narrator has occasion to remark in the frame of the story, commenting on the New Age site Lieu du Changement that enchants Bruno, its “aesthetic of goodwill” (176) (“une esthétique de la bonne volonté” [213]) in sexual matters is exceptional and bears little resemblance to intercourse as otherwise practiced. The Lieu du Changement still harkens back to idealized conceptions of physical love or seduction, with its emphasis on personal creativity, despite the fact that sex there is treated as a commodity.48 The gasps of the actor in pornographic videos, by contrast, openly stress personal enjoyment, rather than any desire to produce the collective pleasure of the primitive orgy (201–02).49 It is, also in this novel, more about imitation than anything else: pornographic models set the tone in sexual life and the desire for similarity in sexual enjoyment trumps all. What the narrator and his characters chronicle in these last decades of the twentieth century—which the novel eulogizes as a confused age, aware of its imminent demise—is the realization of a Sadean sexuality.50 It emerges as the fulfillment of the dominant culture’s liberalism.51 Indifference toward others inheres in the contemporary sexual hedonist’s attitude, which makes pleasure an asocial phenomenon. Granted: without the presence of another person, who is ‘consumed’ according to the models of pornographic enjoyment, there is no possibility of pleasure at all. Nonetheless, without indifference toward that other person there can be no assertion of one’s absolute right to choice and hence of individuality and personal freedom.

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In contrast to the somewhat tired flaying of the rebels of 1968 and their sexual mores, the twist Elementary Particles offers on the sexualized, Darwinist victim-scenario of Freud’s Totem and Taboo strikes me as highly original, and it is from this innovative integration of both that bare life is reconceptualized. Houellebecq’s novel recalibrates Freud’s account, with its tension between the emergence of a primitive communism and the force of sexual desire. To refract the primal murder scene through the lens of late twentieth-century consumer individualism, Houellebecq’s narrator interrupts the flow of the narrative with digressions into the animal kingdom. He continues the philosophizing strain present in the animal dialogues in Whatever. In one such excursus in a chapter entitled “The Omega Male” (36) (“L’animal omega” [43]), he describes the tensions among dominant alpha, rival beta, and feeble omega males. He has just detailed the protagonist Bruno’s unhappy childhood and his sexual abuse at the hands of boarding schoolmates, where younger boys are sadistically tortured and left psychologically and physically crippled. While this paragraph is set off in the English translation, it is integrated into the longer French passage detailing Bruno’s maltreatment. The explanatory force of this general observation is heightened through its combination with the description of the particular quandary facing Bruno: Combat rituals generally determine status within the group; weaker animals try to better their position by challenging those above them. A dominant position confers certain privileges: first to feed and to couple with females in the group. The weakest animal, however, can generally avoid combat by adopting such submissive postures as crouching or presenting the rump. Bruno, however, found himself in a less auspicious position. While dominance and brutality are commonplace in the animal kingdom, among higher primates, notably the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), weaker animals suffer acts of gratuitous cruelty. The tendency is at its greatest in primitive human societies and among children and adolescents in developed societies. (38) (Les positions hiérarchiques sont généralement déterminées par des rituels de combat; les animaux de rang bas tentent d’améliorer leur statut en provoquant les animaux de rang plus élevé, sachant qu’en cas de victoire ils amélioreront leur position. Un rang élevé s’accompagne de certains privilèges : se nourrir en premier, copuler avec les femelles du groupe. Cependant, l’animal le plus faible est en général en mesure d’éviter le combat par l’adoption d’une posture de soumission [accroupissement, présentation de l’anus]. Bruno se trouvait dans une situation moins favorable. La brutalité et la domination, générales dans les sociétés animales, s’accompagnent déjà chez le chimpanzé [Pan troglodytes] d’actes de cruauté gratuite accomplis à l’encontre de l’animal le plus faible. Cette tendance atteint son comble chez les sociétés humaines primitives, et dans les sociétés développées chez l’enfant et l’adolescent jeune. [45–46])

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As so often, the narrator moves from a particular episode in a character’s life to zoological observations and back to the human world. The narrator’s seemingly neutral presentation injects a tone of scientificity and inevitability into the process of victimization among animals. In fact, his assumption of a parallelism between primitive and developed society has more than a passing affinity to Freud’s views on human development (where the child is assimilated to the primitive). Presumably, we are meant to believe that such animal victimization ineluctably carries over into and is, indeed, exacerbated in human behavior. This case, which moves from ontogenesis to evolution, from human to primate and back, clearly does not evidence the Freudian dialectics between victims and victimizers I discussed in the Introduction. The victimized human here has no choice other than brutalization. No solidarity emerges between weak members of the group (there are other omega males apart from Bruno), and no collectivity issues forth from the experience of victimization (89). The human victim cannot even legitimately claim the moral high ground, since society only values prowess and the privileges it confers.52 Elementary Particles, despite its backdrop of inevitable decay and dissolution, proposes a solution to the generalized victimization it postulates. It does so in a future that the protagonists can no longer imagine—thus there is a science fiction frame, which looks back to the turn of the millennium from the late twenty-first century. In the frame’s conceit, sexual reproduction and the crisis of differentiation have finally been circumvented. This lays the groundwork for a love capable of transcending the ubiquitous sense of victimhood. Sex, we are informed, was always coupled with an unquenchable desire for a love unattainable within the Western culture of the twentieth century. The mystical union in and through love only becomes possible with the advent of cloning and after the end of sexual competition nearly a century later. A panacea is born with the fusion of biology and physics that frees the body from its subsumption under the dictate of choice. Through the groundbreaking biophysics of the novel’s other protagonist, Michel Djerzinski, mankind discovers the possibility of replicating itself. There is no need for sexual differentiation to guarantee the survival of the fittest DNA: the new humans are immortal, impervious to chromosomal mistakes. Djerzinski’s scientific breakthrough augurs in the third “metaphysical mutation” (“une mutation métaphysique”)—“radical, global transformations [...] in the values to which the majority subscribe” (4–5) (“les transformations radicales et globales de la vision du monde adoptée par le plus grand nombre” [7–8]). The first is due to Christianity’s rise, the second to the Church’s waning and its replacement with reason (4–5, 257–64). The late twentieth century’s indebtedness to a per se contradictory Enlightenment is finally left behind in this ultimate paradigm shift. Man is liberated, the narrator from 2079 tells us, free to live a utopian existence

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diametrically opposed to the execrable temporal and spatial coordinates of the supermarket world. The denizens of this new order dwell in a luminous realm, as a poem addended to the sci-fi narrator’s factual prologue makes clear. The lyrical interlude counters the prologue’s technocratic tone, but continues its trend toward a historical grand récit (4–5); it outlines the new “world order” (“règne” [9]). The immortal beings produced through genetic manipulation and replication are no longer properly human, since they lack the aggressive tendencies characterizing humankind. The new men can look back on the old order with compassion, a sentiment for which there was no place in “the lost kingdom” (“le royaume perdu”), as the subtitle of the first section calls the Europe of the twentieth century: Now that the light which surrounds our bodies is palpable, Now that we have come at last to our destination Leaving behind a world of division, The way of thinking which divided us, To bathe in a serene, fertile joy Of a new law, Today, For the first time, We can revisit the end of the old order. (no pagination, italics in original) (Maintenant que la lumière autour de nos corps est devenue palpable, Maintenant que nous sommes parvenus à destination Et que nous avons laissé derrière nous l’univers de la séparation, L’univers mental de la séparation Pour baigner dans la joie immobile et féconde D’une nouvelle loi Aujourd’hui, Pour la première fois, Nous pouvons retracer la fin de l’ancien règne. [9–10, italics in original])

The incantatory spell, which the anaphora (“nous”; “maintenant”), repetitions (“lumière”; “séparation”), internal rhymes (“autrefois”–“quelquefois”; “savons”–“devons”) and end rhymes (“musique”–“pratique”; “loi”–“fois”) weave in the two-page-long poem, mimic the quasi-mystical result of Michel’s scientific discovery. There is a kind of lyric sweetness to this poem, even as it hovers on the brink of sentimentalism. The biotechnic sexual revolution produces an emotional one. Love blossoms in the final stage of world history, which evades sacrificial logic and the human being seen as exchange value. This stage brings into being that which was only intimated earlier in the behavior of some people, mainly women: “Human beings who have worked—worked hard—all their lives with no motive other than love and devotion, who have literally given their lives for others, out of love and devotion; human beings who have no sense of having made any sacrifice [...]” (76–77, emphasis mine) (“Des êtres humains qui

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travaillaient toute leur vie, et qui travaillaient dur, uniquement par dévouement et par amour ; qui donnaient littéralement leur vie aux autres dans un esprit de dévouement et d’amour ; qui n’avaient cependant nullement l’impression de se sacrifier [...]” [91, emphasis mine]). In their sacrificial acts without consciousness of sacrifice, women are the avatars of the clones. The cloning of human beings transforms them into a new kind of bare life. They are similarly undifferentiated to Agamben’s “bare life,” but very differently evaluated. Biopolitics is brought to the forefront, the scientist placed in the position of the sovereign (see Homo 159), and the “multiform, complex rule” replaced by an ever more encompassing “new law.” Ending the sacrificial logic requires breaking the “filial chain that linked us to humanity” (263) (“le lien filial qui nous rattachait à l’humanité” [316]), the narrator, one of the clones, admits in the closing pages. Houellebecq, I would argue, is in this regard even more post-apocalyptic than Agamben, even where the Frenchman’s ethical ideas are less vague.53 If Agamben’s prognoses have relevance to Elementary Particles, it lies in the book’s realization of a state where all are homines sacri—an eventuality that Agamben foreshadows for current humanity (114–15, 124, 133). The non-substitutability of the homo sacer, however, must be replaced with a radical substitutability, which in the end has the same effect: the new regime of the metaphysical mutation leads to the coincidence of biopower and sovereign decision-making. The opening poem, with its stress on the first-person plural at the beginning of many of the French verses (“Nous vivons [...] / Nous savons [...] / Nous pouvons”), acts as a harbinger of the collective, corporeal “we,” which emerges from individual victimization in the epilogue. External and complete sameness—rather than similarity—becomes the source and guarantor of communal feeling.54 The genetic revolution represents a drastic alteration in modern notions of pleasure, if we conceive of pleasure in a radically individualistic, Sadean vein, as does Elementary Particles (260–61). The revolution in biopolitics does away with the “margin of uncertainty” that destabilized interpersonal relations. Djerzinski’s innovation reintroduces predictability as the desired goal for human behavior and development (186). Sex is reconfigured, stripped of its determining link with reproduction and “narcissistic differentiation” (133) (“différenciation narcissique” [160]), which was Bruno’s claim about sex in Brave New World (whose imprimatur on Houellebecq’s novel is unmistakable). As the body assumes pride of place in the communal fantasy framing Elementary Particles, it enables the restoration “of community, of permanence, and of the sacred” (262) (“le sens de la collectivité, de la permanence et du sacré” [314]). The new world order is a placid one, stripped of those passions that energized the old. The presentism of consumption has been eliminated in the process, replaced by another kind of presentism: no striving toward goals is discernible, no ambitions aimed at fulfillment in the future are apparent. This present-tense orientation has

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nothing to do with victims’ suffering at the hands of oppressive agencies. Indeed, there are no victims at all—they cannot come into existence under these conditions. Replication in Elementary Particles, as a hypertrophic form of repetition, is diametrically opposed to change. In the realm of light, where all share the same genetic code, stasis reigns. Some readers may fear that I have quietly passed over the more problematic aspects of Houellebecq’s text and puzzle over my generally approving portrayal of cultural restoration. After all, I have been quick to ferret out signs of cultural conservativism in others such as Peter Sloterdijk or Michael Haneke, but slow to ascribe them to Houellebecq, certainly a most divisive public figure espousing many conservative views.55 There is the jarring mention of the word “sacred” in the quotation presented earlier, particularly grating since it recurs a mere two pages after it has been applied, in derogatory quotation marks, to discredit New Age philosophies.56 I have fallen into the narrator’s objective tone, representing Elementary Particles as a conglomeration of socio-historical study, concise anecdotes, and sexually explicit episodes without satirical intent. With my vested interest in discovering a solution to the pervasive culture of victimhood within our present consumer individualism, I have downplayed the science-fiction frame’s tongue-in-cheek tone (Shulevitz 47). Continuing the mea culpa, I must add that I have neglected the somber underside of this ambiguously dystopian utopia lacking all difference.57 The novel, in my presentation so far, could be seen as an upbeat variant on or an implicit riposte to the technological and scientific resolution of Christoph Ransmayr’s Resplendent Decline, where Michel Djerzinski’s elimination of the human race takes a less macabre turn. In Elementary Particles, man is replaced by an immortal demigod, who no longer ravages the planet and fellow man. The victimvictimizer relationship, rather than being sublated through man’s annihilation as in Resplendent Decline, would just peacefully disappear with the introduction of a sexually non-competitive species of absolutely sacrificeable humans. Instead of calling into question the new species’ non-violence (which Bruno’s adventures at a nudist colony prognosticate [182–83]), I have hidden the continuities in the pre- and post-cloning sections and the insidiousness of the novel’s closure. The novel’s largest problems relate, however, to its gender issues (for which Houellebecq has been taken to task); within the embedded stories of Bruno and Michel, Elementary Particles still falls prey to a sacrificial, gendered logic.58 Life is, as I have stressed, conceived of as a “battle zone, teeming and bestial, the whole thing enclosed within a hard, fixed landscape—clearly perceptible, but inaccessible: the landscape of the moral law” (170) (“un champ clos, grouillement bestial ; tout cela était enclos dans un horizon ferme et dur—nettement perceptible, mais inaccessible : celui de la loi morale” [205]). Within the realistically depicted twentieth century, with its inaccessible yet open law, the intimations of a new order are

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to be found: in a gendered self-sacrifice that goes hand in hand with love.59 “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” reads an advertisement of the Monoprixsupermarket chain in the late 1990s (102). “THE FUTURE IS FEMININE” proclaims the influential Djerzinski-proselytizer, Hubczejak, less than a century later, as he begins to implement Djerzinski’s ideas (260). Although in the French original, we read “DEMAIN SERA FÉMININ” in both cases (123, 311), the adjectival substitution in the English relays an important message about the qualities of self-sacrifice within the newly bare life the novel propounds. Since the locus of love and a fulfilled life is to be found largely in biological women, the new, sexless species, by extension, enthusiastically accepts a state of being that is intrinsically gendered feminine. Yet the women in the novel, be it the physically generous Christiane (Bruno’s girlfriend) or the love-starved Annabelle (Michel’s companion), have to die for the men—particularly the scientist Michel—to realize the role erotic love can play within human society. The women’s capacity for self-sacrifice through sex is a beacon of communal solidarity; their behavior prefigures the commonality that any revolution in biopolitics must usher in (111). They generate shared pleasure, breaking through the indifference inherent in the individualistic consumption of sexual partners. The novel intimates that sexual pleasure, no less than collective action or feelings of commonality, depends on feminine self-sacrifice and the subordination of one’s own pleasure. This has, among other things, earned Houellebecq a reputation for being anti-feminist.60

V When Houellebecq attempts to translate his science-fiction world into a time and space nearer to his own, it becomes apparent that he cannot reground ungrounded sacrificial logic by way of a reconceptualization of homines sacri. Platform, which could be read as an extension of Elementary Particles in the psychosexual and economic trends it outlines, espouses sexual tourism as the logical outgrowth of a culture predicated on victimization and victimhood. The protagonist Michel’s encounters with magnanimous Thai prostitutes and his phenomenal sex with the sex-tour operator Valérie should be seen from this perspective. The women represent the apotheosis of feminine self-sacrifice in pleasure (244).61 Houellebecq’s later novels leave no doubt that we are not heading toward such a purportedly feminine, self-sacrificial future. Instead of moving toward an epoch of replicants, who are generous to the point of self-erasure, we are moving at an accelerated pace toward a world in which the law of the competitive advantage reigns. Platform provides an image for this future world according to capitalism’s first principle: the S&M clubs of Paris. Michel, in this incarnation a state bureaucrat in charge of cultural affairs, correlates the clubs devoted to sado-masochism to the decline of

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sexual desire. A Western propensity for rules and regulations, and its rhetoric of individual rights correlates directly to everyone’s physical and emotional impoverishment: “We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence [...]. Organised S&M with its rules could only exist among cultured, cerebral people for whom sex has lost all attraction” (244–45) (“Nous sommes devenus froids, rationnels, extrêmement conscients de notre existence individuelle et des nos droits ; nous souhaitons avant tout éviter l’aliénation et la dépendance [...]. Le SM organisé, avec des règles, ne peut concerner que des gens cultivés, cérébraux, qui ont perdu toute attirance pour le sexe” [254–55]). While people such as Valérie, the narrator’s partner, express repulsion at the sadomasochism on display, Michel is less aghast. For Valérie, the willingness to be victimized exceeds her understanding: “[W]hat I don’t understand is that victims exist. It’s beyond me that a human being could come to prefer pain to pleasure” (190) (“[...] ce qui me dépasse, c’est l’existence des victimes. Je n’arrive pas à comprendre qu’un être humain puisse en venir à préférer la souffrance au plaisir” [198–99]). In her opinion, such behavior requires a re-education in love and pleasure. For Michel, it is the logical extension of the liberalization of the public sphere.62 However, the radical lack of identification with others is the problem plaguing not only the Western humanity Michel analyzes, but the analyst as well. His indifference is, as a modality of interaction, also the kind of cruelty he attributes to others, and the novel will show how indifference engenders contempt.63 The non-homologous nature of the spheres of economics and sexuality and the absence of love as a mediating factor between the disparate domains of everyday life are short-circuited, in Michel’s head in Platform, and he attempts to fashion a coherent explanation for the problems he sees. What comes into existence is a highly questionable worldview, one that has gotten the author into trouble as readers extrapolate from the thoughts of the characters to those of the writer and as the author himself mimics his characters’ sentiments.64 This view is one in which the narrator conflates the soft differences of fashion—including the continuing sex appeal of a Benetton multiculturalism with an edge—with other differences considered less mutable, such as those of race and religion.65 As I mentioned in the context of Whatever, a feeling of victimhood, arising from superficial differentiation, can create an irremediable sense of separation from others. It creates, in effect, a hard difference. In Platform, the narrator traces this hard difference back not only to its well-spring in alterable sources, but also projects it onto those areas commonly seen as fixed. As a result, the general atmosphere of Elementary Particles, whose only resolution is the non-resolution of science fiction, becomes a specific historical nightmare in Platform. An ambience of aggression pervades the consumption-driven French Republic, as a result of tensions with have-not immigrants (social and racial factors

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come together). Danger is, moreover, present everywhere in the form of global terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, which rejects Western-style consumer individualism. What we are left with is a highly charged scenario of an altogether immanent, violent victim-victimizer dialectic, as opposed to the diffuse sense of victimhood, with its broken metaphysical dialectic, at the hands of a neo-liberal culture we encountered in Whatever.66 If in that early novel the perception of being a victim could arise from a sense of injury within unrelated, but homologous economic and sexual systems, the later novel clearly looks for distinct agencies that encourage victimizers and foster victims. In Platform, Michel, his girlfriend Valérie, and her boss withdraw to the office of a corporate behemoth. Their market-driven response to the pervasive sense of societal anomie in the West is to concoct a plan promoting sex tourism in the Third World. The montage of disparate facts on the narrative level, as we shift between locations within the space of a paragraph (from Paris to the modern city of Évry), corresponds to the fragmentation of the public sphere. However, while the narrator describes the disjunction between the corporation’s global imperatives and its local situatedness, he nonetheless suggests an interpenetration of remote areas, people, and things: Three thousand people worked there during the week, but on that Saturday there were just the three of us, apart from the security guards. Close by, on the forecourt of the Évry shopping centre, a pair of rival gangs faced each other with Stanley knives, baseball bats and containers of sulphuric acid; that evening the number of dead would stand at seven [...] but at that moment we knew nothing about it. In a state of excitement which seemed slightly unreal, we set down our manifesto, our platform for dividing up the world. (249) (Trois mille personnes travaillaient là pendant la semaine ; mais ce samedi nous n’étions que tous les trios, à l’exception de l’équipe des gardiens. Tout près de là, sur la dalle du centre commercial d’Évry, deux bandes rivales s’afrontaient à coups de cutters, de battes de base-ball et de bonbonnes d’acide sulfurique ; le soir on dénombrerait sept morts [...] mais pour l’instant nous n’en savions rien. Dans un état d’excitation un peu irréelle, nous établissions une plateforme programmatique pour le partage du monde. [259])

Urban warfare implicitly creates a state of siege for the colonizers redrawing the earth’s sexually ‘pristine’ zones.67 The victimizers cordon themselves off from the disadvantaged with a huge security apparatus (which proves only somewhat effective, since West Indians rape one of the workers on her way home in the métro). On the other side of the barrier, the impoverished minorities win Pyrrhic victories, since the dead are predominantly among their ranks and the in-fighting leads the French to further stigmatize and ostracize them (real estate prices drop in the area).

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The narrator’s Spenglerian reflections on the decline of the West and the sexual solution he proposes are intimately bound up with his perception that such conflicts will determine the future course of history—despite his admitted lack of knowledge about the modern world (272). His own sense of victimhood feeds into his racially driven appraisal of the situation. In another lengthy quotation, we note the conglomeration of elements we have encountered in previous Houellebecq texts. Middle management typecasting, sociological analysis, indifference to fellow human beings, and consumer individualism combine here, as Michel articulates what makes him absolutely different from all others: It’s true I had very little contact with the barbarian hordes, except perhaps occasionally at lunchtime when I went for a walk around the Forum des Halles, where the subtle infiltration of the security forces (the riot squad, uniformed police officers, security guards employed by local shopkeepers) eliminated all danger, in theory. So I wandered casually through the reassuring topography of uniforms; I felt as though I was in Thoiry safari park. In the absence of the forces of law and order, I knew, I would be easy prey, though of little interest; very conventional, my middle-management uniform had very little to tempt them. (270, emphasis absent) (Il est vrai que j’avais peu de contact avec les hordes barbares, sinon occasionnellement lors de la pause déjeuner, lorsque j’allais faire un tour au forum des Halles, où la subtile imbrication des forces de sécurité [compagnies de CRS, policiers en tenue, vigiles payés par l’association des commerçants] éliminait en théorie tout danger. Je circulais donc, dans la topographie rassurante des uniformes ; je me sentais un peu comme à Thoiry. En l’absence des forces de l’ordre, je le savais, j’aurais constitué une proie facile, quoique peu intéressante ; très conventionnel, mon habillement de cadre moyen n’avait rien qui puisse les séduire. [279, emphasis in original])

Horde behavior is a by-product of the social fragmentation, where victims band together and roam public places in search of indifferent victims. Paradoxically, Michel’s own difference grows out of his incapacity to perceive difference and his indifference toward differentiation: For my part, I felt no attraction for this youthful product of the dangerous classes; I didn’t understand them, and made no attempt to do so. I didn’t sympathize with their passions nor with their values. For myself, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong [...]. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. (270–71, emphasis in original) (Je ne ressentais de mon côté aucune attirance pour ces jeunes issus des classes dangereuses; je ne les comprenais pas, ni ne cherchais à les comprendre. Je ne

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sympathisais nullement avec leurs engouements, ni avec leurs valeurs. Je n’aurais pas pour ma part levé le petit doigt pour posséder une Rolex, des Nike ou une BMW Z3 ; je n’avais même jamais réussi à établir la moindre différence entre les produits de marque et les produits démarqués. Aux yeux du monde, j’avais évidemment tort. [...] j’étais seul à ne pas la percevoir ; il s’agissait d’une infirmité, dont je ne pouvais me prévaloir pour condamner le monde. [279–80, emphasis in original])

Michel, sharing the analytical, yet nonetheless deprecating tone of other Houellebecq protagonists, fixes his attention on the lack of difference among things. Although his inability to recognize differences among brand-name and generic goods irremediably sets him apart from others, it also presents him with a theory about the general misery that people’s aesthetic desires for consumer goods, for “the presence of beauty” (271) (“la présence du beau” [280]), produce. He projects his own indifference to commodities onto the sexual realm and postulates that a general desire for sexual indifferentiation exists. The language of race enters into his questionable conjectures, questionable even by his own admission: “All humanity instinctively tends towards miscegenation, a generalized undifferentiated state, and it does so first and foremost through the elementary means of sexuality” (234) (“L’humanité entière tendait instinctivement vers le métissage, l’indifférenciation généralisée ; et elle le faisait en tout premier lieu à travers ce moyen élémentaire qu’était la sexualité” [244]). We can see the wish for indifferentiation as a result of the sense of victimhood the fashion world fosters. We also witness, slightly aghast and incredulous, how the language of racial difference comes into play.68 For Michel, the solution to victimhood lies in transposing indifference and sameness from the market for luxury items onto Westerners’ experience of sex. When one imposes the rules of the marketplace onto those of the sexual arena, the logical outcome is that the people from poor nations should sell their bodies to the rich, sexually destitute First World. As a result of Michel’s melding of distinct spheres, he can claim that sexual tourism in the Third World is the most beneficial form of prostitution: “If sex has to be paid for, it is best that, in a certain sense, it is undifferentiated. As everyone knows, one of the first things you feel in the presence of another race is that inability to differentiate” (354) (“Si la sexualité doit être payante il est bon qu’elle soit, dans une certaine mesure, indifférenciée. Comme chacun sait, une des premières choses qu’on ressent en présence d’une autre race est cette indifférenciation” [362–63]). The possibility of establishing society around what Michel sees as a ‘weak’ consensus depends upon making sex, like beauty, into a marketable, exchangeable commodity on the one hand, and subordinating it to the experience of sameness on the other (329, 298). The immensely profitable vacation resorts Valérie’s company establishes, tacitly going along with Michel’s line of reasoning, seem to bear out the veracity of these speculations.

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Houellebecq carries out one of his customary destabilizations at the end (Crowley 24): the wish to collapse sex into economics as an escape from victimhood is unmasked as dangerous in and of itself. A bloody terrorist attack on one of the resorts in Thailand, during which Valérie dies, brings the fantastical fusing of these spheres to an end—for now at least. While the novel leaves open whether the militants are Malay separatists or Islamic fundamentalists outraged at Western licentiousness, the narrator singles out Islam as culprit (which three of the Muslim characters in the novel denounce in no uncertain terms). Only a Jordanian’s claims that “the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph” (350) (“le système musulman était condamné : le capitalisme serait le plus fort”) and “young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex” (“les jeunes Arabes ne rêvaient que de consommation et de sexe” [358]) convince the narrator of the ultimate triumph of his logic. The Western exportation of its consumerist and individualist ideology will continue apace, Michel realizes, and indifferentiation and indifference will ultimately spread, terrorism notwithstanding. Indeed, terrorism may even function as a necessary sideeffect, temporarily restoring social order by clearly delineating one group from another. But it is no longer an escape or sublation of the dialectic of victimization and victimhood that such a process will bring, but a solidification of the concept of the innocent and guilty victim we have encountered. A Libération headline proclaiming “NOT SO INNOCENT VICTIMS” offers a summation of the novel’s own bottom-line (341, capitalization in original). The ambiguity inherent in the situation is expressed more pointedly in French: “DES VICTIMES AMBIGUËS” (349, capitalization in original). Where entropic tendencies inhere in the market forces dominating human behavior—with the reduction of the heterogeneous to simultaneously more homogeneous and more atomized units—the socioeconomic, emotional, and political world functions like the natural one.69 In Houellebecq’s novels, it would be a mistake to profess innocence in this schema or hypocrisy to abjure responsibility.

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CHAP TER

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Cognitive Dissonances: Elfriede Jelinek

One of the notable characteristics in chapter 6 was the tendentious use of victim rhetoric: in Houellebecq and Agamben we find victimhood in a superlative modality. The effort of highlighting paradoxical situations, and thereby casting doubt on the supposedly firm ground on which many assumptions of twentieth-century political, social, and economic life rest, brings with it rhetorical overstatement; such exaggeration trumps the dire conditions being commented upon. The solution Houellebecq proposes in Elementary Particles requires nothing less than an epistemic mutation and metaphysical revolution, wherein the clone displaces the human being. In the blueprint for modern life Agamben puts forward, the camp becomes the law-giving paradigm, reducing humans to a bare, undifferentiated life form. What we have in Agamben’s case is a variant of the “radically transcendent sublime” that Dominick LaCapra locates in certain postHolocaust discourses in his book, History in Transit (145).1 For him, Agamben’s thought denies the recuperation of limit events—events of maximal victimization—on some ‘higher,’ meaningful level (such as the extinction through synthesis or synthesis through extinction that Christoph Ransmayr and, to some extent, Michel Houellebecq suggest). For LaCapra, such writing nonetheless remains “fixated on the absolute in its very elusiveness, unavailability, or unrepresentability.” In the work of certain thinkers such as Agamben, LaCapra senses an “extreme, posttraumatic, empathic response to the abject plight of victims, even to the point of self-erasure” of the writer (History 148–49).2 I would like to commence this final chapter with these thoughts as an intellectual springboard. In Elfriede Jelinek’s theatrical texts of the 1990s and 2000s, we find an unfamiliar turn to the empathetic response to limit events, in particular the Holocaust. In two programmatic texts about theater and in post-dramatic works such as A Sport Play (Ein Sportstück, 1998), she simultaneously arrogates and subverts the speaking position of the hyperbolic victim. The melding of the author’s public persona and

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narrator’s voice, which we have already witnessed in Friederike Mayröcker’s and Michel Houellebecq’s texts, is driven implacably forward as a means of bringing into language the traumas of twentieth-century history. In this willful fusion and confusion between publicly constructed author and textual speaking position, we are confronted not with the self-erasure, but with the self-aggrandizement of the author-narrator-victim. With this purposefully dedifferentiated, conglomerate persona, Jelinek draws our attention to the ungrounded ground of victim talk and even makes manifest its unavoidability. Indeed, if anything, this ungrounded ground becomes the unstable foundation from which we must learn to speak—or to be spoken—if we are to develop new ethics as a victim society.

I In the Anglo-American world, it is hard to imagine a writer receiving the kind of highly personalized treatment heaped on Elfriede Jelinek. To judge from most feuilleton accounts, she is the writer everyone loves to hate or hates to love in the German-speaking world. It is this pre-eminent position in the mediated public mind that warrants commentary at the outset. Dark metaphors of aggravation and assault abound in literature on Jelinek and reveal the readers’ investment in Jelinek’s publicly constructed persona. In a 1999 issue of the highly regarded Swiss culture magazine du (you), for instance, Helga Leiprecht begins her contribution “The Electronic Writer” (“Die elektronische Schriftstellerin”) with this general appraisal: These texts attack their readers. They harass them. They provoke nausea and steal the air one needs to breathe; asphyxiation threatens in the metastasizing word growths. They take aim, throw powerful blows against supposedly good taste, and hit their target, these tirades of hatred, these cannonades of obscenity, salvos of bitterly ironic gallows humor. (2) (Diese Texte attackieren ihre Leser. Sie rücken ihnen auf den Leib. Sie lösen Übelkeit aus und nehmen die Luft zum Atmen, und es droht Erstickungsgefahr in den wuchernden Wortgewächsen. Sie holen aus, schlagen zu, gegen den vermeintlich guten Geschmack, und sie treffen sicher, diese Hasstiraden, diese Kanonaden des Obszönen, Salven bitter-ironischen Galgenhumors. [2])

Leiprecht, en route to an interview with the withdrawn Jelinek in the district of Hütteldorf, Vienna, describes what has become a familiar set of reactions to Jelinek’s oeuvre. The writer’s violent words attack, nauseate, asphyxiate, and even militate against the suspecting reader. Leiprecht’s introduction may here stand in for many reviews, in which the sentiment is expressed that reading or viewing Jelinek’s works is foolhardy self-exposure. In line with the definitions with which I began this book, an unwillingness

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to engage in voluntary self-victimization is stated here; reading Jelinek is tantamount to passively falling prey to Jelinek’s aggressions (esp. def. 2.c. and 3). Even five years before Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize, Isolde Schaad posed the provocative question: “Read Jelinek, for God’s sake, who still reads Jelinek? (“Jelinek lesen, um Himmels willen, wer liest denn noch Jelinek?”). She suggests that the repetitive cumulative effect of Jelinek’s themes lead to a reluctance to keep up with her newest works (12).3 There is some truth to Schaad’s charge, as Jelinek’s roster of concerns—beholden to a different kind of melancholic replay loop than Mayröcker’s, but obsessively recurrent nonetheless—has remained remarkably consistent over the course of her career. With the writer’s continuing preoccupation with victims and victimhood within patriarchy, war, and the media (usually in some admixture of the three), the reader’s position as one outside the power plays Jelinek describes is threatened. However, even when we take into account Jelinek’s long occluded political stance and stress her analysis of fascist continuities or her Marxist ideological critique, these thematic factors are not sufficient to explain the vitriol with which Jelinek’s texts are perceived and the visceral nature of most readers’ reactions.4 Her provocative manner of articulating her themes makes the reader’s or viewer’s extrication impossible. To reject Jelinek’s texts often is to focus on the person seen as the god-like voice behind these works and the way in which this voice speaks of collusive victims. Indeed, Jelinek’s concentration on traumatizing violence and Opfer mechanisms engenders a fascination with the author, a fact that has caused feminists especial dismay.5 As a self-defensive gesture on the public’s part, a bizarre investment and fetishistic interest in the author’s biography, clothing habits, and hairdos is everywhere in evidence. Leiprecht, too, admits to feeling an unscientific enthrallment with the person behind this virulent literary output. Mooting distinctions between author and narrator, she confesses: “And even if it is impermissible from a scholarly literary standpoint, you still ask yourself involuntarily: Who’s behind this painful exposure of the world?” (“Und auch wenn sie literaturwissenschaftlich verboten sein mag, so stellt man sich die Frage unwillkürlich doch: Wer steckt hinter dieser schmerzhaften Entlarvung der Welt?” [2]). I would argue that this biographical appeal is inseparable from the ethical undertaking upon which Jelinek has embarked, not an unfortunate side-effect. Paradoxically, then, as Jelinek tries to dismantle the authorial persona, she has furthered her staying power.6 The culmination of this contradictory effort is exemplified most distinctly in what has been called Jelinek’s “post-drama” around the turn of the new millennium. With the designation “post-drama,” I mean to situate her texts within the large body of theater work that has evolved in the post1945 period—not only in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, but in the West more generally. Post-drama eschews the primacy of the written text, standard scenic development, and depth-psychological characters; it opts

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for non-referential images or parodies the media images it absorbs.7 It resists, as Hans-Thies Lehmann contends, synthesizing impulses (26). Bidding adieu to plots, dramatis personae, and dialogue, Jelinek’s theater works voraciously incorporate fashion, colloquial language, and advertising (calling attention to their transience). She nonetheless remains beholden to the now almost anachronistic seeming political impulses of both pre-dramatic theater of the Greek polis and dramatic theater from the Renaissance down to the present day.8 Dissolving characters into “speech planes,” or “Sprachflächen,” Jelinek subverts any direct affective investment in the spoken word and the speakers of those words. The importance Jelinek accords to theater as Schillerian “moral institution,” however, only appears to be at odds with the disidentification her works activate.9 That is, her employment of intersecting speech planes, her dissolution of characters, her emphatic effort to be “shallowly” one-dimensional do not vitiate the intense emotional impact we associate with more common forms of mimetic emotional involvement in theater. Her ethical thrust is realized along the route of what I will describe as cognitive dissonance—as a “post-dramatic stress disorder.” The proliferation of the prefix “post” in the preceding paragraph and in scholarship on Jelinek is indicative of the difficulties in elaborating a critical framework commensurate to Jelinek’s project (cf. Caduff 272–73). I by no means except myself from this quandar y. Indeed, to label her works as post-dramatic (Lehmann 25), post-structuralist (cf. Lücke 229–43), posthistorical (Bartens 114), post-socialist (Müry 166), or post-ideological (cf. Konzett 95–125) is an effort to at once grasp and fix Jelinek’s panoply of metamorphosing styles and allusions. Her effortless non-synchronism, inheriting concepts such as structuralism, history, socialism, or drama and reconfiguring them into something else—avant la lettre—always attests to her being somehow ahead of the belatedness game. Scholars can be sure that she has arrived at some postposition to theirs when they first apply the prefix. (The same, presumably, holds true of the phenomenon I would like to outline in closing this book.) Jelinek’s littérature engagée is in perpetual conflict with the realization that an artistic commitment to social questions requires a resistant, somehow delineable social context no longer given in a thoroughly mediated society of fragmented individuals—one we have found lacking in the context of sacrificial thinking more generally. The dwindling of cohesion in the public sphere and the absence of communal aspirations are the foil against which her theater pieces such as A Sport Play must be seen (Bartens, “Vater” 114). These trends engender resigned statements on Jelinek’s part, including the following: [S]ociety no longer needs people like me, their offers are no longer accepted; on the other hand, we seem, even when we no longer express ourselves, still

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to be negative people [...]. Exactly this problem is what I tried to work on in A Sport Play: the ludicrousness of political engagement und being-thrownback-on-oneself, on absolutely nothing other than oneself. (“Man” 12) ([D]ie Gesellschaft braucht Leute wie mich nicht mehr, ihre Angebote werden nicht mehr angenommen, andrerseits scheinen wir, auch wenn wir uns gar nicht mehr äußern, immer noch Negativpersonen zu sein [...]. Genau diese Problematik habe ich im Sportstück zu bearbeiten versucht: die Lächerlichkeit politischen Engagements und das Zurückgeworfensein, absolut auf nichts als auf sich selber. [“Man” 12])

Jelinek bemoans the fraying and demise of the bonds necessary to create a public sphere within which political involvement could take place (she refers here not only to the right-leaning Freedom Party, but also to a disparaging, disheartened left-liberal consensus in Austria). “What I try to deal with,” she continues in this email exchange, citing Antonio Gramsci as a potential explicator of the situation, “is the lost solidarity that has contributed to the poisoning of the political climate in these last years” (“Womit ich mich zu beschäftigen versuche [wahrscheinlich muß man dazu Gramsci lesen], ist die verlorengegangene Solidarität, die das politische Klima in den letzten Jahren mit vergiftet hat” [“Man” 15]). Rather than attempt to reinstate a renewed sense of belonging via her public intervention and thus turn the tables, she exponentializes the loss that the disappearance of solidarity entails. In the course of her writing, she has insistently drawn attention to foundational moments and beliefs that engender such a sense of belonging. To be more precise, she has interrogated the foundations of supposed foundations, culminating in her magnum opus, The Children of the Dead (Die Kinder der Toten, 1995).10 Because the base on which the Austrian post-war Republic rests is such a problematic one—with the aforementioned “first-victim” myth of the Moscow Declaration (Introduction)—she tenaciously points to the infinitely regressing ground separating Austrians, and by implication all others, from any professed innocence before and outside of an incommensurable victimization.11 Before focusing on her Sport Play, where the public sphere is a gladiatorial arena in which aggressively ludic impulses erase distinctions between victims and perpetrators, I would like to turn to her interrogation of the ungrounded grounds on which post-dramatic theater takes place. For Jelinek, it is only with the victims in mind—the hyperbolic victims of Houellebecq’s and Agamben’s accounts—that artistic intervention becomes possible.

II In a series of short polemical pieces, Jelinek has outlined a complex kind of theatrical practice in which she must stake a position as Opfer. In these brief

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texts, “I Would Like to Be Shallow” (“Ich möchte seicht sein,” 1983) and “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless” (“Sinn egal. Körper zwecklos,” 1997), Jelinek speaks auto-referentially with the use of the first-person pronoun. Auto-reference melds with auto-reverence, as the self augments her power over the institution of theater at the expense of the actors and, eventually, the directors. Other traits that make Jelinek’s writing aggravating to many readers come to the fore: the unusual use of pronouns (jumping from “I” to “we” to “you”), the tendency toward unexpected declarative statements, the deployment of idiomatic expressions with a nasty twist, the invitation to dialogue that is immediately undercut in favor of monologue. Because some of the obvious characteristics of post-dramatic theater—such as the turn away from psychological dramatis personae12—are evident in these essays, many scholars have glossed over the essays’ difficulties,13 perfunctorily noting the similarities to a longer tradition of theatrical innovation in Austria.14 It should be noted at the outset that Jelinek does not wholeheartedly embrace post-drama. Rather, she hints at the epistemological and ontological risks involved in such an undertaking, reliant as it is on the fashionable ‘soft’ differences in society and an inclusively exclusionary discourse. Jelinek unmoors the audience, forcing it to question its positions toward what is occurring on-stage. Any exposure to her brand of postdramatic theater entails an “aesthetic of risk” (“Ästhethik des Risikos”), which leaves the audience feeling victimized.15 In “I Would Like to Be Shallow” (1983), which twice references Roland Barthes, Jelinek creates a distinctive authorial persona after “the death of the author.”16 Jelinek begins by shunning all traditional theatrical practices and immediately comes to the fore in an opinionated, all-negating first-person pronoun. “I don’t want any theater” (“Ich will kein Theater”), she writes near the outset. Playing with the idiomatic meaning of the phrase, she ironically affirms her desire to cause a different kind of uproar in the double German meaning of producing “theater.” She assails traditional actors and acting methods (157). However, in the course of the next few pages, we become increasingly confused as to whether the theater about which she is writing is supposed to be the dramatic theater of the present or her envisioned theater of the future, and we begin to sense that what she would like is something altogether different and resistant to categorization. She lambastes the actors for being ornamental figurines, excrescences of a god-like director. On the one hand, she maintains her distance from them, employing the formal German “you” (she had earlier addressed the audience and then the characters with this same “Sie”). On the other, she harangues them, destroying all pretense of distance, and warning them not to bother “us,” the spectators. All belief in substance, content, and meaning are shunned; the audience should, it seems, only care about ‘soft’ differences of a horizontal order. Depth is aligned with bourgeois arrogance

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and hierarchical society. She chastises the actors for bothering us, the audience: Don’t bother us with your substance! Or with whatever you try to feign as substance, like dogs that circle around each other with excited noises. Who is the boss? Don’t be arrogant! Get out of here! Theater has the purpose of being without content, but of demonstrating the power of the director in keeping the machine going. Only with his importance [/meaning] can the director make the empty plastic bags glow, these flaccid, leaky sacks filled with more or less sealant [/poetry]. And suddenly the meaningless becomes meaningful! (159) (Belästigen Sie uns nicht mit Ihrer Substanz! Oder womit immer Sie Substanz vorzutäuschen versuchen, wie Hunde, die sich mit aufgeregtem Getön umkreisen. Wer ist der Chef ? Maßen Sie sich nichts an! Verschwinden Sie! Theater hat den Sinn, ohne Inhalt zu sein, aber die Macht der Spielleiter vorzuführen, die die Maschine in Gang halten. Nur mit seiner Bedeutung kann der Regisseur die leeren Einkaufstüten zum Leuchten bringen, diese schlappen undichten Sackeln mit mehr oder weniger Dichtung drin. Und plötzlich bedeutet das Bedeutungslose was! [159])

While Jelinek unmistakably sets the actors against the audience here, it is actually unclear whether she is speaking about post-dramatic or conventional theater—to which the Stanislavski-trained method actors presumably belong, reacting like Pavlovian hounds to the stimulus of the stage. Regardless: for their effort to transform themselves and thereby move the audience, they are to be removed like dirt stains from clothing, as the speaking I imperiously maintains. The essay decisively takes leave of Aristotelian poetics, which is implicitly correlated with method acting. Jelinek goes back on the idea of cathartic fear and pity: “How do we remove these dirt stain actors from the theater, so that they can no longer cover us from their vacuum packs and move us, I mean swamp us?” (“Wie entfernen wir diese Schmutzflecken Schauspieler aus dem Theater, daß sie sich nicht mehr aus ihrer Frischhaltepackung über uns ergießen und uns erschüttern, ich meine überschütten können?” [160]). Cathartic cleansing is moved from the passive audience back to the author; like a dry cleaner, she intervenes to remove the “stains” on the theater. To the question of what remains of “sense” or “meaning” (“Sinn”) in theater if it is not the embodiment of characters through the medium of actors, Jelinek offers an interesting answer: theater becomes a demonstration of power. Her theater without plot or content (“Inhalt”) demonstrates the director’s might (“Macht” [159]). This trend toward making the director more important than the dramatic text in post-dramatic theater is, indeed, one that theater scholars have noted.17 However, it seems strange that Jelinek, who relies heavily on the early Barthes and his critique of society’s

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myths, would even sarcastically be willing to augment the power of the director. After all, she first uses the National Socialist, Germanified term “Spielleiter” rather than the common French “Regisseur” to designate the “director.” In her words, he is interested in the self-replication of the theatrical institution and the consolidation of directorial-dramaturgical power. His “Bedeutung,” in the doubled sense of “meaning” and “importance,” brings out the actors’ luster. When one considers that male directors, ranging from Claus Peymann, Frank Castorf, and Jossi Wieler to Christoph Marthaler, Peter Zadek, Einar Schleef, and Christoph Schlingensief have largely been responsible for Jelinek’s theatrical successes, this emphasis on the director’s importance gains added significance. Jelinek’s manifesto shores up the male-dominated status quo, while denigrating its purveyors. The director’s negation of tradition is a metaphorical murder, allowing his insertion into the ‘immortal’ canon of high art. His quintessentially modern gesture affirms (a false) newness: “Then he murders everything that once was, and his staging, which for its part is based on repetition, becomes the only thing that can exist” (“Dann ermordet er alles, was war, und seine Inszenierung, die doch ihrerseits auf Wiederholung gegründet ist, wird zum Einzigen, das sein kann”). Earlier in the paragraph she had compared the actors to purses and plastic bags (“Tascheln,” “Einkaufstüten”), filled with emphatically ironic “poetry!”—with “Dichtung!” In the double entendre of sexualized colloquial language, the actors now turn into “flaccid, leaky sacks” (“schlappe [...] undichte [...] Sackel[. . .]”), with “more or less poetic sealant” inside them (“mehr oder weniger Dichtung drin”). The director’s hand motion releases the poetry and makes the meaningless meaningful (158–59). Actors are rendered superfluous in the director’s auto-erotic jouissance. Through the downgrading of actors and the laying bare of power in theater, Jelinek brings to the fore and radicalizes the audience’s position concerning what is happening. As Andrzej Wirth has convincingly shown, the movement from dialogue to discourse in twentieth-century theater (from Brecht to Artaud, Müller, Handke, Foreman, and Wilson) has disproportionately affected the role accorded the audience. They are increasingly considered like-minded persons from the get-go; a metacommunicative understanding between speakers and listeners is considered given.18 Using what has since Clouds.Home. (Wolken.Heim.) become a customary gesture, Jelinek melds writer, audience, and actors in the first-person plural pronoun to highlight the audience’s emotional and psychological investment as well as its responsibilities in post-dramatic theater. The viewers are reminded of their constructive role in what is presented on-stage. Yet the movement between an apodictic, imperative-uttering “I” and an inclusive “we” purposefully disconcerts the post-dramatic balance among the chummy insider-group involved in the theatrical process. The speaking self’s attacks (even when they are hilarious) necessarily discomfit the audience, on whose

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behalf these things are said. The audience is recalled to the implicit question-and-answer structure that Hans-Thies Lehmann describes as the potential of post-dramatic theater, recognizing its co-responsibility for the theatrical production (471–73). However, it probably would rather forget its involvement. Thus, when we reach the closing passage of “I Would Like to Be Shallow,” we sense that we have been somehow duped. We have been misled into accepting a quick condemnation of more properly dramatic theater, while not yet knowing precisely where the new, post-dramatic theater is taking us. When Jelinek again rails against the supposed authenticity of the method actors, demanding their dismissal, she harps on the audience’s—our—reality: And I say: Away with them! They are not real. Only we are real! We are the most that exists, when we hang slimly and stylishly in our elegant theater clothes. Let’s look only at ourselves! We are our own actors. Let’s not need anything other than ourselves! Let us go into ourselves and let’s stay inside, everybody hopes that the greatest possible number of people might look at him, when he parades through the world, properly regulated by magazines and their images like a well-oiled machine. Let us be our own patterns and let’s sprinkle the snow, the meadows, knowledge, with what? With ourselves! That’s the way it should be. (161) (Und ich sage: Weg mit ihnen! Sie sind nicht echt. Echt sind nur wir! Wir sind das meiste, das es gibt, wenn wir schlank und schick in unsren eleganten Theaterkleidern hängen. Richten wir die Blicke nur noch auf uns! Wir sind unsere eigenen Darsteller. Brauchen wir nichts außer uns! Gehen wir in uns hinein und bleiben wir drinnen, jeder hofft ja, daß ihn möglichst viele betrachten mögen, wenn er durch die Welt stolziert, von den Zeitschriften und deren Bildern ordentlich geregelt wie eine gut geölte Maschine. Werden wir unsre eigenen Muster und sprenkeln wir den Schnee, die Wiesen, das Wissen, womit? Mit uns selbst! So ist es gut. [161])

The question, of course, arises: What reality do we as audience embody? Where the essay begins by creating a weak distinction between the fake/untruthful actor (“falsch”) and the real/authentic viewer (“echt”), the dichotomy now is solidified into real and unreal, truthful and untruthful actors (“nicht echt”/“echt”).19 Supposedly authentic experience has been Jelinek’s bête noire from the outset of her writing career, as I mentioned. Her novels and plays seek to rend the veil hiding the artificiality of nature and the naturalness of artifice, to destroy the mythological superstructure obfuscating the gap between signifier and signified.20 Any binary opposition between real and unreal, as that established in this passage, should give us pause. In an impossible German superlative phrase, Jelinek states: “We are the most” (“wir sind das meiste”). The partial answer, “the most that exists” (“das meiste, das es gibt”), is entirely cryptic in its

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colloquial certainty.21 Whenever Jelinek turns to everyday spoken Austrian, here in the confusion of “das” for “was,” the reader is forewarned: parody enters full force. That it does, as Jelinek returns to the fashion imagery that she uses as the dominant metaphor for the new theater and her desire to be shallow at the very beginning of the piece. “Maybe a fashion show, in which women in their dresses speak sentences,” she writes toward the beginning of “I Would Like to Be Shallow,” continuing shortly thereafter: “Fashion show for the reason that one could send out the clothes alone, too” (“Vielleicht eine Modeschau, bei der die Frauen in ihren Kleidern Sätze sprechen. [...] Modeschau deswegen, weil man die Kleider auch allein vorschicken könnte”). Theater, like fashionable clothing, is at first said to be form-fitting, clinging to human beings like a sheath: “Like the clothing, you hear, which doesn’t have its own form either, it has to be poured over the human being, who IS its form” (“Wie die Kleidung, hören Sie, die besitzt ja auch keine eigene Form, sie muß um den Menschen gegossen werden, der ihre Form IST” [158, emphasis in original]). The form of the clothing—and by extension the dramatic-theatrical form—becomes an inverse model, representing ex negativo the human being whom it surrounds. In the first variant of post-dramatic theater, then, humans have vacated the stage only to be replaced by their forms. An imprint of the people remains nonetheless, filled with the haunting content of something that was there once, but is no longer present now.22 In the second version of post-dramatic theater at the end of the essay, the uncanny moment is not reversed, in order to return us to any anterior authenticity of the viewer. We now learn that we are “the most that exists” when we hang around in our clothing, given over, presumably, to the artifice and ephemerality of fashion: “We are the most that exists, when we hang, slim and chic, in our elegant theater clothes” (“Wir sind das meiste, das es gibt, wenn wir schlank und schick in unsren eleganten Theaterkleidern hängen” [161]). Interestingly, it is not our clothes that hang on us, but we who hang in our clothing. With a sleight of hand, Jelinek changes her earlier simile, in which she had demanded that theater become like a fashion show. The uncanny moment increases exponentially. Were the clothes limp and we the ones who give form to clothes in the earlier variant, in the new version we are saggy, supported by our clothes. Like the actors, the “flaccid, leaky sacks,” we are presumably waiting for some god-like being to make us greater than we are. Filing about the theater like ephemeral fashionable creations, the humans are as empty of content as the clothes themselves. There is no depth to which their existence would attest; in short, we are all human beings without either deep content or superficial quality. Although intrigued by the surfaces and ‘soft’ differences, we are neither here nor there—a decidedly uncomfortable place. There cannot be a reflecting moment in Jelinek’s theater, with its fundamental emptiness at

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the core and nothing to surround it.23 Jelinek’s stage is no longer the site where actors, playing dramatic characters, make possible any identification with a parallel universe. The actors hold no mirror up to the audience (nor we to them), in whose image an uncanny self could ultimately be embraced and adopted. Perhaps only the oft-invoked Möbius strip works as a spatial corollary for this type of theater (cf. Agamben, Homo 37). I discern a predatory tone in the engulfing “we” discourse that Jelinek generates in this essay around her envisioned theater, which simultaneously calls the theater and the audience into question. The plural pronoun in “I Would Like to Be Shallow” is similar to the proto-fascist, homeland-loving “we” that Jelinek puts on-stage in Clouds.Home. Premiered in 1988, the dramatic text without parts or roles is an amalgam of altered quotations from Heidegger, Hölderlin, Hegel, Fichte, Kleist, letters from the Red Army Faction of the 1970s, and Leonhard Schmeiser’s essay “The Memory of the Ground” (“Das Gedächtnis des Bodens”). The “we” also occurs in theater texts such as The Adieu (Das Lebewohl, 2000), a dissection of Jörg Haider’s political success. The collective speaking subject in “I Would Like to Be Shallow” is no less exclusionary, for all its inclusive rhetoric, than the “we” in these later works.24 If Jelinek’s brand of post-dramatic theater radically abolishes outmoded strictures and paradigms at the moment of writing in 1983, we are forewarned that what comes in its stead is nothing easily discernible and may have negative consequences. Oscillating between the omnipotent god/murderous director, the dead/undead author (who reminds us in the personal nature of her address to the audience that she is always somehow present), and personal/impersonal actor-sheaths, post-dramatic theater tries to speak for someone, although this someone is always already absent. It is someone that “we,” the audience, might actually not enjoy meeting, even if it were possible. Let me recall the phrase in the quotation set off above, with its ironic posturing: “Let us be our own patterns and let’s sprinkle the snow, the meadows, knowledge, with what? With ourselves! That’s the way it should be” (161). The self-aggrandizement of the authorial persona, abrogating the power of the actors in favor of the director, carries over into the audience’s postulated behavior. There is no confrontation with any kind of otherness in this model and no ground on which this inflated “we” could stand to speak. We are caught completely in the hypothetical subjunctive: were it possible for actors in some way to reflect/refract our lives, we might be able to identify with them. Since they are not able to do so, identification in post-dramatic theater becomes an impossible possibility—or possibly just impossible. The embrace of one’s own inner alterity has by now become a truism of literary-philosophical discourse, and it is for this reason that Jelinek shuns the easy optimism and sometimes naïve humanism of this conception of otherness. In light of my reflections above on Jelinek’s brand of post-dramatic theater, I would postulate that she acknowledges fully the exponential

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uncanniness at the center of her own project. Physical confrontation and simultaneous disengagement occur within her variant of theater, according to her 1997 essay, “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless,” where she follows up on her 1983 text.25 “Within the theater every one can meet himself and nonetheless carelessly pass himself, because he has not yet fully hit upon himself,” she writes, “I am the challenge, yet it is up to every single individual, whether or not he wants to accept this challenge” (“Auf dem Theater kann jeder sich selbst begegnen und doch achtlos an sich vorübergehen, weil er sich dabei noch immer nicht fest genug getroffen hat. [...] Ich bin die Herausforderung, doch es liegt an jedem einzelnen, ob er diese Forderung auch annimmt” [10]). The viewer—ungrounded, as I have shown—is left on precarious footing, so much so that a careless selfconfrontation with any uncanny self automatically becomes a risky face-off with the author.26 Jelinek, in fact, picks up on the self-replicating gesture of her propounded theater and multiplies authorial selves, “so that I can become more and garner more points than before [...] when I was just singular” (“damit auch ich mehr werden und ausgeglichener punkten kann als bisher [...] da ich nur eine einzige war”). The refracted and refractory speech of authorial selves is summoned up with the uneasy integration of all manners and types of quoted material. This is an “alien” or “foreign speech” (“ein fremdes Sagen” [9]).27 By the end of this follow-up essay, we as audience again understand, on a visceral level, the way in which Jelinek’s speech has challenged the actor, charging him up with her authorial voice and the haunting presence of predecessors. In the cacophony of the many voices—the “foreign speech” of the cited authors—the uncanniness of the situation is multiplied. Actors are enjoined to avoid embodying dramatis personae and also to avoid bringing the text into any direct relationship to their own lives (8). They are, instead, asked to harmonize with the aggressive, petulant, confrontational, and risky speech of the author, “ [...] only to be forced into harmony with me and these foreigners here on-stage, until we all, without any sense of rhythm [/tact], each in our own rhythm challenge reality” (“[...] nur um in einen Einklang mit mir und diesen Fremden da auf der Bühne zu geraten, bis wir alle, und zwar ohne jedes Taktgefühl, jeder in seinem eigenen Rhythmus die Wirklichkeit herausfordern” [9]).28 Harmony and a sense of tact become both risk and challenge to the actors as well as the audience.29 The words reaching us through the medium of actors ask us to enter into a random, haphazard symbiosis with an authoritative and authorial “I”/“we.” This symbiosis threatens the inner alterity we had projected outside ourselves and which we might have yearned to encounter when we entered the theater. Jelinek concludes her renewed call for a post-dramatic theater, one that openly avows the uncanniness the earlier manifesto had only implied, with the clothing-hanger image from “I Would Like to Be Shallow.” The spatial metaphor, which conjures up an actor getting

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“hung up” on his words during a performance (his “Hänger”), serves to locate a space where the acting and reception in post-dramatic theater occurs. It is simultaneously a non-space and utopian place for the actor and for us: “Hung up in an anywhere, but without hanger [/mistake], with which he could find a firm place, from where the softness of his flesh can dangle” (“Im Irgendwo hängenbleiben, aber keinen Hänger haben, an dem er einen festen Ort bekommt, von wo das Weiche seines Fleisches herabbaumelt”). Here, strangely in-between, the risk for actor and viewer most distinctly emerges. In the oscillating position between dramatic reality and post-dramatic theater, trapped in the “shaft of another dimension” (“Schacht einer anderen Dimension” [9]), Jelinek’s breathless text finally pauses for emphasis: “Dangerous. For everyone” (“Gefährlich. Für alle” [13]). Jelinek’s theater produces cognitive dissonance—she asks us to hear “foreign” voices (“fremdes Sagen”) and to receive them as her own. Her pieces demand both our sympathetic understanding (“Einklang”) with these other, alien voices, and the retention of a personal rhythm (“eigener Rhythmus” [9]). We are continually asked to occupy a doubled position as members of a harmonizing “we” group and as outsiders to this group, while not having any clear epistemological or ontological ground beneath our feet. Jelinek recognizes that the cognitive dissonance her theater enjoins upon the audience is difficult to bear, and the self-pitying, self-flagellating commentaries in later essays such as “Sense Whatever” acknowledge the price of such dissonance. At once asserting and denying her control over the situation, she prominently puts on display her public, victimized self. The stress on the authorial persona, a lightning rod for the viewer’s and reader’s frustrations, reduces the dissonance of our “postdramatic stress disorder” to an acceptable level. As such, we can understand the trend in Jelinek’s work foregrounding her textual self, replete with a characteristic autobiographical tone. In effect, she willingly assumes the position of René Girard’s scapegoat (chapter 1) in a self-victimizing and self-sacrificial gesture. ‘Jelinek’ as the constructed textual persona becomes the quintessential Opfer in order to instigate rivalries and tensions between actors and audience and between members of the audience. However, rather than assuming victim status to avert destabilization, Jelinek wants to keep the tensions high. As such this ‘Jelinek’ victim is not substitutable; she intervenes vociferously, over and over again, to make known her absent presence. By avoiding the dualistic thinking of self and other, actor and character, audience and actor, the plural Jelinekian self in “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless” capitalizes on the potentials of romantic irony. Identification needs to be rediscovered, not as shallow concept, but as a concept that brings out our higher potential: “So not in the sense of a flat identification with something, but in the sense of a sense of something” (“Also nicht im Sinn einer platten Identifikation mit einem Etwas, sondern im Sinn eines

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Sinns von etwas” [10]). With her new interpretation of alterity and her sense of the exponential possibilities of “foreign speech” in mind, Jelinek begins to rethink the bases of community and its relation to the Holocaust. These ideas will come to full fruition in her works of the 1990s.

III Jelinek’s fashioning of theater is brought into a direct relationship with victim politics in a brief piece from 1997, entitled “The Great Tear” (“Der große Riß”). Written for the Berlin paper, Der Tagesspiegel, and later reprinted with the new title, “Brecht out of Fashion” (“Brecht aus der Mode”), Jelinek associates speaking about victims with the permanence of impermanent fashion and the post-dramatic theater of which Bertolt Brecht was the avatar (Wirth 16–19). Showing herself to be as perceptive a cultural critic as her great model Roland Barthes, she probes the implications of the 1990s grunge style, which she describes as a “kind of modified proletarian look” (“eine Art modifizierter Lumpenlook”). To her mind, it relates to the stylishness of social issues in literature, or their being passé— since grunge already passed its apogee when she writes this article. Her own interest in fashion is correlated to Brecht’s awareness of its importance.30 Jelinek writes that Brecht realizes the fascination of fashion; for him, it lies in the exteriority of the iconic detail. His leather coat, for example, purposefully sewn askew so that the collar stands away rather than lies flat, proves to Jelinek that significance inheres in “the external, that which ‘tops off ’ literature” (“das Äußerliche, das dem literarischen Gegenstand ,Aufgesetzte’ ”). In Brecht’s didactic plays, Jelinek senses, the external emerges as the essential. In a passage I would like to quote in full, Jelinek unexpectedly draws together the superficial differences of fashion and thinking on victims: However, if the tireless naming of the victims as well as of their exploiters stays somehow strangely external to these didactic plays, like a sewn-on collar (although the naming of the perpetrators and victims is, after all, the main thing), so one could say that Brecht’s works, like fashion and its recurrences, clearly wears its date-of-making. But precisely in the disappearance of oppositions, which are exposed as pure externalities (misery and luxury, poverty and wealth), the differences, strangely enough, come to the fore ever more clearly, and that is precisely what Brecht wanted! (“Brecht” 26) (Wenn aber die unermüdliche Benennung der Opfer wie ihrer Ausbeuter einerseits etwas diesen Lehr-Stücken seltsam Äußerliches bleibt, wie eben ein angenähter Kragen [obwohl die Benennung von Tätern und Opfern ja eigentlich die Hauptsache ist], so könnte man sagen, daß Brechts Werk, wie die Mode und deren Wiedergänger, seinen Datumsstempel deutlich sichtbar

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trägt. Doch gerade im Verschwinden der Gegensätze, die entlarvt sind als pure Äußerlichkeiten [Elend und Luxus, Armut und Reichtum], treten seltsamerweise die Unterschiede immer unabweislicher hervor, und genau das hat Brecht gewollt! [“Brecht” 26])

From the collar that is awry—somehow simultaneously intrinsic and extrinsic to the leather coat—Jelinek extrapolates to literary themes and the language in which they are garbed. The naming (in “Benennung” we have to hear the overtones of twentieth-century German thought on the metaphysical relation of the name to its referent) of the victims and of those that harm them is the purpose of Brecht’s literature—and of all literature tout court. This naming includes pointing to the conditions in which and through which victimization takes place and remains oddly external to the didactic plays. However, in this bizarre externality, with the seeming erasure of the ‘hard’ oppositions such as class or poverty, differences emerge nonetheless. Upon closer inspection, the ‘soft’ differences show themselves to be the key to understanding the tear (“Riß”) between the supposed dichotomies of the “real” and the “spoken,” style and content, master and slave (“Herr/Knecht”). The collar-antics on the director’s part in “I Would Like to Be Shallow” are taken up in this short article and emphasized again, nearly fifteen years later. Where the mighty director “rips off a whole human collar and fools us with another” (“dann reißt er einen ganzen Kragen Mensch herunter und leimt uns mit einem anderen” [159]), Brecht’s collar exposes the relations between victims and victimizers more subtly. In presenting the human as substitutable and the conditions of his victimization as peripheral and transient, Brecht enables the mechanisms of sacrificial logic to come forth all the more clearly: the human has become absolutely indifferent to the process of which he is a part. By implication, the self-erasure of the oppositions between victims and victimizers is part of the purposeful obfuscation within a system where anyone can suddenly fall prey to anonymous capitalist agencies. When the “codes of appearances” (“Codes der Äußerlichkeiten”) become the means whereby people are “catalogued” (“katalogisiert”) in class society like articles of clothing (“Brecht” 27), the truth of such ‘soft’ differences has to be sought. For Jelinek, then, there is no such thing as a perfectly horizontal paradigm for human relations. ‘Soft’ differences automatically involve some vertical, ‘hard’ difference. Thus, in writing about Brecht’s theatrical practice, Jelinek is also speaking about her own. In his didactic plays, the dialectic of victim and victimizer almost functions too perfectly, so much so that it appears like an awkward collar on an iconic coat, an irritating detail of a larger, mediated and mediatized whole.31 As in mathematical equations, these plays seem too perfectly constructed and divisible without remainder. But this is not really so. “[I]n the didactic plays,” Jelinek closes, “which appear to totally ‘work themselves out,’ an unsayable, indescribable remainder is left, about

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which one cannot speak. And only about that can one now speak” (“[S]o bleibt auch in den Lehrstücken, die sich scheinbar total ,ausgehen’, ein unsagbarer, unbeschreiblicher Rest, über den man nicht mehr sprechen kann. Und nur über den kann jetzt gesprochen werden” [27]). For Jelinek, we are forced to speak incessantly about that which up to now has seemed unsayable. Indeed, her quasi-passive formulation (“kann jetzt gesprochen werden”) suggests that the language of a traumatic remainder speaks us, forcing itself on our attention. She here offers us a variation on the manner of dealing with extreme events that LaCapra outlines in History in Transit, with which I began this chapter. Jelinek ties the indivisible remainder and the break in any continuous narrative—including the Brechtian Lehrstück—to the unsayable in victimization. This unspeakable rest is at the heart of accounts dealing with the “radically transcendent sublime” (one has to think only of Agamben’s title, Remnants of Auschwitz, or, more accurately rendered in English, That Which Remains of Auschwitz). Certainly, Jelinek is attracted to the unreconciled stance of writers privy to the “transcendent sublime,” and she is quite close to thinkers such as Agamben. Her approach to limit events, aware of the ultimate unrepresentability of what occurred, remains permanently uneasy with any recovery or redemption of the event. As such, she does not believe in what LaCapra calls an “immanent (or this-worldly) sublime” (145).32 Paradoxically, however, because a limit event such as the Holocaust is impossible to describe adequately or to understand fully, it must necessarily be talked about. Jelinek’s machine-like integration of all cultural emanations—the paternalistic high literary tradition, designer and street fashion, pop culture, televised sports, advertisements33—into ever-lengthier works are part of her production of a different kind of discourse on limit events.34 She has made the effort, then, to sensitize us to ubiquitous forms of oppression and domination as they lead up to and live on after National Socialism. Her works have tried to redefine what the experience of a victim may be, while at the same time avoiding any easy identification with him or, more often, her.35 In so doing, she has attempted to criticize the prevalent definitions of traumatic experience, which hew to an “androcentric norm based on white male experience.” The feminist therapist Laura S. Brown cogently argues against such parameters, where “we formally define a traumatic stressor as an event outside of normal human experience” and thereby “exclude those events that occur at a high enough base rate in the lives of certain groups that such events are in fact, normative, ‘normal’ in the statistical sense” (103). Jelinek alerts us to the constitution of a dominant discourse that determines what is normal, and which would make the ‘hard’ difference of an incommensurable victimization ‘soft.’ Those who fall outside dominant definitions have little juridical, political, and socioeconomic recourse. Interestingly enough, when Jelinek wrote a play based on four murdered gypsies in Oberwart, Austria, the figures say nothing at all

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in their theatrical incarnation (even as “speech planes”). The Roma were not given a voice, neither in the text of Stick, Staff, and Pole (Stecken, Stab und Stangl, 1996), nor in the acclaimed staging by director Thirza Bruncken (Sieg 126). Once Jelinek has approached such a contemporary topic—and made the continuation of prejudice her issue—by alerting us to the way in which victims are silenced, she also begins to see how this discourse is instrumentalized. She inserts the quintessential victim, simply calling him/her “das Opfer,” in A Sport Play. She brings into language this other voice outside the dominant discourse, which it normally helps constitute through its exclusion, and also shows how it can be put to use.

IV A Sport Play (1998), designated “Drama of the Year” by the influential German theater magazine Theater heute, is devoted to massification, de-individualization, proto-fascist body training, sport as consumer culture, and, most importantly, the author as victim. With this text, the Austrian critic Klaus Nüchtern perceptively notes, Jelinek reaches new heights in self-denunciation and self-reproach (20). For the very first time, Jelinek lets the victim speak—it is the singular “Opfer,” as opposed to the pluralized perpetrators labeled “man” (“Mann”) and “an other perpetrator” (“Ein anderer Täter”), “other perpetrator” (“andrer Täter”), or simply “other” (“Ein andrer,” “Andrer”).36 The mass, which at first appears as a multi-vocal reincarnation of the Greek chorus, soon degenerates into fragmentary, isolated speakers, all of whom, however, sound the same and become indistinguishable (Bartens, “Mein” 118). Jelinek experiments with the conflation of characters in other pieces. In her Stick, Staff, and Pole for instance, the numerous women are called “Frau Margit,” the men are all “Herr Stab.” The text reproduces an “Austrian ideoscape,” with the conflated figures becoming “discursive relays” for the many forms of mediatized, “commodified knowledge” (Sieg 126). A Sport Play continues this trend, while according the victim a unique status. In the 188-page-long text, the victim is presented as a cloth bundle, and Jelinek carefully avoids any gendering traits apart from its activities (and even these are neutral). The Opfer engages in “normal activities” (“normale Tätigkeiten”), according to the stage directions: it cleans up, fixes things, and tries to watch television. Pressure is soon exerted on it, when a “normally” (“normal halt”) dressed woman in bourgeois clothing begins to kick it (16). Numerous men soon follow her, using the bundle as a football (44). However, the battered victim does not diverge from course (16), as it verbalizes its power within powerlessness. It highlights its recourse to language when all other self-defensive mechanisms fail. “Yeah, you’re better off being perpetrator!” it admonishes the audience, “The perpetrators don’t have to speak, they have no need to” (“Ja, seien Sie doch lieber Täter! Die Täter müssen nicht

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sprechen, sie haben es nicht nötig”). The increasingly ragged victim suggests an identity between the maligned, futile products of the text’s frequently invoked “poets and thinkers” (“Dichter und Denker”) and itself.37 It repeatedly emphasizes its privileged relationship to “this woman” (“diese Frau”), namely Elfriede Jelinek. She will soon write about victims’ suffering, the victim caustically comments, without actually having known a single, suffering soul (“unsre arme Schar” [67]). However, the cruel comments do not spare anyone; the victim, addressing the audience with the formal German “you,” implicates us in the violence being done to it. When the victim in A Sport Play describes its agonal relation to the perpetrators (whose innermost desires it shares), it configures the relationship between itself and the viewer/victimizer in a manner reminiscent of Jelinek’s relation to the audience in “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless.” The Opfer comments on the fact that the victimizing and victimized viewer has not avoided a confrontation. “You could have easily avoided me, didn’t you notice that?, yes, a little step and you would already have been past me, I wouldn’t have been present for you at all anymore, an experience that each of us has for almost the whole time of one’s life” (“Mich hätten Sie mit Leichtigkeit umgehen können, haben Sie das denn nicht gemerkt?, ja, ein kleiner Schritt, und schon wären Sie an mir vorbei gewesen, ich wäre für Sie gar nicht mehr vorhanden gewesen, eine Erfahrung, die jedem von uns fast die ganze Zeit seines Lebens blüht” [72]). In the same way that we are unable to avoid Jelinek’s authorial persona in her theatrical pronouncements, we are unable to avoid the victim in her works for the stage. In trying to avoid Opfer, we run into them. In the unusual phrasing, the victim implies that we physically experience the victim during the entire duration of our lives, despite our deepest wishes to repress such a person’s existence. This is the other risk of Jelinek’s theater—her texts confront us not only with the victim, but with our desire to avoid him or her. The complaining, vituperative, and occasionally despicable victim admits that we have missed and will always miss our opportunity to do so. In Jelinek’s Sport Play, the temporality of a victimizing modernity is the temporality of the sporting event, with its “on your mark, get set, go” (Vogel, “Harte” 122). Relentless and incorruptible chronometers do not allow the eruption of that other dimension in which the confrontation with the victim can become something other than nasty. Compare the victim’s reflections on time to Jelinek’s “shaft of another dimension” in “Sense Whatever,”38 where the victim explicitly makes reference to the impossibility of utopian dimensions: It nearly occurred that you asked me: could you tell me what time it is. But the times are different. You quite definitely want to have a newer time than the one you had. [...] You just need to choose [/dial]! [...] That one second, floating between here and there, between now and never, that would have

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been the one! What a shame! Too late, yes, the one second or the other, and the veil of this nearly risky relationship between us would have already been lifted for a tenth of a second. (72–73) (Es hätte nicht viel gefehlt, und Sie hätten mich gefragt, können Sie mir sagen, wie spät es ist. Doch die Zeiten sind andere. Sie wollen ja partout eine neuere Zeit als die, die Sie hatten. [...] Sie brauchen nur zu wählen! [...] Diese eine Sekunde, schwebend zwischen Hier und Dort, zwischen Jetzt und Nie, die wärs gewesen! Schade! Zu spät, ja, die eine Sekunde oder die andere, und schon wäre der Schleier dieses beinahe waghalsigen Verhältnisses zwischen uns für eine Zehntelsekunden gelüftet gewesen. [72–73])

The lifting of the veil separating victims and victimizers in a perilous, yet unavoidable confrontation would and should leave us all suspended in a hazardous in-between time and place. It would force a break in the continuous narrative, lift (if not tear) the concealing veil, and allow humane, playful impulses to realize the “aesthetic of risk.” It would also, however, turn the victimizer into a “good sport”—he would ask cordially what time it was—and thus betray the modern clock, which measures time in tenths of seconds.39 The victim’s indirect naming of the author in its lengthiest monologue activates the self-reflexive multiplication of authorial personae in response, a replication that Jelinek describes in her programmatic texts for the theater. The plural alter egos Jelinek marshals for her protection in “Sense Whatever” come to the fore in A Sport Play as the plural artist “Elfriede Jelinek” wrestles with questions of empathy, artistic creation, political engagement, and self-defense (Janz, “Mütter” 94–96). As such, the text is framed by two speeches, one by “Elfi Elektra,” the other by a “Ms. Author” (“Frau Autorin”)—who, according to the stage directions, can also be represented by Elfi Elektra (184). Traits of the author are also ascribed to the singular “woman” (“Frau”), who beats the victimized bundle. Jelinek openly parodies her assumption of a diminutive, diminished stance. “Elfi,” and not “Elfriede,” vengefully accosts the audience in her role as a “little baroque avenging angel” (“kleines barockes Racheengerl”) in the opening pages (8–17).40 Like the victim, Elfi melds with the text: using her own finger, “I here turn my worse pages for you” (“[...] ich hier meine schlechteren Seiten für Sie umblättere” [13]). The bastardized offspring of the House of Atreus is also a plaintive, self-pitying melancholic. She articulates the uselessness of elegiac testimony and thereby inadvertently affirms it. The double negations of her personal political engagement as writer give lie to the supposed futility of her public grieving rite. Elfi first takes to task Yugoslavian war criminals Karadzic and Mladic, then reneges on her political writing. She winds up lamenting her uselessness, moving associatively from feeling qualms—presumably about victims—to her mediatized status (doubts, she shows, are photogenic) to concocted empathy.

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Although it is hard to tell definitively from her convoluted sentences, she rails against her lack of resonance: So. Now I am not getting involved on purpose! [...] I find doubts as comfortable as a double-edged sword in my stomach. I’ll go into the house right away and get it ready for the photo. So, now I’m taking the pot with the deep empathy from my stove, no, the deep pot with empathy and I’ll stir them in, the new heroes, against whom of course I have plenty of things to say. [...] So I look questioningly at my mother, because with so much anger in my works I still no longer find any resonance [/sympathy], why? (11–14) (So. Jetzt engagiere ich mich extra nicht! [...] Bedenken finde ich bequem wie ein doppelschneidiges Schwert in meinem Bauch. Ich gehe jetzt gleich ins Haus und lege es mir fürs Foto zurecht. So, jetzt nehme ich von meinem Herd den Topf mit der tiefen Anteilnahme, nein, den tiefen Topf mit der Anteilnahme und rühre sie hinein, die neuen Helden, gegen die ich natürlich auch wieder eine Menge einzuwenden habe. [...] Ich schaue also fragend meine Mutter an, weil ich bei soviel Zorn in meinem Werk trotzdem keinen Anklang mehr finde, wieso? [11–14])

She doth protest too much—and her words lend testimony to the opposite situation. Elfi’s speech intersects with that of the bloodied bundle, of the “Autorin” character, and of the authorial voice giving stage directions, vacillating between hubris and self-diminution.41 Director Einar Schleef brought to bear the self-replication and selfdeification implied by Jelinek’s post-dramatic theater in his staging 1998.42 Heralded for his marathon-length production (running time ca. six hours), he employed choruses in the prestigious Viennese State Theater, the Burgtheater, from which individual speakers occasionally emerge. Certain sentences from the play dealing with artistic engagement and selfvictimization recur in loops, spoken by differently dressed figures: a man in woman’s clothing, a woman in a black riding costume, a woman in gown with supersized hoop skirt. Everybody on-stage winds up speaking this distinctly Jelinekian speech; all subjective rhythms end up harmonizing (“Einklang”) with the dispersed yet localizable Jelinek tone and subject matter. Scholar Juliane Vogel writes: “Metronomic and authoritarian scansions ground and organize speech even then, when it seems to follow its own subjective, meandering rhythm” (“Metronomische und autoritäre Skandierungen grundieren und organisieren die Rede auch dann, wenn diese ihrem eigenen subjektivischen mäandernden Rhythmus zu folgen scheint” [“Harte” 122]). With the word “seems,” or “scheint,” the subjective element is downplayed, and the authorial and authoritarian scansions of the dramatic discourse come to the forefront.43 At the end of Schleef ’s premiere, the continuing power of the director in post-dramatic theater met its match in the power of the author-goddess, who again presents her victimized

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self in the closing pages of A Sport Play (184–88). Schleef, walking on to the stage, read Jelinek’s text from a large white banner spread across the stage and called for the aid of the author, the alpha and omega in whom all meaning resides (Stadelmaier 31). In one performance, Jelinek entered to read the final author’s monologue herself. Perhaps she is left as the only dramatis persona in her post-dramatic theater: a character double of the author Jelinek.

V In closing, a few words should be said about Jelinek’s totalizing theater and its implications for the Opfer rhetoric I have been describing in this book. As Jelinek repeatedly returns to the defensive and aggressive gestures her theater occasions—she even speaks of being “knocked out” and heaping blows on herself—she introduces herself as god-author. But she is always an already impoverished, somehow diminished deity. In “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless,” for example, an impudently auratic dimension is introduced in the text. The actors appear to enter a sacred realm, from where they touch us, enervate or offend us (“Anstoß erregen”), bring us “news” (“Nachricht”) and even “messages” (“Botschaft”). It is a dimension that is neither reality nor theater (“Sense” 8–9). In becoming what they speak, the actors are explicitly compared to Yahweh, whose name has been interpreted as “He Who Is” (“Wie Gott, der ist, der er ist”). Relegating the actors to speakers of language rather than inhabitants of characters does not pass without their protest, Jelinek realizes. The actors—like the Elfi Elektra-alter ego—resist the horizontal paradigm of “speech planes” (“Sprachflächen”) into which they are being forced. As a compensatory gesture, Jelinek reminds the actors of their quasi-deification. Their becoming language, their actualization in the moment of speaking is “a beautiful and great responsibility, isn’t it? (“Das ist doch eine schöne und große Aufgabe, oder?” [9]). But they are not appeased, particularly since their apotheosis is rendered secondary to the author’s. So instead, Jelinek sows dissent, generating a babble of tongues among the actors—and creating a Babel that prevents any uprising against the author-god. Indeed, she is the one in the many and the all in one: But since there are a number of them, many of them, and they can knock me out without trouble and count me out, I have to confuse them, make them disparate; I have to smuggle in foreign voices, my dear citations, which I have all called up, that I, too, can become more and garner more points than previously, when I was singular. To each his own, but everything to me—so, now I have smuggled in a double or multiple of myself, I’ve put it under my tail, without having noticed. (9) (Aber da sie ja zu mehreren, zu vielen sind und mich mühelos ausknocken und auszählen können, muß ich sie verwirren, disparat machen, ihnen ein

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fremdes Sagen unterschieben, meine lieben Zitate, die ich alle herbeigerufen habe, damit auch ich mehr werden und ausgeglichener punkten kann als bisher, da ich nur eine einzige war. Jedem das Seine, mir aber alles, so, jetzt habe ich mir mich selbst, eine Doppel-, eine Mehrgängerin von mir, unter das Bürzel geschoben, ohne es gemerkt zu haben. [9])

Jelinek’s theater finds reinforcements in the old masters—sutured together with the methods of TV talk shows. She rewrites her statement from her earlier manifesto “I Would Like to Be Shallow” to mark the difference between her position in the late 1990s from that in the early 1980s and to indicate the radicalization of her theatrical undertaking. Now it is not the “we,” meaning the audience, that is the “most that exists.” It is, rather, the television: “The most that exists is, by nature, the TV” (“Das meiste, das es gibt, ist naturgemäß das Fernsehen” [11]). The television pipes in the words, which are then broadcast via the actors; it also serves as a model for the method of dissemination. The female god-author cuts down to smaller format any remaining dead white male authors and spreads them with the effectiveness of today’s propaganda machine (see Gemünden 66–88). If we can never escape the monolithic media and its rapaciousness, we can also never escape the author’s pronouncements—much as we could not escape the victim’s voice in A Sport Play. Embedding these voices—of the dead authors, the corporeal actors, the television—as witnesses in a general prosecution, Jelinek introduces juridical language in her essay. With it, she emphasizes the ethical and political dimension of her post-dramatic project. In the speaker-actors, she marshals her forces: “[T]he witnesses in my prosecution of God and Goethe, my country, the government, the newspapers, and time as such, are the relevant figures, however, without representing them and without wanting to be them, because they are them already!” (“Die Zeugen meiner Anklage gegen Gott und Goethe, mein Land, die Regierung, die Zeitungen und die Zeit solo, sind die jeweiligen Figuren, jedoch ohne sie darzustellen und ohne sie sein zu wollen, weil sie sie ja schon sind!” [10]). It seems to me that Jelinek’s theatrical project attempts to have it all ways. It wants to be a kind of total Theater: politically engaged yet abstract, corporeal yet disembodied, authorial yet not authoritative, self-referential yet anti-self, auto-reverential yet irreverent, monolingual yet polyglot. Even in her speech broadcast in Stockholm on the occasion of her Nobel Prize 2004, “Sidelined” (“Im Abseits”), we find an investment in the larger-than-life writer (she was broadcast on enormous screens), who must necessarily disengage from concrete circumstances in order to speak about political engagement in a language that always already speaks her. When we accept Jelinek’s unavoidable post-dramatic challenge with its totalizing implications, it also means that we cannot easily impute psychopathology to a victim irredeemably different from ourselves

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(see “Sinn” 10). There is no outside from where guilt or responsibility could be allocated. We have to acknowledge that we have always already been the innocently guilty victims and the victimizers, too, if only in our reconciliation with the status quo. Jelinek’s theater realizes that attempting to speak with—if not for—the victims (and us) and to bring their posttraumatic stress disorder into post-dramatic theater is a problematic undertaking, as her ambivalent programmatic essays and statements within her theater texts reveal (Sieg 131). However, as the hotly debated term of “trauma” gives way to a palpable trauma-fatigue in academia, her works remind us that the concept is more than simply a fashionable catchphrase. Jelinek’s theater wears its ethics on its sleeve. And in doing so, her works recall us to the ungrounded ground from which we all, as a “victim society,” must learn to speak.

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Introduction 1. Baudrillard uses this term in an interview entitled “Endgame” in Paroxysm (15). In the French original, “Fin de Partie,” the “société victimale” is not separated from the remainder of the text with quotation marks (33). 2. In “The New Victim Order” (“Le Nouvel Ordre Victimale” [183–96]) in The Perfect Crime, (Le crime parfait, 1995) Baudrillard fleshes out his conception a bit (131–41). He ties the Western perception of victimhood to a pervasive sense of indifference as well as to the intense Western interest in and futility vis-à-vis humanitarian catastrophes. I reflect on the issue of indifference in chapter 1; on the issue of empathy and images in chapter 2; on the idea of commiseration in chapter 5. 3. Baudrillard speaks of us as moderns in similar situations, e.g., in Transparency of Evil (75–80) (Transparence du mal [82–87]). 4. Raymond Williams long ago stressed the utility and pitfalls of relying on the OED in his book Keywords: “all dictionary definitions must be viewed with skepticism and the OED’s ‘massive air of impersonality’ as deceptive” (16). Dominick LaCapra also notes the OED’s tendency to resist smoothing over discrepancies within definitions. He draws on OED definitions of “experience” in History in Transit (39–44). 5. The OED offers definition 2.d. as well, “In weaker sense: One who suffers some injury, hardship, or loss, is badly treated or taken advantage of, etc.” which I have already integrated into my “weak” readings of the “stronger” sense (2.b. and 2.c.). 6. A collection of central articles and excerpts from texts dealing with the growing field of victimology within the discipline of criminal justice are collected in Paul Rock. A book such as George Rudé’s Criminal and Victim: Crime and Society in Early Nineteenth Century England offers statistics on the proportion of urban to rural crimes and the class affiliation of criminals (laboring and working classes) as well as on the victims of theft and assault (middle or upper class) in Gloucester, Sussex, and London. However, it tells us little about the psychological or cultural effects which come about with the emergence of a group that experiences itself as victimized. In other words, such a study hews too closely to definition 2.a. of the OED, examining in mathematical fashion the “one who suffers severely in body or property through cruel or oppressive treatment.” 7. Seeing victims as innocent of the harm that has come upon them is necessary in the criminal context. There it is imperative to construct demarcations between innocent victims and guilty victimizers, a delineation that does not

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and often cannot pertain in the cultural sphere. Strict definitions as those James E. Bayley offers simply are not practicable in my context: “People are victims if and only if (1) they have suffered a loss or some significant decrease in well-being unfairly or undeservedly and in such a manner that they were helpless to prevent the loss; (2) the loss has an identifiable cause; and (3) the legal or moral context of the loss entitles the sufferers of the loss to social concern. Someone who deserves a loss is not a victim, for example, a burglar maimed by a householder. Nor is one a victim who incurred a loss fairly, as would an open-eyed speculator in the stock market. Victims must be innocent; they must not be guilty of having contributed to their loss” (53–54). It is clear why Bayley develops such guidelines. He uses this outline of victims and non-victims to develop ideas about who, having suffered harm, can reasonably expect attention from the state or community. He warns against the dangers of vague delimitations and an indiscriminate use of the term: “People repeatedly called victims usually think of themselves as victims, that is, as pitiable, hapless, and disempowered. They can become what they are said to be. A rueful irony of recognition that some groups are victims of social injustice is that self-perception and other-perception of their victimhood work to perpetuate that very victimhood” (58). 8. For criticism of this view, see Michelle Wasserman, “Rape: Breaking the Silence,” Victimology (231–35). See also Susan Brison’s profoundly moving Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, in which she charts her experiences of victim-precipitation attitudes and her quest for philosophical methods of dealing with rape. 9. Perhaps the shift to a blame-the-victim stance toward women who have come forward to prosecute their attackers does have a larger importance, of interest to me later: as society on the one hand comes to see itself as increasingly victimized, it tends to fend off the suggestion that it could be so. The tendency to blame the victim could be seen as a collectively unconscious resistance to such a general societal trend. In a different context, see Walklate’s chapter relating to corporate victimization (81–107). 10. Another, earlier essay devoted to a then still young field in criminal justice, entitled “Victimology: A New Territory in Criminology” (1974), also describes the movement away from assuming a victim’s a priori innocence. In a Foucauldian twist, victimology justifies increased surveillance and engenders the pre-emptive blaming of the victim. Although the victim is not legally guilty of an actual crime, responsibility for any injury and a vague, metaphorical guilt are displaced onto him or her: “Once the stereotype of the innocent and unsuspecting victim has proved to be false, it has seemed natural to plan measures that are supposed to change the behavior of the victims, rather than that of the offenders. It has become possible to demand that potential victims should use special safety locks, introduce television surveillance in shops and similar technical devices, or insure themselves against burglaries” (Antilla 6). The article goes on to warn of the dangers of this approach, such as the exclusive focus on crimes where a potential victim is easily discernible (this is certainly only one of many problems with this view!). “Victimology” draws our attention to the twentieth century’s on-going concern with the victim’s perceived innocence.

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11. Cf. Von Hentig’s statement: “The collusion between perpetrator and victim is a fundamental fact of criminology. Of course there is no understanding or conscious participation, but there is interaction and an interchange of causative elements” (436). 12. This is a substantial shift, to be sure, from the time when victims first came to light as a classifiable category at all in the late nineteenth century, namely as indices to improved crime statistics. The move further decouples the victim and criminal duo; originally, only where there was a criminal could there be a victim (Rock xi–xix). Martha Minnow points out that even so-called victimless crimes such as suicide and drug abuse inflict injury on others (1415). 13. In the Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit), some German historians argued that fascism had to be interpreted with Communism as a counterpart; i.e., Hitler’s aggressive policies could only be understood in light of Stalin’s. Historians such as Ernst Nolte argued that Germans’ ability to imagine themselves as potential victims could account for some of the terrible crimes perpetrated in Nazi Germany. As Charles Maier has shown, what was at stake in the efforts to dispute the non-comparability of the Holocaust were questions of what German identity and German nationhood could mean. At the end of his discussion, he argues that changing politics of memory brought about a re-evaluation of victimhood as a desirable asset in the 1980s (164–68). Also see Baldwin. 14. On more recent discussions of German suffering, see W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur), in which he relates the relative silence on German suffering during the air raids of World War II to an ambivalent sense of Germanness. In his foreword, Sebald argues that the moral discrediting of Germans and the precarious position of intellectuals in society after the war engendered particular kinds of literary works. A strange “half-consciousness” or “false consciousness” of the conditions in German cities characterized these stories (ix). 15. Minnow argues that the introduction of victim impact statements into criminal cases counters the efforts made to reform the criminal justice system and defendants’ rights (1416–17). She highlights the odd nature of victimology and how it may actually lead to the “blaming the victim” syndrome it wants to avoid. In this context, she makes mention of another classic study that I cannot treat in detail, William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim. 16. Minnow’s article runs the gamut of cases where such victim rhetoric is at work: affirmative action, hate speech, academic canon debates, or family violence come under scrutiny. 17. About the “victim talk world,” Minnow writes: “ [...] people exchange testimonials of pain in a contest over who suffered more. Paradoxically, this blurs distinctions between degrees of harm, leveling all suffering to the same undifferentiated plane of equal seriousness and triviality” (1430). 18. She herself confesses as much, when she offers her ‘either-and’ story at the end (1442–45). Minnow’s locutions deserve attention, since she shifts the terms of the debate somewhat from jockeying for victim status to the viewer’s response vis-à-vis victims. “To purchase the image of the victim,” she writes, “is to purchase the opportunity to be privately moved by images

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

NOTES

of victims and their suffering, but to do nothing about it. The stories of victims are attractive because they arouse attractive emotions. Possessing some aspect of victims’ lives can engender a sense of one’s capacity to respond, whether or not that capacity is exercised in any practical way” (1414). While she is ostensibly speaking about the buying of a towel, emblazoned with the images from the Broadway version of Hugo’s Les Misérables, she is also speaking about the hold or position achieved (purchase in the metaphorical sense) when one allies oneself with a victim—without being one. Clearly, there is a power advantage in seeing oneself as a victim, and in imagining a certain moral superiority through a sense of empathy or sympathy with a victim. See Carolyn Dever, who writes: “The shift from passivity to activity, from victim to master, characterizes the origin of psychoanalytic subjectivity.” The “fort-da” game, e.g., becomes a revenge narrative, in which a sense of abandonment is linked to an ambivalent celebration of survival (4). In the other example in the Interpretation of Dreams using the first-person singular, Freud speaks of being victim of a “painful complaint which made movement of any kind a torture to me” (5: 480–81). There are more masculine pronouns (I counted ten uses of “he,” “his,” and “man”) than feminine ones (eight occurrences of “she,” “herself,” “Veronika”), suggesting that victimization is not necessarily predominant among women. It occurs in the singular in Totem and Taboo (13: 147 twice, 149, 101, 138); Moses and Monotheism (23: 135 twice), and in the plural in The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words (11: 156) as well as Totem (13: 136). On the publication history, see Grubrich-Simitis, Back to Freud’s Texts (191–203) and her Freud’s Moses-Studie. See also Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, esp. 115, n. 21. Indeed, it is alluring to quote Freud himself when it comes to this doubled meaning. In Totem he writes: “The use of the same word for the two kinds of relation (of contiguity and similarity) is no doubt accounted for by some identity in the psychical processes concerned which we have not yet grasped” (13: 85). The psychoanalyst’s German is, admittedly, a bit more sober than Strachey’s words (“Stellen wir uns nun die Szene einer solchen Totemmahlzeit vor […]” [9: 169]), but the translation captures the drama of Freud’s mise en scène. On the negative epithets used to characterize victims see Bayley 58 and my n. 7 earlier. A. L. Kroeber wrote a severe review of the text, one he ultimately toned down; see his “Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis,” American Anthropologist 22 (1920): 48–55. Robertson Smith’s sacrificial totem meal is the exception rather than the norm, as Freud himself admits later in Moses 131. On the fallacy of the anthropological, biological, and genetic assumptions underpinning Freud’s four essays, see Derek Freeman’s article “Totem and Taboo: A Reappraisal” (53–78). See also Yerushalmi’s Chapter 5, “Monologue with Freud” (81–100) and Paul (esp. 1–36). More recently, Paul has argued that Robertson Smith’s readings in The Religion of

NOTES

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

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the Semites (1894) are plausible (121–23). Paul has also taken to task what appear to be over-hasty ascriptions of Lamarckism to Freud’s Totem essays: only a single sentence, formulated in a highly cautionary manner, alludes to the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristic (172, cf. 13: 158). See Peter Gay’s chapter “Foundations of Society” (324–35) and Paul (5–16). Cf. Paul’s account of the competing triadic Darwinian schema and the dyadic Hegelian one underpinning Freud’s scenario of the conflicts in the primal horde (17–23). Strachey, who emphasizes “a sense of superior strength” rather than “superiority” in general (13: 141–42), translates Freud’s comment on Atkinson more freely: “Thus any new organization of society would be precluded” (13: 142 n.1). In Totem, Freud writes: “The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. [...] They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too” (13: 142–43) (“Der gewalttätige Urvater war gewiß das beneidete und gefürchtete Vorbild eines jeden aus der Brüderschar gewesen. [...] Sie haßten den Vater, der ihrem Machtbedürfnis und ihren sexuellen Ansprüchen so mächtig im Wege stand, aber sie liebten und bewunderten ihn auch” [9: 171–73]). For a discussion of iterability in relation to the “form of life” in Judaism, see Santner (esp. 7, 23–24). See also Freud’s references in Totem and Taboo to “private property” (13: 138) (“Privateigentum” [9: 167]) and to guilt in bourgeois life (“bürgerlichen Lebens” [9: l87]). James Strachey translates this rather loosely as “everyday life” (13: 156). Freud’s wording carries more positive overtones than Strachey’s: twice the psychoanalyst speaks of a “Brüderschar” (9: 171–72), which is more like Strachey’s “company” than “mob” (13: 141–42). For German speakers, the word “Schar” often occurs as a way to designate an amicable group, such as children. As Freud himself stresses, there is a homoerotic component to life amongst brothers (13: 174). On discourses of homosexuality, the construction of “manly,” heterosexual Judaism in Moses, see Boyarin (244–70). See Strachey’s translation (13: 133). See Tabu 9: 162; 163; 186. For Robert Paul, Freud moves backward from the Communion of the Catholic mass, with the ingestion of the body of Christ, to reconstruct the primal feast (8). As a result of being so thoroughly surrounded by Viennese Catholicism, Paul argues, Freud could take the cannibalism of the band of brothers for granted. Only two pages in The Descent of Man before the quotation Freud incorporates, Darwin writes: “Besides the evidence derived from the terms of relationship, other lines of reasoning indicate the former wide prevalence of communal marriage. Sir J. Lubbock ingeniously accounts for the strange

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38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

NOTES

and widely extended habit of exogamy,—that is, the men of one tribe always taking wives from a distinct tribe,—by communism having been the original form of marriage […]” (360). The term also occurs in Atkinson’s 1903 description of the patricide in Primal Law: “A horde [...] would, when strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by combined attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life from the paternal tyrant. But they themselves, after brief communistic enjoyment, would be segregated anew by the fierce fire of sexual jealousy, each survivor of the slaughter relapsing into lonely sovereignty” (qtd. in Wallace 95). The Strachey quotation does not use the 1871 edition of The Descent of Man, from which Freud draws (where the quotation is on p. 362). He uses a later edition, where the possibility of monogamy is downplayed. Freud cites V. Carus’s translation, which draws on Darwin’s first edition. Cf. Darwin 361. Darwin I: 100–04, I: 161–66, II: 392–93. See, e.g., the dynamics of Darwin’s “horde”: “In order that primeval men, or the ape-like progenitors of man, should have become social, they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings which impel other animals to live in a body; and they no doubt exhibited the same general disposition. They would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades, for whom they would have felt some degree of love; they would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defense. All this implies some degree of sympathy, fidelity, and courage” (161–62). All later efforts to reinstate that absolute difference fail, since no son can later take on the father’s role (13: 144). Cf. Paul 17–18. See also Adorno and Horkheimer’s allusion to Freud’s term in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I will be discussing in section four (9). As Santner notes, scholars have been keen to historicize Freud’s texts relating to Judaism (Moses in particular) to salvage its good ‘core’ from the less palatable aspects. However, while scholars such as Santner, Paul, Yerushalmi, Gilman, or Boyarin have been interested in reading Freud’s work in relation to Judaism and Jewishness, I will side with Carl Schorske in arguing that the political tensions in Austria-Hungary are relevant to my argument (181–207). Admittedly, national politics are often difficult to separate from the anti-Semitism of the time. Derrida makes much of Freud’s self-questioning and expressions of humility in Moses in Archive Fever (Mal d’Archive) (7–10). I develop these ideas in chapter 4. Freud quotes Robertson Smith in English (16: 183, emphasis in original). Santner argues that Freud takes the opposite path in his Moses twenty years later: rather than react to danger through self-aggrandizement, Freud radically calls into question any primacy of the Jewish people and Judaism. In Santner’s words: In a sense, Freud models a response to crisis that was diametrically opposed to what he was seeing all around him in Germany and Austria;

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while his Christian compatriots were busy fashioning themselves as original and pure Aryans by means of a narcissistic identification with Hitler and the grandiose fantasy of a millennial Reich, Freud introduced ‘impurity’ and secondariness into the heart of Jewish cultural identity by suggesting that Jewish ethnogenesis begins with the contingent act of a wilful Egyptian priest. (7)

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

Santner goes on to problematize this reading of Freud, showing how Freud injures this narcissism only to recuperate it on a higher, symbolic level, when the Jewish people are shown to be spiritually superior (15–18). The Grimm Dictionary lists first the religious sacrifice and then the metaphorical meanings of “Opfer,” with reference to the voluntary and painful nature of the action undertaken: “(3) a) von personen, die (einem tier- oder menschenopfer ähnlich) wofür büszend und sühnend untergehn oder wenigstens ein übel erdulden, die gewaltsam oder freiwillig wofür preisgegeben, aufgeopfert werden (...) b) von sachen und abstractionen, ␣) die einem opfer gleich dargebracht oder angenommen werden (...) ␤) besonders etwas mit entbehrung oder entsagung dargebrachtes oder erlittenes” (1293–96, esp. 1295–96). The definition of the noun Opfer in the Wahrig Wörterbuch states: “Gabe für die Gottheit (Tier-, Trank-); unter schmerzl. Verzicht gebrachte Spende; schmerzl. Verzicht zugunsten eines anderen Menschen; jmd., der eine Missetat od. ein Übel erdulden muß.” The verb form “opfern” is defined as: “für andere hingeben, schmerzlich verzichten auf, spenden, obgleich es schwerfällt” (2631). In the Duden, the situation is similar. The first definition stresses the cultic meaning, “in einer kultischen Handlung vollzogene Hingabe von jmdm., etw. an eine Gottheit;” the second definition the metaphorical meaning, “durch persönlichen Verzicht mögliche Hingabe von etw. zugunsten eines anderen.” The third relates to physical injury: “jmd., der durch jmdn., etw. umkommt, Schaden erleidet” (2806). Strachey’s translation is: “The non-religious usage of the word followed from this subsidiary sense of ‘renunciation’ ” (13: 133). “Id” (“Es”) is a term Freud will only use in 1923. His focus on the self toward the end of his four German essays is worth noting (e.g., “Selbstentäußerung” [9: 181]; “Selbstopferung” [9: 182]). Cf. Strachey’s English translation (13: 150–51). Cf. Santner 18. On the male bonding in the early twentieth century including in National Socialism see Bernd Widdig (11–72). In his monograph, Yerushalmi elaborates on the historical compulsion that helped Moses and Monotheism into existence. He also highlights an aspect some Freud readers have neglected, namely that the dialectic Freud establishes between monotheistic religions only privileges Christianity over Judaism to a degree (in respect to the return of the repressed). In many other ways, Pauline Christianity is actually a regression to an earlier, less intellectual, more superstitious mode of belief (1–55, esp. 21, 50–53). On

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56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

NOTES

the relationship between the Moses text and National Socialist persecution, see also Caruth, Unclaimed 10–24, esp. 12–13. Cf. Moses 23: 86–88. As Freud replaces a father-religion with a son-religion promising absolution and redemption, he also changes Jesus’ status: the usual victim status accorded to Jesus Christ is subverted (Yerushalmi 38–39). Jesus is not important as the founder of a new religion, but as a sacrificial victim. Freud makes him into a culpable, rather than an innocent one: in Freud’s interpretation, the sacrifice must be carried out on a guilty individual, for only a person responsible for murder could offer himself to be sacrificed. Freud speculates that Jesus must have been “the most guilty person, the ringleader of the company of brothers who had overpowered their father” (23: 87) (“der Hauptschuldige, der Anführer der Brüderbande, die den Vater überwältigt hatte” [16: 193]). Other readings than the one I offer could be pursued here, of a more speculative nature. An individual responsible for wrongdoing—the worst victimizer, in other words—allows his own victimization, his self-sacrifice, in order to uphold the image of a victim society, for which (as we have seen) spectacle and self-dramatization are crucial. The paradoxical double nature of Jesus as simultaneously innocent and guilty allows Jesus’ own usurpation of the father’s role (cf. 23: 136). What is more, his sacrifice ushers in a complete revolution in socio-cultural dynamics. As Freud delineates Christianity from Judaism (seeming to draw on Nietzsche), it becomes clear that a new, more powerful victim narrative spreads through the masses, enabling syncretism between various religions, and forming heterogeneous attachments. Freud speaks of “deferred obedience” (“nachträgliche[m] Gehorsam[…]” [9: 173]) in Totem and Taboo, in order to explain the sons’ post-murder reevaluation of the dead father and their upholding of his prescriptions (143). So Freud’s statement in Moses that Judaism had been a “religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son” (16: 88) (“[...] Vaterreligion gewesen, das Christentum wurde eine Sohnesreligion” [23: 194]) is only valid to an extent. Christianity actually became a religion of the son qua father. Cf. Yerushalmi, who in making his argument for the applicability of a fratricidal rather than patricidal model, a “Cain complex” rather than an Oedipal complex, argues that both Judaism and Christianity are “son-religions” in respect to the “maternal” Torah (92). While I only borrow loosely from Santner’s insightful reading of Freud’s Moses in October, it is worth summarizing his argument here. For Santner, Freud demonstrates the “ ‘pagan’ excesses” animating Jewish thought: within the domain of the law, of paternal, superego injunctions that enjoin ethical commandments on the Jewish people, there remains a pleasurable “secretion of jouissance” (16–17). This kernel animates the symbolic order and binds individuals to the law and its normative claims. The universalization that Freud implies with “progress in spirituality” is dependent on what Santner describes as the “surplus vitality immanent in the universal, in its contingent formulation” (18). For Santner, at least in the first half of his argument, Judaism seems to become the contingent carrier of the question of ethico-political universals in communal life (any other religious group, one infers, could have been chosen to embody a similar relationship to the law).

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61. Human society manages to transmute this impulse toward eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth violence. Freud singles out the Christian religion and the relationship between God and Jesus Christ as a case of such transmutation. In the relationship between Father and Son (and in the covenant between Christians and their God), the desire for bloody sacrifice has been inverted and introjected. Jesus’ death on the cross atones for the past crime of patriarchal murder (23: 154). 62. Cf. Moses 23: 135. 63. This is one way of explaining the different approaches to what Dominick LaCapra calls “extreme or limit events” such as the Holocaust (see chapter 7). The first approach he delineates involves a kind of Hegelian mode, which would make sense of and redeem even the greatest experiences of loss (such as the Holocaust). The second perspective, which he associates with poststructuralist theories, would disqualify any redemptory interpretations and sees any redemption as under erasure or endlessly deferred. These two approaches do not coincide with the relationship I outline here between truth claims of victims against those of victimizers, although they may be seen as contiguous. See his chapter “Approaching Limit Events,” History 144–94, esp. 145–55. 64. In contradistinction to Strachey, who uses the more benign “groups” to indicate Freud’s “Massen,” I use the more direct “mass.” Strachey furthermore speaks of “groups” by whom intolerance is “exhibited”: “[...] the intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones” (Moses 23: 91). While German certainly allows for more passive formulations than English, Freud’s German is in this instance quite specifically active. 65. See Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, which remains the definitive study on the Frankfurt School, and its chapter on Freud’s influence (86–112). For those seeking an introduction to Adorno and Horkheimer’s incorporation of Freud into their work, see Sherratt 50–69. Friedrich W. Schmidt also discusses the influence of Freud on Adorno and Horkheimer in an essay entitled “Die Vergeblichkeit des Opfers und die Irrealität des Todes.” Schmidt maintains that the German philosophers do not go far enough in their analyses; while they focus on man’s effort to separate himself from the nature of which he is a part, they should have followed Freud and confronted man’s denial of death (142–53). 66. Cf. Schmid Noerr, who in an effort to update his earlier project on the actuality of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, writes in 2006: “The exchange implicit in sacrifice already becomes a non-equivalent exchange of equivalents through fraud, in which Marx later saw the essence of capitalist relations of domination” (“Der im Opfer enthaltene Tausch wird durch die List schon zum nichtäquivalenten Äquivalententausch, in dem dann später Marx das Wesen kapitalistischer Herrschaftsverhältnisse erblickt” [“Sechzig”]). 67. Scholars have been at pains to resuscitate Adorno and Horkheimer’s text from Jürgen Habermas’s influential 1985 criticism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne [130–57]), where he claims that the text falls prey to a totalizing, skeptical thrust (106–30). These interventions, while I do not have the opportunity to integrate them here, are

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68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

NOTES

worthy of note and influence the last segment of my Adorno and Horkheimer discussion. See in particular Schmid Noerr, “Sechzig.” I also do not have the opportunity to delve further into the connections between Freud’s “Entäußerung” and its relation to Adorno’s reification and alienation, on which Habermas comments critically. See Friedhelm Lövenich’s subchapter, “Gesellschaftstheoretische Grobheiten,” esp. 35–41. Adorno and Horkheimer’s well-known statement goes as follows: “The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice” (43) (“Die Geschichte der Zivilisation ist die Geschichte der Introversion des Opfers” [79]). See their two statements connecting sacrifice, rationality, and deception— both are a “mark” or “stigma” (“Mal”): “the institution of sacrifice is itself the mark of an historical catastrophe” (41) (“die Institution des Opfers selber ist das Mal einer historischen Katastrophe” [75]) and “Fraud was the stigma of reason” (49) (“Betrug war das Mal der Ratio” [86]). This is, to be sure, a particular affective position from which it becomes impossible to allocate responsibility to others: we are always already inside, so to speak. Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom socialization means alienation (49). Cf. Paul 124. Sacrifice marks man’s attempt to abrogate nature’s power over him. Pretending to honor the deities he has projected outside himself into nature through sacrifice, he actually topples those godheads (56). Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer a bit later in their excursus, where in their examination of the Polyphemus episode, they argue that the priest/victim Odysseus must make himself disappear when he declares himself to be “Nobody”: “This adaptation to death through language contains the schema of modern mathematics” (48) (“Solche Anpassung ans Tote durch die Sprache enthält das Schema der modernen Mathematik” [84]). Cf. Schmid Noerr, “Sechzig.” Adorno and Horkheimer return to the thoughts articulated in their introduction toward the middle of the first excursus to forestall any suspicion that they may be of an ilk with the irrationalists they condemn: “[T]he self is precisely the human being to whom the magic power of representation is no longer attributed. The formation of the self severs the fluctuating connection with nature which the sacrifice of the self is supposed to establish. Each sacrifice is a restoration of the past, and is given the lie by the historical reality in which it is performed” (“[D]as Selbst ist gerade der Mensch, dem nicht mehr magische Kraft der Stellvertretung zugetraut wird. Die Konstitution des Selbst durchschneidet eben jenen fluktuierenden Zusammenhang mit der Natur, den das Opfer des Selbst herzustellen beansprucht. Jedes Opfer ist eine Restauration, die von der geschichtlichen Realität Lügen gestraft wird, in der man sie unternimmt”). However, they do seek to recuperate a moment prior to the dialectic of victim and victimizer they describe, and their usual certainty seems to desert them: “That untruth may not have been always only untruth” (41) (“Vielleicht ist jene Unwahrheit nicht stets nur Unwahrheit gewesen” [75]).

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Chapter 1 Politics of Indifference: René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk 1. On the questionable elevation of excess and transgression see LaCapra, in particular his lengthy commentary on readings of Georges Bataille (153–54 n.10). 2. A spate of recent books engage substantively with Girard’s thought, while criticizing certain failures within Girard’s anti-systematic system. See John Vignaux Smyth’s The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory, Michael Kirwan’s Discovering Girard, and Charles K. Bellinger’s The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil. See also James G. Williams’s The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred and Richard J. Golsan’s René Girard and Myth. Chris Fleming, defying the published evidence to the contrary, argues that Girard’s work is currently marginalized in the academy. See his introduction and conclusion to René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (1–8, 152–64). In a review for the journal First Things, J. Bottum describes what he perceives as Girard’s waning stock among the literary critics and renewed popularity among thinkers of religion (42–45). 3. For all his foregrounded differences from Freud, Girard admits his great debt to Freud’s theories (e.g., 215). Freud’s view, as I have tried to show, does not amount to a disavowal of victimization. 4. In the most controversial feature of his oeuvre, Girard accords the Bible an important role in escaping sacrificial mechanisms and in this differs most significantly from Freud. Cf. Golsan, “The Bible: Antidote to Myth” (85–107) and Bellinger, “The Problem of Christian Violence” (98–112). In his most recent and problematic work, I See Satan Falling Like Lightning, Girard examines the role of Christianity as a mechanism to circumvent the sacrificial process, continuing a line of reasoning he began earlier. 5. See Girard’s chapter in Violence entitled “Totem and Taboo and the Incest Prohibition,” in which he carefully analyzes Freud’s theory in light of his own ideas about surrogate victims (193–222). 6. See Kofman 36–45 and Golsan 107–28. 7. Girard does allow that there is no such thing as absolutely pure violence; one should rather speak of a purifying violence (Violence 40). 8. Over against Girard’s later, specifically Christian concern, he writes in Violence: “Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence” (23, emphasis in translation) (“Le religieux au sens large, ne fait qu’un, sans doute, avec cette obscurité qui enveloppe en définitive toutes les ressources de l’homme contre sa propre violence” [42]). 9. In English, “indifferentiation” is the translator’s neologism (e.g., 253), and I will use it in single quotations when I would like to stress a semantic contiguity (such as with the word “indifference”). At times, I use the more customary “dedifferentiation” as an equivalent. 10. Also see I See Satan Falling Like Lightning, where Girard discusses the illusions and the illusionism behind modern individualism (20).

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11. In a comparison to which I will have occasion to return in chapter 6 by way of Giorgio Agamben’s work, Girard sees Kafka’s texts on the law as the most perfect corollary for the modern situation (189). In Girard’s view, Kafkaesque parables, rather than Freudian psychoanalysis or Nietzschean ressentiment, describe the condition in which law is suddenly everywhere, which has “run wild” (“devenue folle” 261). 12. Girard fleshes out the concept of the double-bind and its relation to mimesis in “To double business bound.” 13. Cf. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, where justice is a direct outgrowth of the social organizations that come after the patriarch’s murder (82). 14. On this trend, see Ran Hirschl’s recent Towards Juristocracy. 15. This victimization, in Girard’s view, has many different sources: a loss of status, an infringement of rights, an obstacle to desire’s gratification, a perceived threat to one’s culture. 16. See especially Girard’s chapters “Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim” (78–85) and “The Origins of Myth and Ritual” (89–118, 99–101). 17. In discussing the case of the primal murder, Girard asserts that the unanimity that the murder creates is paramount; the victim’s identity per se leaves little, if any, impression on the community (214). For a summary of the process Girard describes see Fages, who argues that the human sacrifice creates a pacifying unanimity (72). 18. This longer paragraph containing these terms is not present in the original French version, and no explanation is given in the English translation as to its addition. 19. The fifth meaning is the “fact of not mattering, or making no difference; unimportance; an instance or thing of unimportance” and the sixth and final definition reads: “freedom of thought or choice; equal power to take either of two courses” (OED 1993, 1349). 20. If we refine Girard’s scenario for our present day, an “absence of care or concern” is present vis-à-vis the surrogate victim, who like a lightning rod diverts violence away from the closed social group. A lack of care is palpable between the antagonistic group members, whose convergence on a victim is driven by a wish to defuse negative emotions. In this sense, we could add the “indifference point” to the roster of words relating to difference and indifference to clarify what occurs in the sacrificial act. “Indifference point” has a psychological definition, taken from Schelling and Hegel, to describe “a position or value between two continua of experience, such as a temperature that is experienced as neither warm nor cold, or a feeling-value that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant” (def. 3.b. of the OED 1989, 864). The indifference point, in my interpretation of Girard, could designate that moment at which the conflicting parties realize that their heated feelings for the other side can be neutralized—by directing their attention toward the surrogate victim. The moment of paroxysm is, presumably, not quite as cathartic as it is in Girard’s model with its explosion of emotion. It is more a matter of reaching a homogeneous state, when a “feeling-value that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant” compensates for the lack of “active feeling” for one another. 21. Ludger Lütkehaus wittily describes Sloterdijk’s slack citation method as a technique in relation to the philosopher’s novel, The Magic Tree

NOTES

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

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(Der Zauberbaum); the liberal use of others’ material is meant to engender a feeling of déjà lu. Compare also, in Lütkehaus’s reading, the interpretation of the novel’s vertical tower as a masculine, egocentric principle that must be overcome in favor of a more horizontal, maternal paradigm (162–63). Cf. Girard, Violence 188. For a nuanced discussion of apocalyptic modern temporalities, see Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, esp. “The Modern Apocalypse” 93–126. In the works of Michael Haneke and Elfriede Jelinek, the vocabulary of the game is picked up to complicate and partially negate the legacy of Schillerian aesthetics (see chapters 2 and 7). Sloterdijk here borrows liberally from Baudrillard, particularly from The Transparency of Evil. In an essay collection devoted to visions of the future from the perspective of the late twentieth century, Before the Turn of the Millennium: Reports on the State of the Future (Vor der Jahrtausendwende: Berichte zur Lage der Zukunft), Sloterdijk warns of the problems of all-too-apocalyptic visions of the future. As Uwe Steiner has noted in his discussion of Spheres, Sloterdijk notably avoids reference to Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, while engaging with the admired predecessor’s work (60). The same could be said for Contempt of the Masses. A detailed discussion about the interrelations goes beyond my scope here. On the ability to discriminate see Bieri 15. In a Spiegel issue from 2005, a plethora of articles deal with the issue of German suffering in World War II; see esp. Leinemann (10–18) and the interview with historian Norbert Frei “Gebirge an Schuld” (46–49). On the relationship between German memory and victimhood, see also Andreas Huyssen’s essay on W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (138–57). See Peter Sloterdijk’s book-length interview with Carlos Oliveira in Selbstversuch. See his afterword to the highly controversial Rules for the Human Park: A Reply to Heideggers Letter on Humanism (Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus [57–60]), in which he takes to task media misreaders (“Falschleser” [59]). Sloterdijk’s text can be read as a part of his ongoing interest in the role of narcissism as an important motivating factor in human behavior. While in The Contempt of the Masses the role of a socially shared narcissism is central— with the desire for respect and admiration—he has more recently looked at the role of language and narcissism in social relations. See his About the Improvement of the Good News: Nietzsche’s Fifth Gospel (Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht: Nietzsches fünftes Evangelium), where he argues that contemporary mass culture relies on self-praise. Such praise is de-coupled from any “higher criteria for admiration” (“höheren Bewunderungskriterien”) and is linked to “primitive elation” (“primitiven Hochgefühlen”) of a complicitous public (23). On the role of parity in Girard, see Livingston 152. Sloterdijk writes: “The critics of naively lauded globalization have astutely pointed out that the world market produces more exclusion on the whole

206

35.

36.

37.

38.

NOTES

than inclusion” (“Die Kritiker der naiv gelobten Globalisierung haben zu recht darauf aufmerksam gemacht, daß der Weltmarkt im Ganzen mehr Exklusion als Inklusion produziert [...]” [253–54]). In Before the Turn of the Millennium (Vor der Jahrtausendwende), Sloterdijk writes about the necessary “pluralization of future events” (“die Pluralisierung des Zukünftigen” [9]) in light of continuing individualization and increasing regionalization. Since I discuss definitions 3.b. and 7 relating to the “indifference point” earlier and do not look at the “indifference curve” (def. 8), I have not included these definitions in my list (864). The obverse of “Verachtung” would be “Achtung,” or respect. The latter is derived, as the Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz argues, from the durative verb “achten,” signifying an ongoing action: we respect someone or something for an unlimited temporal span. The addition of the prefix “ver” and the suffix “ung” to “achten” brings to an end this action of endowing someone or something with a specific positive quality: “Respect is thus at an end, when contempt enters the scene” (“Das Achten ist also zu Ende, wenn die Verachtung eintritt”). Streeruwitz brings up a synonym for “verachten,” which is more pertinent to the condition I find in Haneke’s narratives (chapter 2), namely “mißachten.” While she offers the two as equivalents, the verb “mißachten” (or, in its new spelling, “missachten”)—often translated into English as “disrespect”—entails something else than the scorn or hatred of contempt. It suggests withholding respect on purpose; it means not recognizing the other by an act of will. See Streeruwitz’s speech, “About Contempt. Or. Why I Would Rather Not Have Taken the Prize. Or. Why I Will Continue to Play Lotto” (“Über Verachtung. Oder. Warum ich den Preis lieber nicht nehmen wollte. Oder. Warum ich weiter Lotto spielen werde” [64–65]). Honneth’s essay, “Invisibility: Towards the Moral Epistemology of ‘Recognition’ ” (“Unsichtbarkeit: Über die moralische Epistemologie von ‘Anerkennung’ ”), helps clarify the dynamics involved in disrespect and why it can be perceived as a form of severe victimization (see also chapter 2). The essay begins the discussion of social invisibility by way of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man. How is it done, Honneth asks, the “making invisible” from which the black protagonist suffers at the hands of his white countrymen? There is a performative component involved in a lack of perception, Honneth argues, to which the I-narrator is subjected: someone intentionally disregards another person who is physically visible. Arguing that social visibility means more than the act of perception or the ability to perceive (“Wahrnehmbarkeit” [12]), Honneth asks about the elements that have to be added to the mere act of cognition (“Erkennen”), so a person deems himself recognized in a social sense (“Anerkennung”). He comes to the conclusion that a subject can only be sure of his social visibility if others react to his existence with appropriate gestures, words, or facial expressions. A lack of such expressions implies the opposite. The public character of social invisibility is related to the absence of the expressive gestures generally associated with individual identification (15). See also Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (Kampf um Anerkennung), where he expands

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these reflections in discussions of Hegel, Mead, and others, and his essay “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality Based on a Theory of Recognition” (247–60). It is a translation of “Integrität und Mißachtung. Grundmotive einer anerkennungstheoretischen Moralkonzeption,” Honneth’s inaugural lecture at the Department of Philosophy, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, June 28, 1990, also published as “Integrität und Mißachtung: Grundmotive einer Moral der Anerkennung” (1043–54). 39. See Honneth’s chapter, “Personal Identity and Disrespect: The Violation of the Body, the Denial of Rights, and the Denigration of Ways of Life,” in Struggle for Recognition (131–39). 40. Michel Houellebecq’s writing will problematize Honneth’s views on the undesirability of indifferent qualities (chapter 6). For Honneth, building on Kantian conceptions of “Achtung,” one’s lack of a sense of value is correlated to the lack of self-esteem as a valued member of society. See also Joel Anderson’s introduction, x–xxi. 41. Girard distinguishes between different types of mimesis, such as acquisitive and conflictual mimesis (cf. Livingston 103–34). These distinctions are not relevant to my discussion.

Chapter 2 Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke 1. In the introduction to his book about Michael Haneke’s early films, Jörg Metelmann discusses attempts to transcend traditional sociology, which searches for violence’s underlying reasons, toward a sociological model that looks at the socially constitutive role of violence (esp. 15–29). 2. Schematism is often associated with Haneke’s characters. See Hrachovec 294, Yates 41–42, and Gauß 56–57. 3. As Masson has remarked with reference to Haneke’s Austrian nationality, this kind of violence, constituting an inalterable social make-up, has its model in World War II films devoted to the courteous and implacable Nazi officers (40). 4. In a much-debated and criticized scene, Paul reaches for the remote control, rewinding Funny Games, to bring Peter (shot to death) back to life. See Gauß 55, Frodon, and Rouyer 38. 5. See Haneke’s interview with Gernot Zimmermann: “It is the transition between coercion and becoming guilty oneself, the motor of our life that affects all. I try to capture the ambiguity of our life between victim and perpetrator” (“Es ist der Übergang zwischen Genötigtsein und Selber-schuldig-Werden, der Motor unseres Lebens, der alle betrifft. Die Ambiguität unseres Lebens zwischen Opfer und Täter versuche ich einzufangen”). 6. On the Trilogy’s occasional descriptive title, see Phillip “Ankläger,” Knorr 117–18, Rybarski 92, and Holden C14. 7. In his prize-winning adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s satirical novel, The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin), Haneke situates the victim-victimizer

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dynamic largely within claustrophobic mother-daughter and daughter-student relationships. For this reason, I do not treat it here. 8. In his groundbreaking monograph on Michael Haneke, Jörg Metelmann briefly alludes to Girard’s theories and this paradox, but also relates the paradoxical nature of violence to Focault’s, Derrida’s, and Koselleck’s theories via the systems theorist Dirk Baecker (15–23). 9. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard relates this perception of external violence to the idea of demonic possession, monstrous doubling, and victimization: The subject watches the monstrosity that takes shape within him and outside him simultaneously. In his efforts to explain what is happening to him, he attributes the origin of the apparition to some exterior cause. [...] The subject feels that the most intimate regions of his being have been invaded by a supernatural creature who also besieges him [from-F.N.] without. Horrified, he finds himself the victim of a double assault to which he cannot respond. (165) (Le sujet verra la monstruosité se manifester en lui et hors de lui en même temps. Il doit interpréter tant bien que mal ce qui lui arrive et il va nécessairement situer l’origine du phénomène hors de lui-même. [...] Le sujet se sent pénétré, envahi, au plus intime de son être, par une créature surnaturelle qui l’assiège également du dehors. [230]) Cf. chapter 1. 10. For example, clues strewn throughout the “thriller” Funny Games let us hope the family will survive. 11. Haneke stresses the importance of sound over the visual in an interview with Serge Toubiana at the end of the French DVD of Benny’s Video. 12. See Lefort and Péron, Masson 39–40, and Frodon. 13. Qtd. in Metelmann 32, emphasis in original. See also Suppan, esp. 91–97. 14. On trauma and temporality in the media, see Elsaesser 193–201. 15. See Grissemann “Plötzlich,” Vogler 41–42, and Zimmermann. 16. “Clinical” is an adjective that recurs in discussions of Haneke’s work. Brenez argues for Haneke’s “clinical post-humanism” (“klinischer Posthumanismus” [42]), and Amos Vogel characterizes Benny’s Video as an “ice-cold, brutally clinical study” (69). See also Michael Haneke’s statements in Karl Suppan’s article, “Der wahre Horror liegt im Blick” (88). 17. Emotional glaciation and social anomie are not limited to any specific country, as Haneke has repeatedly stated. See Vogel, “Nonexisting” 73–75. 18. This clinical aspect also strikes me as an outgrowth of the director’s approach to figural characterization. The understated acting style and sparse dialogue between characters have them oscillating between realism and schematism. For a nuanced discussion of the acting style in Haneke’s films, see Metelmann’s chapter, “Verfremdung: Haneke und Brecht” (153–79, esp. 164–65). 19. Only in the last scene does Haneke opt for the easily recognizable concert hall, the Musikverein, largely to capitalize on the symmetrical, rigid outlines of the building. 20. In this respect, Haneke has often emphasized his own debt to the French director Robert Bresson. In an interview with Marcus Rothe,

NOTES

21. 22. 23.

24.

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he claims: “For me, the master of ‘dirty’ images, that’s Robert Bresson, he always manages this small discrepancy which allows his films to be ‘beautiful’ (not ‘aesthetic’!), that is to say ‘true.’ The only thing that is interesting in art is exactness (conciseness)” [“Pour moi, le maître des images ‘sales’, c’est Robert Bresson : il parvient toujours à ce petit décalage qui permettent à ses films d’être ‘beaux’ (pas ‘esthétiques’ !), c’est-à-dire ‘vrais’. La seule chose qui est intéressante dans l’art est l’exactitude (la justesse)”]. On Bresson and Haneke see Monika Leisch-Kiesel (169–86), as well as Haneke’s own reflections in his article “Schrecken und Utopie der Form.” Wolfram Knorr fittingly speaks of “serial images of banality” (“Bildfolgen der Banalität” [117–18]). See Haneke’s comments about this TV-film with Claus Philipp, “Beschreibung” and “Amoklauf.” Regarding this aspect, we might say that Haneke’s portrayal of emotional neglect among the bourgeoisie is everything other than anti-psychological. However, for Haneke it is less a matter of making the individual disappear in the general than of making the general appear in the individual, inflected by standard psychological or sociological patterns (Metelmann 160). Amos Vogel’s indispensable work on Benny’s Video, introducing the director to an American audience, is characteristic of a less jaded view: This ice-cold, brutal study is rendered in powerful images and laconic montage. Dominant social trends of alienation, the ubiquity of our image industries, the emergence of ‘virtual reality,’ and the ever-more‘real’ illusionary power of film and television, Baudrillard’s simulacra and Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ have made it ever more simple to remove oneself from contact with the real world (and its inevitable pains) and to instead enter a chimerical universe of shadows and lights far more dramatic—and less dangerous—than reality itself. (“Nonexisting” 75)

25. Haneke stresses the inadequate nature of sociological and psychological paradigms in an interview with Fritz Grabner (9–18). 26. Of course, the means of victimization may become the means of escape from this victimization: technology and reproduction may awaken a desire for change. 27. Reviewers discussed this aspect in Funny Games a great deal. See James 10, Rooney 12, Romney 6, and Gauß 55. 28. See Peucker’s article, “Fragmentation and the Real: Michael Haneke’s Family Trilogy,” in which she discusses the mediated nature of Benny’s perceptions (176–88). 29. In fact, we are introduced to Benny first through clips from his videos: he films the slaughter of a pig at the parent’s country retreat, then his sister’s party. 30. The withholding of gestures at least partially accounts for the film’s clinical veneer. 31. Sloterdijk here alludes to Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles (Les particules élémentaires).

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32. Jörg Metelmann convincingly claims that the casting of the same actors in similar parts, with Arno Frisch as the young man and Ulrich Mühe as the father in Funny Games, implies the expansion of “Benny’s video” system to all subsequent domains of life (140). 33. Suppan speaks of the “pathology of unmediated perception” (“Pathologie der unmittelbaren Wahrnehmung” [91]). 34. In a short article for the Austrian newspaper, Die Presse, Klaus Unterrieder argues that Funny Games is a call to increase reciprocal sensibility and communication. 35. The inadequacy of mediated interaction also holds true for Benny’s videotape in Egypt, on which he addresses his father about the murder. 36. In an alternative reading, one could view this “whatever” attitude along the lines Giorgio Agamben proposes in The Coming Community (La comunità che viene). Agamben argues that the quodlibet character of being can become the precondition for a human community that transcends predication (being American, being Muslim, etc.). According to Thomas Carl Wall, Agamben redefines the basis of community, such that “each being occupies a particular place that is radically called in question as it opens onto another space where each being is always already substituted for another being who is in an always other place” (127). This allows it to inhabit and uninhabit, so to speak, a position where this being is both exemplary and singular. The vision of a community that is determined by a radically expropriated identity, where an “I” can only communicate with another “I” through “its belonging to the most-common,” is certainly indebted to the Situationist analysis of the gradual evacuation of the world into the image, with “the transformation [...] of the real into its image” (128). Wall attempts to sum up Agamben’s immensely difficult book: “All of his book is an attempt to get ‘between’ existence and essence into a paraonomastic interworld that transcends only toward itself and does not refer back to an anterior reality that would remain ineffable and unsayable, nor toward a fictitious signification that would annihilate the real and unveil it as essentially Nothing” (131). See esp. Wall’s fourth chapter “Agamben and the Political Neuter” (115–62). Haneke’s film militates against this kind of “coming community.” 37. Metelmann, in distinction to Wessely in “Virtualität” (120–24), argues that there is no conscious transition in Benny’s behavior (97). 38. The Christian overtones of Haneke’s films are emphasized in the essay collections, Utopie und Fragment and Michael Haneke und seine Filme, as well as in Alexander Horwath (11–39), and Metelmann (92–93). 39. Haneke articulates his skepticism strongly in an interview with Scott Foundas: “Every kind of explanation is just something that’s there to make you feel better, and at the same time it’s a lie. It’s a lie to calm you, because the real explanation would be so complex, it would be impossible to have in 90 minutes of film or 200 pages of a novel.” 40. In this sense, we can understand Benny’s answer to his father’s question about his motive, when he says: “Don’t know. I wanted to see what it’s like ... probably” (“Weiß nicht. Ich wollt’ sehen, wie’s ist ... wahrscheinlich”). Apart from mimicking and thereby demasking prevalent explanations (Benny already knows what his answer is supposed to be and relativizes it

NOTES

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

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with a “probably”), he also seems to be returning to the earlier conversation with the girl about death and corpses. Invisibility serves another function: the annihilation of an obstacle to economic exchange. When something cannot be absorbed into the profit cycle, it has to disappear. All traces of the victim have to be erased, the body dismembered and discarded, as the father explains to the mother, in order to ensure that his career is not destroyed. Although Hal Foster describes the importance of form in Frank Gehry’s architecture in this manner in Design and Crime (esp. 27–42), his thoughts on the role of form are no less applicable to ritual, which is, in essence, a formalized way of dealing with life. See Haneke’s interview with Cieutat 29 and Vogler 42. We note the long take of the beaten, abused, and silent Anna toward the end of the film Funny Games; the camera lingers on her swollen, distorted features, and avoids having her share the frame with her torturers. Cf. Barbie Zelizer’s work on atrocity photographs in Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (171–201). Susan Sontag discusses the simultaneous horror Europeans profess toward the war in then Yugoslavia and their coping mechanism for it in Regarding the Pain of Others. On the one hand, the horror seems far removed from a firmly pacifist Europe (Sontag’s words: “But horror seems to have vacated Europe”) and hence all the more shocking for its barbarous proximity. On the other, there is a distinct effort to distance Europe from this ‘un-European’ atrocity by claiming that the Balkans “were never really part of Europe” (71–72). See James Berger’s reflections on the contemporary sense of post-apocalypse, fostered by the news’ “procession of almost indistinguishable disasters” in After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (xiii). In Sontag’s earlier writing on photography (which she revisits in Regarding the Pain of Others), she explicitly referred to Agee’s writing about Evans’s work as that of a moralist. Agee, in Sontag’s view, is asked to attest to the truth of the photos’ social content (Photography 107–08). While she is speaking about another of Agee and Evans’s collaborations—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)—her words are no less applicable to Many Are Called. Although the subway photo-project was undertaken around the same time as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it was only published in book form in 1966. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag argues against a false impression of nearness in photos and attempts to guard against the sentimentality that they may engender (102–03). There are no page numbers given in The Other. In Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the “hypermediatization” of local struggles does not further transnational action; the problem is precisely that the similarities between equal struggles do not communicate televisually (56–57). On the photographer’s desire that an image “speak,” see Sontag, On Photography 108. Cf. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning 13, where he speaks about the deceptiveness of difference.

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55. See also Lennon’s article on Delahaye in the London Guardian, “The Big Picture” (24–31). 56. There is never background music in Haneke’s films. When it does occur, e.g., John Zorn’s heavy metal in Funny Games or Megadeath’s in Benny’s Video, it serves the function of creating a disjunction, alerting us that all is not as peaceful as the images we see (a happy family in an expensive sport utility vehicle, a boy doing his math homework). In Benny’s Video, as in the earlier Seventh Continent, Haneke utilizes Bach cantatas to emphasize the Catholic transfiguration that occurs. 57. See Haneke’s interview in “Die letzten Zuckungen des verendenden Tieres.” In a discussion with Cieutat, Haneke lays stress on the consoling function of art in this scene from Code Unknown (28). 58. For Metelmann, Haneke is the “last avantgardist” (“letzte[...] Avantgardist[…]” [14]). 59. Haneke repeatedly polemicizes against what he sees as the Americanization of European film taste. The apostrophe “s” in the title of Benny’s Video conforms to English and not German grammatical rules; the English title of Funny Games in the original version also serves to allocate blame to Hollywood dominance. See “Kälte und Ekel” 65–66 and Assheuer 59. On Haneke’s reception as auteur and propagation of this image, see Kilb “Schrecken.”

Chapter 3 Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer 1. Qtd. in Markus Brüderlin’s preface [n.p.]. In an interview entitled “Wer soll das alles lesen und warum?” with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from November 2003, Reich-Ranicki speaks about what he considers Ransmayr’s canonical status and defends him against charges of being a “mystical poet removed from the world” (“mystischer Weltentrückungsdichter”). 2. He has won numerous awards, including Austrian and German prizes and the coveted European Prix Aristeion. 3. Ransmayr’s essay was reprinted separately a year later. 4. See Frank Kermode’s discussion of apocalyptic fiction (esp. 3–34, 128). 5. In The Dog King, Bering’s employer and surrogate father Ambras is given this appellation because of his large pack of guard dogs. 6. The development of Moor leads backward to pre-modern times rather than into the post-war economic miracle in Germany and Austria. 7. In the English translation by Ransmayr’s longtime translator, John Woods, no distinction is made between the more formal “Do as you wish” and the grammatically correct, but more colloquial-sounding “Do what you want” (cf. “Unborn” 16, 18). This imperative shares something of the tone of the “whatever/so halt” I discussed in chapter 2. 8. On the rhetoric of the apocalypse, see O’Leary, esp. Chapter 2, “Time, Evil, Authority” (20–60). 9. See Katharina Schmidt’s contribution in Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces, where she talks about the open-ended nature of Kiefer’s cycle (75–92).

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10. Woods, in his excellent translation, opts for the more restrained “reflection” as a translation of “Abglanz,” rather than my “pale reflection.” To my mind, Ransmayr here would like to articulate a sense of futility regarding human efforts to capture natural forces in their representations (12). 11. Ransmayr’s word choice perhaps reflects his reading of Celan’s poetry in advance of a meeting with Kiefer, for whom Celan’s works are an important source of imagery. See, in particular, the poem “Reflection-laden” (“Abglanzbeladen”) in Lightduress (Lichtzwang): “REFLECTION-LADEN, by the heavenbeetles, / in the mountain. / The death/ you owed me, I / deliver / it” (39) (“ABGLANZBELADEN, bei den / Himmelskäfern, / im Berg. / Den Tod, / den du mir schuldig bliebst, ich / trag ihn / aus” [38; 9.1: 20]). See also Lichtzwang: Vorstufen 25. 12. Joris’s translation of Celan’s poem is “Lightduress” rather than the more common “Light Compulsion.” The stress on the forcible aspects of Celan’s word—including the unusual German substantival hybrid—is nicely captured in this translation. However, since Kiefer’s title is commonly rendered in English as Light Compulsion, I will go by this translation. Joris’s beautiful rendering of the poem, in which the eccentric noun occurs, runs as follows: “WE ALREADY LAY / deep in the underbrush, when you / finally crept along. / But we could not / darken over toward you: / there reigned / lightduress” (33) (“WIR LAGEN / schon tief in der Macchia, als du / endlich herankrochst. / Doch konnten wir nicht / hinüberdunkeln zu dir: / es herrschte / Lichtzwang” [32]). About the various stages of the poem, see Lichtzwang: Vorstufe (18–19). About the posthumous publication of the volume, see the introductory note to Lichtzwang in Werke 9.2 (esp. 9–12). 13. Anselm Kiefer’s Light Compulsion (Lichtzwang) is composed of oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, ash, paper and metal objects, glass and lead on canvas and measures 279.5 cm  759.5 cm. It is also reproduced in Anselm Kiefer: the Seven Heavenly Palaces (ill. 20, 80–81). 14. For Fludd, “the origin of all things may be sought in the dark Chaos (potential unity) from which arose the Light (divine illumination or actual unity)” (qtd. in Schmidt, “Kosmos” 76). For an introduction to the Englishman’s theories on creation and God’s light, see Godwin; in her volume the fascinating plates from Fludd’s various writings illustrating his esoteric, cosmic schemata are reproduced (5–19; ill. 23, 40). 15. The Secret Life of Plants is an ongoing series and in the artist’s collection. The image reprinted in this chapter and on the front cover form part of a series commissioned for Frederick Seidel’s poetry, The Cosmos Poems (2000). 16. Kiefer uses a wide array of plants—rosemary, birds of paradise, gladioluses, safflowers or thistles, oak leaves, etc.—juxtaposed against photos of starry expanses. See Anselm Kiefer’s The Secret Life of Plants, part of a series by curator Heiner Bastian devoted to Kiefer. His works are here reproduced without commentary. 17. It may be worthwhile to compare Kiefer’s Light Compulsion with other, slightly earlier works, namely Stars (Estrellas) from 1995 and Star Picture (Sternbild) from 1996. In both, we have another night sky, covered with innumerable stars. Kiefer lies prone below this vast expanse, on barren

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18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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ground. In Stars, a fine dotted line leads from a star in the top center of the canvas to the figure’s head. The first painting is reprinted in Arasse 319; the second is to be found on 353. It is striking how often Kiefer and his works are compared to labyrinths (Bloom 30; Ransmayr, “Unborn” 16). Qtd. in Rosenthal 127. On Kiefer’s alchemical interests and works, see Rosenthal 126–33. See Thomas McEvilley’s introduction to Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, where he discusses Kiefer’s use of space after 1993, in particular works incorporating Mao Ze-Dong (esp. 9–11). See also Arasse, esp. the chapter “Repositioning,” in which he writes about the manifold mythic and mystic strains that Kiefer combines (177–223). Bloom’s essay, “Anselm Kiefer: Troping without End,” reflects on the Jewish thought in Kiefer’s work (mediated through Kiefer’s reading of Gershom Scholem). He does much to separate the various strains of Cabbalist and pre-Cabbalist allusions in the Seven Heavenly Palaces and Merkaba in particular (19–33). On the Cabbalistic myths to which Kiefer refers, see also Arasse 198–205. Recent scholarship on Kiefer, such as Daniel Arasse’s monograph and the essay collection edited by Markus Brüderlin, stresses the interrelationship between synchronically disparate works. Light Compulsion has, in subject matter and style, numerous precedents reaching back into the 1970s. Arasse comments here about the watercolor Everyone Stands under His Own Dome of Heaven (Jeder Mensch steht unter seiner Himmelskugel). Lisa Saltzman has posed the question of Kiefer’s sense of victimization in regard to his oeuvre. Does his identification with the role of painter (his repeated integration of palettes) or his Orientalist fascination with Jewish mysticism attest to a problematic mystification of history? she asks (62–70, 44–45). For a discussion of Saltzman’s book, see Zervigón 103–05. I here use Michael Hamburger’s translation (31–33) of Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (Die Gedichte 40–41). See also the two variants of “Todesfuge” in Werke 2/3.1 (64–66 and 100–02). In this context, also see Kiefer’s overdrawing of the 1963 handbook, Spaces and Peoples in Our Time (Räume und Völker in unserer Zeit), in which he unmasks the geopolitical tendencies of the Cold War and the rhetorical continuities with National Socialism. In About Spaces and Peoples (Über Räume und Völker), Kiefer does not begin ex nihilo, but superimposes his own creation story over the pre-printed text. We should not forget that Kiefer dwelt on the dark-haired Jewess Shulamith as well as the Faust-inspired Margarethe from Celan’s “Death Fugue” in works from 1981 to 1983. Cf. Saltzman 26–33, 118. Cf. Ransmayr, “The Unborn” 17. On Kiefer’s ambiguous identification with the perpetrators, see Schütz’s chapter, “Der Künstler als imaginärer Täter—Frühe Foto- und Bucharbeiten (1969–1974)” (115–53), and Saltzman, who argues that the artist’s negative reception in his homeland was in part conditioned by German fears of what the international responses to Kiefer would be (97–123).

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29. See Schütz’s chapters on “Kiefer-Rezeption in Kritik und Kunstwissenschaft” (60–81) and “Faszinierender Faschismus” (313–52). Also see Gerlach 236–37. 30. Woods’s translation reads: “No, our host never wanted to teach anyone, never wanted to heal anyone or reform the world” (18). 31. See the chapters entitled “Stellamour, or, the Peace of Oranienburg” (28–37) (“Stellamour oder der Friede von Oranienburg” [37–48]), where the vanquished form mimetic tableaux under the command of the conquering army. “Keep movin’ ” (115–21) (English title in the original [144–51]) and “An Outdoor Concert” (122–35) (“Ein Konzert im Freien” [152–68]) deal with the rock concerts—something like the Rolling Stones’s Hell on Wheels tour. The occupation forces use such concerts to bring the children of the “defeated foe [...] under the victors’ magic spell” (“[die] geschlagenen Feinde [...] in den Bann der Sieger zu ziehen”). Before entering the concert hall, the audience has to watch silent documentary films in “endless loops,” “showing over and over the perfectly straight rows of the barracks by the gravel works, a pile of corpses in a white-tiled room, over and over, a crematorium oven with its firing door open, a column of prisoners beside the lakeshore [...]” (116) (“Stummfilme in Endlosschleifen, die wieder und wieder die schnurgeraden Barackenzeilen am Schotterwerk vorführten, wieder und wieder einen Leichenstapel in einem weiß gekachelten Raum, einen Krematoriumsofen mit offener Feuertür, eine Häftlingskolonne am Seeufer – und im Hintergrund aller Erinnerungen, wieder und wieder, die verschneiten und sonnendurchglühten und regennassen und vereisten Wände des Steinbruchs von Moor […]” [145–46]). In the chapter “Dog, Rooster, Overseer” (304–13) (“Hund, Hahn, Aufseher” [377–88]) we hear again of past “penitential rites” (“Sühnerituale”) and the “reconstruction of forced labor” (304) (“Nachstellungen der Zwangsarbeit” [377]). 32. By focalizing the reader’s perspective predominantly through Bering’s eyes or those of the vanquished (e.g., in the chapter “Rage” 292–302, or “Wut” 363–76), rather than those of the former camp inmate and dog king, Ambras, Ransmayr tilts reader identification toward the perpetrator’s son, who repeats his father’s behavior. 33. See Andreas Huyssen’s criticism of this kind of writing, “Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,” Twilight Memories 209–47, and Schütz 313–59. 34. One reason for this is scholars’ concern with Ransmayr’s postmodernism; the fragmenting narrative technique and play with referentiality seem to guard him against charges such as those leveled at Kiefer. See the essays in Wittstock’s Die Erfindung der Welt, particularly Anz (120–31) and Niekerk (158–80). 35. The change from “a” to “the” signals greater specificity: “A Fire in the Ocean/The Fire in the Ocean” (3–4, 344–55) (“Ein Feuer im Ozean/Das Feuer im Ozean” [7–8, 426–40]). 36. Only one corpse—that of Bering’s love interest, Muyra—is spared. 37. See Ransmayr’s description of Kiefer’s method of building roads (13–16). 38. Page numbers refer to the second edition of Ransmayr’s text. The original version was published together with Willy Puchner’s photos, focusing on

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39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

NOTES

the sun, the shadows, and reflections it creates (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1982). The photographs are entirely devoid of people. Bernhard Fetz’s essay, “Der ‘Herr der Welt’ tritt ab,” remains one of the few full-length essays devoted to Ransmayr’s first work. Fetz situates the fifty-page-long text and its examination of instrumental rationality within the context of Ransmayr’s editorship of the monthly Extrablatt as well as his oeuvre (27–42). In Wirklichkeit hat ihren eigenen Ort, Gehlhoff devotes a short chapter entitled “Ähnlichkeit nicht ausgeschlossen: Intertext und Selbstzitat” to Strahlender Untergang. She sees the narrative as a precursor to Die letzte Welt in its focus on metamorphosis and the death drive (28–33). Fröhlich embeds her brief discussion of Ransmayr’s narrative in the context of strategies of figurative de-personalization. She argues that Strahlender Untergang is unique in Ransmayr’s oeuvre. In its eschatological attempt to write of last things, the narrative does not foresee a new beginning arising from the protagonist’s end, as does The Last World. See her chapter “Der verschwindende Held: Struktur und Bedeutung des zentralen Motivs” (47–52). Rudolf Arnheim uses the phrase “readable complexity” to argue against random combinations in art of the twentieth century. In Arnheim’s opinion, such randomness, while it has the potential to be beautiful, does not convey valuable information to the viewer (19). Entropy measures the disorder of a thermodynamic system. As formulated by Clausius, Kelvin, and Boltzmann in the nineteenth century, thermodynamic systems begin with a high degree of order and move toward a state of greater disorder, using up the energy available in the system for work. From this arises Clausius’s classic formulation that all entropy in the universe tends toward a maximum: as the amount of energy available within a system for work decreases, disorder increases. Heat death is the final stage of entropy, as nineteenth-century physics conceived it. On entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, see Goldstein. The description of the philosophy’s unanswered questions as a “conglomerate”—a term for loosely cemented, heterogeneous material that is homogeneously random—replicates on a lexical level the geological entropic processes the spokesman emphasizes (19). Here, too, one may discern an allusion to Celan’s poems in Lichtzwang. In the poem “MUSSLEHEAP” (“MUSCHELHAUFEN”) the poet thematizes the radical temporal breaks in the earth’s development, retracing the way to the ice ages of an “ice- / homeland” (ll. 4–5) (“Eis- / heimat” [ll. 4–5]). The line “Lemmings burrowed” (l. 10) (“Lemminge wühlten” [l. 10]) occurs midway in the poem, as the lyrical self discovers that there is “No later” (l. 11) (“Kein Später” [l. 11]) to the developments whose traces can be found in the past. See Joris 24–25. Also see “Muschelhaufen” (9.1: 13). See also the notes to the poem in Gedichte 799–800. The images are much more benign than Ransmayr’s accompanying words; photos of the sun, the play of light on fences, walls, and so on, do not bear much resemblance to the fierce convulsions and nuclear fusions described in the literary text. On the distinction between kairos and chronos see Kermode 46–49.

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46. Even if the extinction of the self in God, which the New Science postulates, is Christian and not Judaic in origin (Bloom 33), we can discern parallels between Ransmayr’s idea of the return to an origin and pre-Cabbalistic and Cabbalistic ideas in Kiefer’s recent work. Discussing the cosmic thrust of paintings such as Shevirat Ha-Kelim, Ransmayr talks about the influence of Isaac Luria on Kiefer, briefly recounting the myth about the vessels of godly light and their breakage (23). See also Bloom 24–25, 29. 47. See Habermas, “Postmetaphysical” esp. 8; “Begründete” esp. 21–22. 48. The matter of apocalyptic thought and its relation to temporality would be well worth pursuing in another essay on Ransmayr. Klaus Vondung argues that a cosmological perspective moves away from time conceived linearly; historical events no longer play any role in the rhythmic movement through time (70). Stephen O’Leary maintains that eschatology and, by extension, apocalyptic eschatology imply a temporality that gives meaning to historical time (32). Frank Kermode’s argument focuses on the Bible as “rectilinear history” (5). 49. The third segment, “The Terrarium” (“Das Terrarium”), serves as a counterpart to the first section (38–44). Instructions are given on how to build terraria to fulfill the redemptory intentions of the New Science (39). Since this part largely recapitulates the suggestions of the spokesman, I will not deal with it explicitly. 50. Reviewers and scholars have problematized Ransmayr’s approach in other texts. See, e.g., Volker Hage’s piece “Mein Name sei Ovid,” in which he takes Ransmayr to task for the equivalences The Last World implies: the Holocaust is like the many other metamorphoses the story describes (92–99, esp. 98). Scott G. Williams speaks about Hage’s changing reception of Ransmayr following German unification (154). Hage’s post-unification interview with Ransmayr is reprinted as “ ‘... eine Art Museum lichter Momente’ ” in Wittstock (205–12). Herwig Gottwald stresses the natural philosophy underlying The Last World, where history cedes to natural history. Gottwald relates Ransmayr’s apocalyptic novel to the “crisis of anthropocentrism” in the twentieth century (26–33, esp. 29). 51. In his one-page introduction to Merkaba, Wingate mentions the “tohu” and “bohu”—Hebrew for “the earth was without form and void”—that underpins Kiefer’s projects since the 1990s. 52. See in this regard also Matthew Biro’s article on Kiefer’s engagement with larger West German cultural discourses of memory in the 1980s (113–46). 53. In his article “Ein Rudel schwanzwedelnder Hunde,” the author Franz Josef Czernin analyzes single sentences and phrases from The Dog King to fault the novel’s linguistic and logical weaknesses. 54. Cf. chapter 1. On the natural susceptibility of historical entities see, e.g., the story Ovid reads in the Roman stadium in The Last World, an allegory for the Roman Empire (46–48). 55. Ransmayr writes: “Large? Monumental? What does that really mean? Something can be large only in relation to something else, but never large or small on its own. [...] How large are Kiefer’s paintings, for example, in comparison to the black ridges of the Cévennes [...] or in comparison to the dizzying view into the meandering ravines of the nearby Ardèche [...]”

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(23) (“Groß? Monumental? Was bedeutet das schon. Groß kann doch etwas immer nur in bezug auf etwas anderes sein, aber groß oder klein niemals aus sich selbst. [...] Wie groß sind Kiefers Gemälde, beispielsweise, bezogen auf die schwarzen Höhenzüge der Cévennen [...] oder bezogen auf einen schwindelnden Ausblick in die mäandrischen Schluchten der nahen Ardèche [...]” [23]).

Chapter 4 Mourning is Moot: A Brief Reprise of Freud 1. See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) (18: 3–64, esp. 12). Freud here argues that hypochondria and melancholia resemble traumatic neuroses. 2. Baudrillard also characterizes contemporary society as melancholic (Transparency 8). 3. See “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations 257–58; “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 1.2: 697–98. Saltzman uses this Benjaminian figure in regards to Kiefer, as does Arasse (215–22, esp. 222). In Saltzman’s evaluation of Kiefer’s continuing engagement with post-war, postHolocaust history, she maintains that Kiefer’s work may not be as indebted to the movement implicit in Klee’s angel—gazing at the pile of rubble behind him as he is unwillingly driven forward—as one may be led to believe from a survey of Kiefer’s developments (88). 4. The literature on trauma has become so voluminous that I will only mention a selection of texts here. See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory and her Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, and her essay “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival”; Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation; Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Mieke Bal, Leo Spitzer, and Jonathan Crewe, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present; James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse; Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma and his recent chapter “Trauma Studies: Its Critics and Vicissitudes” in History in Transit (106–143). 5. In Totem, Freud writes: Totemic religion not only comprised expressions of remorse and attempts at atonement, it also served as a remembrance of the triumph over the father. Satisfaction over that triumph led to the institution of the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held. Thus it became a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal, whenever, as a result of the changing conditions of life, the cherished fruit of the crime—appropriation of the paternal attributes—threatened to disappear. (13: 145) (Die Religion des Totem umfaßt nicht nur die Äußerungen der Reue und die Versuche der Versöhnung, sondern dient auch der Erinnerung an den Triumph über den Vater. Die Befriedigung darüber läßt das

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Erinnerungsfest der Totemmahlzeit einsetzen, bei dem die Einschränkungen des nachträglichen Gehorsams wegfallen, macht es zur Pflicht, das Verbrechen des Vatermordes in der Opferung des Totemtieres immer wieder von neuem zu wiederholen, so oft der festgehaltene Erwerb jener Tat, die Aneignung der Eigenschaften des Vaters, infolge der verändernden Einflüsse des Lebens zu entschwinden droht [9: 175–76]). 6. Freud reasons inductively in Moses, relating the repression involved in Jewish intellectuality to the struggle between the ego and the superego: “When the ego has brought the super-ego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it” (23: 117). (“Wenn das Ich dem Über-Ich das Opfer eines Triebverzichts gebracht hat, erwartet es als Belohnung dafür, von ihm mehr geliebt zu werden” [16: 224–25]). 7. Cf. Freud, Totem 13: 145. 8. Cf. Paul, esp. 170–92. 9. The analogy of the wound, as Strachey explains in a note to “Mourning and Melancholia,” is already to be found in a draft of Freud’s as early as 1895 (14: 253 n. 1). 10. Traumatic symptoms, Cathy Caruth has written, are always expressed belatedly and indirectly, where “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (Experience 91–92). 11. Cf. chapter 1 and Girard’s argument regarding the decreasing time span between sacrificial crises in the modern world in his chapter “Freud and the Oedipus Complex,” Violence and the Sacred (169–92). 12. Indeed, I would argue that Haneke and Sloterdijk may be less the case in point than recent German appeals to a “Leitkultur,” the term used by Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz to designate a “guiding culture” for Germany (it would rely on a German cultural heritage for its models to integrate foreigners). See Beckstein, Tibi (33–58), Sommer, Mrozek. 13. I will only give a couple of examples from Moses here. When Freud speaks about the prophets that emerge to polemicize against ritual, they are “enthralled by the great and mighty tradition which had grown up little by little in obscurity” (23: 51) (“von der großen und mächtigen Tradition erfaßt, die allmählich im Dunkeln angewachsen war” [16: 153]). In relation to St. Paul, Freud explains: “the dark traces of the past lurked in his mind, ready to break through into more conscious regions” (23: 87) (“die dunklen Spuren der Vergangenheit lauerten in seiner Seele, bereit zum Durchbruch in bewußtere Regionen” [16: 192]). See also 23: 50; 16: 152. 14. Jennifer Radden mentions this phrase—“Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” (14: 249) (“Der Schatten des Objekts fiel so auf das Ich” [10: 435])—as part of the charm of Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia (211). 15. See Santner’s Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (esp. 19–26). Santner also offers a summary and analysis of Freud’s essay and its afterlife in his contribution “1967” to The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing (736–41).

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16. Germans’ inability to mourn resulted, according to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their ground-breaking 1967 study, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, from their narcissistic identification with Hitler and the resulting fixation on this ego-ideal. On the Mitscherlichs’s importance for the German post-war discourse, see Santner “1967” 737–41. For a critique of the analysts’ male-biased approach, see Moser 157 and Linville, esp. 3–9. Linville also takes to task Santner for conflating “masculine elegiac experiences and nationalist typologies” in his treatment of the Mitscherlichs’s work (42–44). 17. See Charity Scribner’s analysis of the end of communism and the “second world” in Requiem for Communism (esp. 89–134). See also Alessia Ricciardi’s The Ends of Mourning. Both scholars work with Freudian texts different from the ones I deal with here. Stressing either An Outline of Psychoanalysis (Abriß der Psychoanalyse, 1938) or Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (“Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse,” 1937), they argue for a problematization of Freud’s types of bereavement. Kathleen Woodward also criticizes Freud’s overly clinical discussion of grief (93–110). 18. The Strachey translation suggests there is an element of conscious decisionmaking with the adjective “obligatory” used to describe the mourning process (13: 140). 19. See Strachey’s introductory preface (14: 239–42, esp. 241). 20. Perhaps a victim-cum-victimizer is always motivated only through such narcissistic identification? 21. Robert Paul has traced Freud’s model in the Christian mass (8). 22. Radden, drawing on a host of important work on melancholia (most notably Melanie Klein’s writings and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun), maintains that the vagueness of Freud’s conceptualization can be attributed to his reception of a long tradition of writing and artwork on melancholia. Earlier Renaissance tradition conceived of melancholia as a mood of loss independent of direct causes (218–22). 23. See also Lisa Saltzman’s problematization of Anselm Kiefer’s melancholic mourning work in her chapter “The Sons of Lilith: Mourning and Melancholia, Trauma and Painting” (75–96). She briefly problematizes Freud’s conception of mourning, deeming it a “profoundly tragic” process hardly different from melancholia, but does not spell out her reasons for Freud’s shortcomings (91). See also Bois’s chapter, which Saltzman cites, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in which he takes to task the apocalypticism of cultural critics. He is interested in seeing what kind of mourning painting of the post-war period might undertake (229–44). 24. Minnow, in her essay “Surviving Victim Talk,” alludes to the religious undertones underpinning the popularity of contemporary victim discourse. Suffering, she writes, may be endowed with religious significance and may instill reverence in the witnesses of pain (1411). 25. Ricciardi argues for a recuperation of the ethical dimension of mourning work (esp. 1–68).

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Chapter 5 Feminization and Impoverishment: Friederike Mayröcker 1. Among her more frequently discussed publications are the following: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1944–78 (1979), Gute Nacht, guten Morgen: Gedichte 1978–1981 (1982), Das besessene Alter (1992), Das Licht in der Landschaft (1975; 1: 363–454), Fast ein Frühling des Markus M. (1976; 1: 455–518), Heiligenanstalt (1978; 2: 7–96), Die Abschiede (1980; 2: 97–266), mein Herz mein Zimmer mein Name (1988; 3: 203–522), Lection (1994; 4: 209–426). None of these works have been translated. Some translations into English do exist: Night Train (Reise durch die Nacht II: 366–464), Heiligenanstalt, with each clouded peak (je ein umwölkter Gipfel; 1: 245–306), Peck Me Up, My Wing: Selections from the Work of Friederike Mayröcker (Pick mich auf mein Flügel ... ; 1: 94–97), and Sinclair Sophocles, the Baby Dinosaur (Sinclair Sofokles der Baby-Saurier). Marcel Beyer provides a useful bibliography of shorter translations into various languages (154–57, 241–56). 2. In his afterword to Mayröcker’s early work, “Demontagen, Variationen und Übergänge,” Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler writes of the impossibility and futility of trying to impose a narrative category or trajectory on her works since the 1940s (1: 595–605, esp. 595). 3. Mayröcker herself thematizes the fact that her work eschews humor in a well-known autobiographical essay. With reference to Roland Barthes’s Camera lucida, she maintains that she places humor outside of the “magical circle” (“magischen Kreises”) of her literary production (“Durchschaubild” 3: 130). 4. Mayröcker, in an interview with Siegfried J. Schmidt in 1983, mentions her detailed study of Freud as her only real scientific interest, as well as her respect for original texts and clear bibliographic citations in her work since the 1970s. See “ ‘Es schießt zusammen’ ” (260–83, esp. 275, 282–83). 5. Since Mayröcker embeds a direct quotation, I give the German original here. “Die Totemmahlzeit,” writes Freud, “vielleicht das erste Fest der Menschheit, wäre die Wiederholung und die Gedenkfeier dieser denkwürdigen, verbrecherischen Tat, mit welcher so vieles seinen Anfang nahm, die sozialen Organisationen, die sittlichen Einschränkungen und die Religion” (9: 172). See the Introduction. 6. On Mayröcker’s linguistic games, see Steinlechner 139–56, esp. 141. 7. In another context, Kastberger maintains that Mayröcker’s texts generally are concerned with the processes of literary production and their own coming into being. See his chapter, “Poetische Poetologie,” in Reinschrift (16–41). 8. See Die Abschiede 2: 97–266. Kastberger convincingly argues that Mayröcker’s works since 1980 radicalize autobiography: her texts are not a simple recounting of anterior lived events. Mayröcker’s dismissal of chronology and causality make autobiography impossible, (“Lebensmetapher” 102–04). 9. As Paul shows, Freud’s Hegelian model of a society in which the men are equals comes into conflict with his triadic, Darwinian schema, according to which reproductive success is the highest goal. The master-slave schema collapses into the senior male-junior male-female one (17–24).

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10. In The Communicating Vessels, the connection to Freud can be found again, where Mayröcker mentions a feast—with terrible “Aufruhr” or “unrest”— in conjunction with melancholia, the Danube, and incorporation (25). 11. André Breton, whom Mayröcker cites in this and other works, compares inspiration to a spark, which comes into being when disparate realities combine. Sparks are also of importance in the works of Antoni Tàpies, who in turn borrows the mystical idea of sparks of unifying illumination from the thirteenth-century mystic Ramón Lull (Catoir 14). 12. In line with Freud’s use of the term “incorporation” (“einverleiben”) in “Mourning,” I use it here to stand for the magical ingestion of the lost love-object. Incorporation comes into play in the ego’s dialectical development with its environs. The self, in an early, narcissistic stage, seeks to incorporate the object outside itself which gives pleasure. Incorporation, Freud stresses in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (“Triebe und Triebschicksale” [10: 228–30]) indicates a type of love that seeks to destroy the object’s autonomy (14: 117–40). In this regard, it is ambivalent—love entails the loss of the object as it is. Cf. Ricciardi 36–37, who notes Freud’s imprecise use of the term (conflating it at times with introjection) and discusses Jacques Derrida’s, Nicholas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s refinements of the concept. 13. Cf. Scribner’s discussion of melancholia as lovesickness in Freudian thought (130). 14. See Requiem für Ernst Jandl 5: 469–94. Interestingly, this text is included in an essay collection entitled Frauen schreiben gegen Hindernisse devoted to the topic of women’s writing and its difficulties (cf. Blumesberger 77–82). 15. Marcel Beyer remarks on the very beginning of the dialogue structure in Mayröcker’s “Angels’ Talk” (title in original, 1: 39–43) and in Minimonster’s Dream Lexicon (Minimonsters Traumlexikon, 1: 39–92) . He notes her development of these techniques in texts between 1968 and 1972, which address the reader in indirect fashion. In her works from the early 1970s, such as with each clouded peak, the inquit phrases we find in The Communicating Vessels are present as textual generators between unspecified figures (1: 590–93). See Beyer’s afterword, “Friederike Mayröcker: lesen” (1: 587–94). 16. See also the essay “Ernst Jandl und seine Götterpflicht” (1985) in Magische 136–39. 17. See Caws’s introduction to Breton’s The Communicating Vessels, where she describes the scientific experiment of the title and its relation to Surrealist thought (ix–xxiv). 18. Cf. Freud’s melancholic characteristics in “Mourning” 14: 244. 19. Cf. Journey, where the speaking self describes a similar sense of self-extinction and a progressive decomposition (2: 420). 20. My reading goes against the male gender ascribed to melancholics by scholars who argue that Freud aligns his melancholic with older traditions of masculine inspiration and genius (cf. Radden 218, 221 and Schiesari). In Requiem for Communism, Scribner reflects on mourning as women’s work in her discussion of Christa Wolf (135–54). 21. As Kastberger has shown in his detailed interpretation of Mayröcker’s Journey, the author’s interest in Derrida’s Postcard begins much earlier than

NOTES

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

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The Communicating Vessels (Reinschrift 107–38). Interestingly, Derrida’s collection of fragmentary love letters and philosophical reflections do not lead the speaking self to identify wholely with it. Derrida remains present, as the author of a beautiful book that is worth excerpting. The figure of Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, however, becomes a textual alter ego, evoking a host of personal associations. See “Mail Art 8,” 2: 285. The first page of this speech is reprinted as a facsimile in Riess-Berger’s Lebensveranstaltung 74. Valuable work has been done on Mayröcker’s Romantic poetics. See Schmidt-Dengler, “Lektionen” (Böen 151–66); Mayer, “Friederike” (174–99); Juliane Vogel, “Nachtpost” (Böen 69–85). Mayröcker asserts that all earlier phases condition the later ones and vice versa, in a process of interpenetration that is “like a periscope that can be extended into infinity” (“wie ein in die Unendlichkeit ausfahrbares Periskop” [qtd. in Riess-Berger 74]). See “Durchschaubild Welt” 3: 125–31; also reprinted in Magische Blätter 188–94 and in Riess-Berger 14–17. The German sentence from “Durchschaubild” deserves reproduction in full. It lends testimony to Mayröcker’s masterful technique, as she moves from one alliterative and consonant descriptor to the next. Her “Fremdling” fits into the series of images she has used to describe herself, as a wandering poet, rucksack on shoulder, and a “bird troubler” (“Vogelbekümmerer”): “[...] ich spüre, wie sie [die Genien] mir winken, ihre Geheimnisse zuflüstern, mir, diesem Schwächling, diesem Schweiger, diesem Wetterdichter mit Wandertasche und Distelkopf, diesem Vogelbekümmerer, diesem Fremdling der Welt, mir dieser fragwürdigen Marginalexistenz.—” (3: 131). See “Mail Art 6,” 2: 275–80; rpt. in Magische 15–19 and partially in Riess-Berger 83. See 51, 59–60; see also Journey 2: 384. Mayröcker also ascribes this power of respiratory inspiration to Jandl, in “Ernst Jandl,” Magische 139. In The Communicating Vessels, the deceased lover “whispers” (“Einsagen”) texts to her, sending them to her as part of an ongoing complex of writing that stands above and outside of her (54). Cf. Freud’s reflections on the prototype of intellectuality (“Geistigkeit”— Freud here means intellectuality and not spirituality) being like air in motion in Moses (23: 114). I do not think that Mayröcker’s project is related to the self-presence that Derrida relates to “good writing” in Of Grammatology (cf. Kastberger “Lebensmetapher” 111). Rather, I think that she shows the continual movement between the oppositional terms of natural and artificial writing. Kastberger suggests as much, when he goes on to discuss Mayröcker’s “good” writing via Paul de Man’s reflections on prosopopoeia. See also “Durchschaubild” 127–28, where Mayröcker plays with the words “schreibhaft” and “leibhaft.” She conjures up a host of associations with these words, ranging from “incarceration in writing/in the body” and the corporeality of a “writerly” life, to the “embodiment” of the writer herself (“leibhaftig”). Mayer briefly discusses incorporation in Die Abschiede 182–84. Cf. also Steinlechner 152.

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32. See Vessels, where the author describes herself as a “lamb” (“Lamm” [36]). 33. See also Journey (Reise) 2: 384, 387. 34. See “Mail Art 6,” 2: 277. Schmidt-Dengler notes the gendering of masculine and feminine actions in Mayröcker’s early “Mythologische Stücke,” where she counterpoises the closed, static, masculine realm with the dynamic feminine arena (“Demontagen” 1: 597). 35. Mayröcker does, to be sure, continue her ambivalence about the overt gendering of German in this book. 36. See the first-person narrator’s comments in Journey through the Night (Reise durch die Nacht), who mentions the perpetual self-positioning as dependent (2: 370). In the same work, the narrator describes it as a “dog-like” (“hündisch”) attitude that is also done for appearances and to dissimulate (2: 434). 37. See, e.g., the passage in Breton’s The Communicating Vessels, where he advocates revolution in the name of the human spirit (136–37). 38. In “Durchschaubild” she argues that Vienna has influenced the changing “images of her condition” (“Zustandsbilder” [3: 128]), but that she has avoided thematizing the city and its history directly. 39. See je ein umwölkter gipfel, 1: 245–306. On her development see Kastberger, “Punkt und Fläche” 34. See also Mayer 174. 40. See, e.g., Mayröcker’s brütt 22. 41. Her work of writing—her “Schreibarbeit” in all its melancholic, laborious aspects—recurs throughout the text (2: 372, 384, 390–91, 395, 407, 414, 416, 422, 448, 455, 460, 466). 42. On Mayröcker’s stylistic innovations see Kastberger’s afterword, “Erzählen gegen das Erzählen” (2: 610–18). 43. See Edith Anna Kunz’s salutary intervention with respect to reading Mayröcker’s repeated injunctions against narrative coherence too straightforwardly (esp. 15–33). 44. By bringing the concerns I adumbrate in this chapter to bear on Journey through the Night, the free standing line “und der Zorn des Lamms ist mir gewiß”—“and the lamb’s anger at me is certain”—loses its cryptic quality (2: 398). The sacrificial rhetoric Mayröcker utilizes for artistic creation breaks through at this point. 45. On the melancholy aspect of Mayröcker’s late poetry, cf. Daniela Strigl, “Winterglück und –unglück: Zur Alterslyrik Friederike Mayröckers, Ernst Jandls, Gerald Bisingers und Michael Guttenbrunners” (41–56). 46. See also “Mail Art 7,” 2: 283–84. 47. On the role of repetition and seriality and their relation to ritual in Tàpies’s paintings, see Borja-Villel’s foreword, “Tàpies, the Contemplation of Art” (9–17). 48. On the work of Tàpies, see esp. volumes 2 (1961–1968), 3 (1969–1975), and 4 (1976–1981) of the six-volume Tàpies: The Complete Works; also see Gimferrer, Catoir, and Penrose. Penrose maintains that Tàpies does not engage in pure Franciscanism or an early variant of Arte Povera. Inspired by Eastern philosophies, the artist attempts to surprise the viewer through his use of degraded, simple materials, forcing him to ponder the paradox that rejected materials are made into ‘high’ art (172–73).

NOTES

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49. Tàpies’s works engender Mayröcker’s care. They move her emotionally and impel her to act, in the sense of reaching out to grasp something (“um ergreifen zu können”). Indeed, being moved literally and figuratively is a prerequisite for creation (“um ergreifen zu können, muß man selber ergriffen sein” [Vessels 50]). 50. Cf. Heinz Schafroth’s attempts to link a masculine poetology in with each clouded peak with the ascetic surface structure of Concrete Poetry (Konkrete Poesie), setting it against the inclusive approach espoused by the woman in the text (55–70). Kastberger argues against such a reading (Reinschrift 21–22) 51. Freud ascribes the fear of poverty to anal eroticism that has been taken out of context and altered in “Mourning” 14: 252. See also 246, 248, 253, 254. 52. I am not using this term in any strict sense. The art historian Germano Celant coined “arte povera” in the 1970s to describe a heterogeneous group of oppositional, experimental Italian artists. They were characterized by their use of non-traditional materials, including perishable items. 53. Mayer argues that Mayröcker resists being labeled as Dadaist or Surrealist (177). 54. See also Das Jahr Schnee. 55. See Friederike Mayröcker’s Sinclair Sophocles, the Baby Dinosaur (Sinclair Sofokles der Baby-Saurier), Pegas, the Horse (Pegas, das Pferd), I, the Raven, and the Moon (Ich, der Rabe und der Mond), ABC-Thriller, The Alphabet of Friederike Mayröcker (Das Alphabet der Friederike Mayröcker). Karl Riha devotes an essay to these texts in Böen, where he relates her children’s literature to German experimental writing generally as well as the participatory, open-ended quality of Mayröcker’s texts themselves (40–52). 56. See her letter of November 15, 1983 to Georg Jappe, reprinted in part in Siegfried Schmidt, Mayröcker 325–26 and his “Würfe” Böen 22–23. 57. See Siegfried Schmidt, “Würfe” Böen 22–39, esp. 36. This essay contains an extensive list of her illustrated works (22). 58. On the influence of the Hans Prinzhorn collection of ‘insane’ art (1890–1920) on Mayröcker and others of the Vienna avant-garde, see Roth iii–viii. Mayröcker mentions Adolf Wölfli, whose work is in the Prinzhorn collection, in her text “mit deiner stimme,” Magische 119. 59. Qtd. in Siegfried Schmidt “Würfe,” Böen 22–23. He concludes that Mayröcker’s work demonstrates the emptiness of the classical formula “ut pictura poiesis” (38). See also her brief paragraph “Zu meinen Zeichnungen” Magische 216. 60. “Mail Art 6,” 2: 275–80; rpt. partially in Riess-Berger 83. 61. On the potential of empathy in relations between and with victims, see LaCapra, History esp. 134–43. 62. I believe Black Marks and Fan is the painting to which she refers with the title Schwarze Zitze und Fächer. Tàpies’s Black Marks and Fan is reprinted in Tàpies: The Complete Works (2: 280). 63. See the reproduction of Antoni Tàpies’s Brown and Floorcloth in Tàpies: The Complete Works (3: 467). 64. Mayröcker’s original contains numerous lexical repetitions, and I quote it here in full: “[...] dieses Bild ist ganz ausgewrungen, dieses dürstende Bild

226

NOTES

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

ist ganz ausgewrungen, ich spüre an den Innenflächen meiner Hände, die den Scheuerlappen auswinden, wie rauh dieses Bild, ich meine Monument, Fußspuren, Streifen von blutigen Fingern auf diesem Bild, ich habe kalte und rote Finger, so kalt ist es heute, ich wringe aus meine Seele [...] auch du [CORA], auch deine Seele so ausgewrungen, ich streiche mit meiner Hand über ihre Wange, ich sage, ich habe dir viele Briefe geschrieben [...]” (31–32, emphasis in original). Juliane Vogel stresses in particular the feminine provenance of Romantic letter-writing, discussing Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim (“Nachtpost” 75–77). Jandl also enjoins her to restrain the text and syncopate its rhythm (44, 60, 75–76). See the narrator’s admonition: “again the transference : that I do not write, why don’t you write, why am I not writing at this moment, because you are not capable of writing this very second, because I am not capable of writing this very second” (“wieder die Übertragung : daß ich nicht schreibe, warum schreibst du nicht, warum schreibe ich im Augenblick nicht, weil du nicht vermagst, in dieser Sekunde zu schreiben, weil ich nicht vermag, in dieser Sekunde zu schreiben” [52]). I explore the conjunction between Benjamin’s concept of translation, the essay’s translation into English, and the Freudian concept of incorporation in an essay entitled “A Melancholy Labor of Love, or Film Adaptation as Translation: Michael Haneke’s Drei Wege zum See” in the journal Germanic Review (2007). See, e.g., the images of Mayröcker’s apartment on the book jacket for Fast ein Frühling des Markus M. (1: 455–518), the catalogue of Lebensveranstaltung (Riess-Berger 19–26, 83), or the Mayröcker display in the exhibition Die Teile und das Ganze: Bausteine der literarischen Moderne in Österreich in the Austrian National Library, May 14 to September 30, 2004. Images paralleling those in the exhibit are included in Steinlechner 142–43. See Mayröcker’s endnote to Heisze Hunde [n.p.].

Chapter 6 The Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq 1. The English title of Elementary Particles is Atomised. While Houellebecq has also published a number of volumes of poetry (La Poursuite de bonheur, 1992, Le Sens du combat, 1996, Renaissance, 1999), I focus only on his novelistic production to date. 2. On Houellebecq’s problematic textual sexual politics with their selfdestructing and self-deconstructing tendencies see Crowley 17–28. 3. On the scandal surrounding Houellebecq’s publication of Les Particules élémentaires in 1998, see Cruickshank 101–16; Abecassis 801–04; and Bowd 35–37. Abecassis notes that 250,000 copies sold within a year, and translations by major foreign publishers soon followed (803). American reviewers have been far less enthusiastic about embracing Houellebecq and his concerns

NOTES

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

227

than European ones. About the ability of Houellebecq to unleash vitriol, see Julian Barnes (72–75), and Gerry Feehily (56–58). See the opening sentence on Houellebecq’s official webpage, http:// www.houellebecq.info/bio.php3 (accessed April 4, 2006): “Son père, guide de haute montagne, et sa mère, médecin anesthésiste, se désintéressent très vite de son existence” (“His father, a mountain guide, and his mother, an anesthesiologist, soon lost all interest in his existence”). As in Mayröcker’s case, Houellebecq’s public authorial persona bleeds into the narrative voice in the texts. All his public appearances—including his displayed indifference toward the larger public, expressed also on the aforementioned webpage—are generally seen as co-extensive with his narrator’s misanthropy. Sloterdijk figures in some commentary on Houellebecq; see, e.g., the interviews in Au secours, Houellebecq revient! (esp. 50–51). See also Abecassis, who places Houellebecq at the forefront of this tendency in French fiction (804). In Abecassis’s illuminating discussion, he convincingly argues that Les particules élémentaires’ manifest interest in daily objects reveals the “contemplation of repetition qua repetition” as a kind of ultimate spectacle (806). Jean-Claude Lamy and Dominique Guiou distinctly summarize this type as “un homme solitaire et misanthrope, portant sur le monde un regard ironique et désabusé mais n’ayant cependant pas encore renoncé à trouver le bonheur.” A common element in scholarly literature on Houellebecq is the tendency to read Houellebecq’s texts as a mimetic portrayal of contemporary malaise, e.g., Abecassis 826; Crowley 27; Cruickshank 115–16. Sloterdijk is here commenting on Girard’s larger project, with its mimetic rivalries at the basis of social cohesion. The constant production of subcutaneous irritations—where desire is focalized on the differences between people—has consequences for our conceptualization of a sense of communality, Sloterdijk writes: “Erotic processes within the group thus create the basic form of competition—triggered through the imitative observation of others’ striving to obtain advantages in being, owning, and recognition” (“Erotische Prozesse in der Gruppe bilden demnach die Grundform des Wettbewerbs— ausgelöst durch die imitative Beobachtung des Strebens anderer nach der Beschaffung von Seins-, Besitz-, und Geltungsvorteilen” [243]). The phrase “authenticity of failure” occurs in Platform, where it is used to describe an artist trafficking in a dated trash aesthetic (184). Because he is truly an outmoded failure, he is different from the market- and media-savvy artists who reconnoiter the terrain before launching their artistic products. The novel closes with a succinct dismissal of the impossible path the narrator has taken. He describes his longtime vision of being accompanied by a ghost, an uncanny likeness, who lives in a “theoretical paradise” (155) (“paradis théorique” [156]) related to the world, but with whom he will never become one. In an engaging essay, Martin Crowley comments on the contradictions inherent in Houellebecq’s works, with useless omniscience clashing with a

228

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

NOTES

desire for total knowledge (esp. 17–18). Crowley argues that Houellebecq essays are an endless reflection of today’s world in which “we all know everything already (including, of course, the fact that we all know everything already)” (18). Centering his reflections on theoretical concerns of postmodernism, Stamos Metzidakis, too, describes Houellebecq’s technique as oscillating between the already well-known and the unique: “This singularity derives from our simultaneous familiarity and disaffection with so much of their [postmodernists’—F.N.] imagery” (129). Lilla allows that the idea of France as a centrist Republic, an idea that superseded the “myth of the eternal French Revolution,” was itself a myth provoking rebellious reactions (18–19). In his book Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, Jan-Werner Müller—like Lilla—finds concurrent trends of “social anomie and economic dislocation” within a “robustly liberal and democratic” Germany after 1989 (285). The differing perception of geopolitical developments in the last fifteen years, as well as the American distance from a socio-democratic model may account for the lukewarm reception Houellebecq has received in the United States in contrast to Europe. For a short synopsis of American reviews, see le Fol and Sedar. “Depressive lucidity” is defined in Elementary Particles as “a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns” and “generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest” (186) (“un désinvestissement radical à l’égard des préoccupations humaines, se manifeste en tout premier lieu par un manqué d’intérêt pour les questions effectivement peu intéressantes” [226–27]). His words that “sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money” should be taken at face value. See in particular Lipovetsky’s chapter IV on “The Seduction of Things” (134–55). Lipovetsky’s point that Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of social distinction provides only a crude map for understanding the ever-widening range of consumer choices and the superabundance of products is well taken (152–55). Cf. Abecassis, who argues in implicitly Girardian terms that “constricted mimetic desire” has all desiring consumers operating according to and within the same logic of the global marketplace (806). This is, in light of Lipovetsky’s other work on May 1968, a somewhat surprising conclusion. Where he faults 1968ers for having presented a utopian platform while augmenting democratic individualism in an article on “transpolitical individualism,” his earlier book, The Empire of Fashion, is not inflected strongly by such misgivings. See Houellebecq’s essays collected in Interventions, esp. “Approches du désarroi” (57–80). They have been translated into German, but not English. See “Ansätze für wirre Zeiten” in Die Welt als Supermarkt (54–77). The translations here are my own. This is foregrounded concern in much of Houellebecq’s more explicitly journalistic, essayistic writing. See, e.g., “The Party” [“La fête”] in

NOTES

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

229

Interventions, where he tries to imagine the various forms of tenuous bonds human beings can form in situations akin to the totem feast (15–20). The narrator’s self-irony is present in this self-description. With his clothes, he imagines himself representing a stereotypical ‘techie’ who is socially inept (53). See Debord 110–12. Gavin Bowd maintains that Houellebecq clearly displays the influence of the Situationist theory of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, while nonetheless departing from it in significant ways. Houellebecq writes against the commodification of everyday life and the desire to overcome separations, without the faith in council communism or libertarian hedonism that the Situationists demonstrate (31). In this scene, the narrator’s language, in a revealing perversion of Nietzschean conceptions of the superman, approaches that found in pot-boilers: “When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then will you truly be the master; then will you possess them body and soul. Perhaps you will even manage, prior to their sacrifice, to obtain various succulent favours from them [...]” (117) (“Lorsque tu sentiras ces femmes trembler au bout de ton couteau, et supplier pour leur jeunesse, là tu seras vraiment le maître ; là tu les posséderas, corps et âme. Peut-être même pourras-tu, avant leur sacrifice, obtenir d’elles quelques savoureuses gâteries [...]” [118]). See Agamben’s direct allusions in his introduction to Homo sacer, where he relates the biopolitics of modern totalitarianism to “the society of mass hedonism and consumerism” (“la società dei consumi e dell’edonismo di massa”) and the “society of the spectacle” (11) (“la società dello spettacolo” [15]). See Agamben’s essay “Violence and Hope in the Last Spectacle” (“Violenza e speranza nell’ultimo spettacolo”) in I Situazionisti, in which he returns to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Debord’s addenda from the 1988 edition. For Agamben, Debord’s analysis of the “integrated spectacle” puts its finger on the interpenetration and homogenization of all discourse of the late twentieth century (Italy, together with France, serves as Debord’s laboratory, in Agamben’s view). In an effort to continue the trenchant analyses in Society of the Spectacle, Agamben proposes thinking community within a society of the spectacle. He proposes moving beyond not only “the expropriation of productive activity,” but “also and above all the alienation of language itself” (“all’espropriazione dell’attività produttiva, ma anche e sopratutto all’alienazione del linguaggio stesso” [15]). In effect, Agamben outlines briefly his concept of the coming community, in which there are no longer the fixed identities to which we are accustomed (see the endnotes to chapter 2). Agamben writes: “Nonetheless, it is this same spectacular state that, by nullifying and emptying of content every real identity, produces on a massive scale out of its bosom singularities which are no longer characterized either by any social identity or any real condition of belonging: unspecific singularities” (“Eppure, è lo stesso stato spettacolare, in quanto nullifica e svuota di contenuto ogni identità reale, a produrre massicciamente dal suo seno delle singolarità che non sono piú caratterizzate da

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alcuna identità sociale né da alcuna reale condizione di appartenenza: delle singolarità qualunque” [15–16]). 29. In Radical Passivity, Thomas Carl Wall has argued that the episodic structure of Agamben’s reflections in Homo sacer asks to be read in a non-linear fashion, where “it is important to read each section or panel as superimposed on the others or as if each simultaneously occupied the same space” (121). Cf. Fitzpatrick 50. 30. Agamben maintains that the figure of the homo sacer is related structurally to the sovereign exception. He puts forth this idea in one of the most widely quoted sections of his work: The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere. (83, emphasis in original) (Lo spazio politico della sovranità si sarebbe, cioè, costituito attraverso una doppia eccezione, come un’escrescenza del profano nel religioso e del religioso nel profano, che configura una zona di indifferenza fra sacrificio e omicidio. Sovrana è la sfera in cui si può uccidere senza commettere omicidio e senza celebrare un sacrificio e sacra, cioè uccidibile e insacrificabile, è la vita che è stata catturata in questa sfera. [92, emphasis in original]). 31. Norris uses the idea of the “ungrounded ground” to describe Agamben’s Heidegger-inspired emphasis on man as a speaking animal, where the living/speaking being continually comes into conflict with death. Sacrificial violence, in its relation to language and death, is the “ungrounded ground of all praxis” (6). As Norris has pointed out, Agamben first develops these ideas in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Because of that book’s heavy reliance on Hegel and Heidegger—both of whom do not figure directly in my work here—Agamben’s early text goes beyond my scope and will not be treated here. 32. For Agamben, the entire idea of the social contract as a foundational moment in Western politics must be set aside in favor of the ban (77), which holds together bare life and the sovereign power to which it is structurally similar (109). 33. In attempting to underline what he sees as tautological definitions of the sacred, Agamben returns to the work of Robertson Smith, upon whom Freud draws so heavily in Totem and Taboo. The Italian philosopher shifts the emphasis away from the ambivalence of the sacred to the analysis of the ban, which is brought into a relation with the taboo (Homo 75–80). While he criticizes Freud, he, too, goes back to pre-history to unearth the homo sacer, upon whose paradoxical status the re-conceptualization of Foucauldian biopower rests (104; cf. Fitzpatrick 52).

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34. Cf. Agamben’s statement “non c’è un fuori della legge” (34), which HellerRoazen translates as “There is nothing outside the law” (29). 35. It is in passages such as this that the extreme rhetoric for which Agamben has come under attack emerges most clearly. He continues: Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as the “zero point” of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment. All societies and all cultures today (it does not matter whether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law [...] is in force as the pure “Nothing of Revelation.” (51) (Dovunque sulla terra gli uomini vivono oggi nel bando di una legge e di una tradizione che si mantengono unicamente come “punto zero” del loro contenuto, includendoli in una pura relazione di abbandono. Tutte le società e tutte le culture (non importa se democratiche o totalitarie, conservatrici o progressiste) sono entrate oggi in una crisi di legittimità, in cui la legge [...] vige come puro “nulla della Rivelazione.” [59])

36.

37. 38.

39.

It is worth mentioning that Agamben picks up the thread here to his earlier text, The Man without Content (L’uomo senza contenuto), his reflection on the separation between aesthetics and artist. What is at issue, in my reading, is the generalization Agamben suggests of this Musil-inspired state (he does not explicitly engage with Musil despite his title): we all have, in virtually becoming “homines sacri,” become men without content (cf. Homo 115; Italian 127). While I unfortunately cannot go into his book in detail here—it appeared after the completion of my manuscript—I would briefly like to mention Eric Santner’s study, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (2006). In his first chapter, Santner outlines his conception of “creaturely” life along lines similar to those proposed in this chapter. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, Santner argues that such life is exposed to a “traumatic dimension of political power and social bonds whose structures have undergone radical transformations in modernity” (12). In contrast to myself, Santner is interested in the Lacanian dimension of such exposure to “sovereign jouissance” (22). For Santner (as for Walter Benjamin, whom Santner discusses at length), Kafka’s textual universe provides the clearest example of this exposure, where the law is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere (esp. 21–25). See Fitzpatrick 49 and LaCapra, History 155–57. As Agamben stresses, homo sacer is also different from the devotee of sacrifice, who by consecrating his life to the gods of the underworld in order to save a city from danger still guarantees a kind of communication with the divine (96). In a relevant passage of his criticism of Agamben, LaCapra relates bare life to Heidegger’s “Gestell” as well as to Marx’s abstract exchange value. Although LaCapra does so very carefully, prefacing the connection to Marx with a “perhaps,” I would argue that it is the “reduction of the human

232

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

NOTES

being to a being denuded of possibilities in a condition of ultimate abjection” that distinguishes Agamben from Marxist exchange values (History 162). Fitzpatrick believably argues that Agamben tries to sever the link to the sacred in order to show how the killing of the homo sacer does not involve the law at all and thus excavates a bare life that is not burdened by any ties to religion. By doing so, Agamben makes the homo sacer applicable to modernity (54). The repudiation of the transcendent dimension is one of Fitzpatrick’s biggest problems with Homo sacer: his own assertions to the contrary, Agamben nonetheless relies on a superhuman beyond to make some of his claims, particularly in relation to the concentration camp inmate (cf. 66). For a criticism of this aspect of Agamben’s thought, see also LaCapra, History 163–64. In their essay “The End of Alienation,” Godignon and Thiriet claim that wanton and indifferent consumption stems from individual choice (220–25). They, in contrast to Lipovetsky, make the case that emancipation and not choice is the determining factor in consumption. Cf. Judith Shulevitz’s defense of Houellebecq’s use of sex in her review of Platform. She writes: “Houellebecq skillfully transforms pornographic excess into social critique, and the return to normalcy into a capitulation to hypocrisy and spiritual death” (47). On the issue of explicit sexuality also see Crowley 23, Bowd 35. Houellebecq willingly courts controversy in this regard. See also his short text “Cléopâtre 2000” in the book entitled Nudes by German star photographer Thomas Ruff (v–vii). In these, Ruff has digitally manipulated pornographic images. A thorough discussion of Whatever’s reflections on the novel form goes beyond the scope of this chapter. It is interesting to note, however, that the historical schema underpinning Whatever necessitates a change in the manner of storytelling. The narrator describes his goals in light of a paradigm shift in human relations, and at the same time ironizes the possibility of creating anything new. Historical forces (“le simple jeu du mouvement historique”) lead to an ever greater uniformity and enlarge the sphere of death in life; these factors aid and abet the pruning, simplification, and reduction of detail in the novel. “Human relationships become progressively impossible,” the narrator claims, “which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life” (14) [“Les relations humaines deviennent progressivement impossibles, ce qui réduit d’autant la quantité d’anecdotes dont se compose un vie” (16)]. On the generic parameters of the novel (and its radical questioning thereof), see in particular Dion and Haghebaert 509–24. He received the Prix Novembre and Dublin’s IMPAC Award for it. See Barnes’s humorous account of the jury’s tense deliberations for the Prix Novembre (72). Houellebecq has also received the Prix Flore (1996), Grand prix national des lettres, catégorie Jeunes talents (1998), the Prix Interallié (2005), among others. In the Austrian context, one might single out the works of Robert Menasse as paradigmatic, in particular his 1991 novel, Blissful Times, Fragile World (Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt) in which he fuses the criticism of the late 1960s

NOTES

47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

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with reflections on the Holocaust’s aftereffects on children born to Austrian Jews. In Germany, attacks on the hyper-individualism of this generation have been common since the terrorism of the 1970s. See Lilla 20; Lipovetsky, “May” 212–19. In “May ’68,” Lipovetsky charges that democratic, consumer society made hedonism “the universal goal” through its redefinition of lifestyles and individual aspirations (216). The episode with David di Meola, son of one of the New Age gurus, is the culmination of the violent sexuality that is attacked in the novel, and from which Bruno and his girlfriend distance themselves. Di Meola winds up producing snuff videos—he tortures, maims, and kills his victims while engaging in fellatio. Bruno gives a detailed account of a book dealing with di Meola’s activities, explicitly linking the horrific murders with the theater of sexual cruelty that the Marquis de Sade embraced two centuries earlier. Bruno shares the American author’s view that libertines like di Meola take their cue from the Marquis de Sade. As purely materialistic beings, they perpetually search for new and more violent sensations. David di Meola is not some monstrous aberration from the system, but its logical outgrowth (171–75). Cf. Abecassis 817. Pleasure—and lust—are societal phenomena, Adorno and Horkheimer remark in the context of their discussion of the Marquis de Sade, and as much a product of social forces as everything else that stands in opposition to nature. See Adorno and Horkheimer’s excursus, “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” in Dialectic 63–93, esp. 104–06. See Abecassis 816–22. On eroticism and pornography in Houellebecq’s Platform, see also Clément 28–39 and Scheuerwegen 40–47. For reader’s unacquainted with Houellebecq’s style, it is worth quoting the pertinent scene from Chapter 21 of the second section, “Strange Moments” (“Les Moments Étranges”): The men and women who frequented clubs for couples quickly abandoned their search for pleasure (which required time, finesse and sensitivity) in favor of prodigal sexual abandon—rather insincere in its nature and, in fact, lifted directly from the gang-bang scenes in the fashionable porn movies shown on Canal. [...] In the liberal system which Bruno and Christiane had joined, the sexual model proposed by the dominant culture (advertising, magazines, social and public health organizations) was governed by the principle of adventure: in such a system, pleasure and desire occur as a result of a process of seduction, which emphasizes novelty, passion and individual creativity (all qualities also required of employees in their professional capacities). The diminishing importance of intellectual and moral criteria of seduction in favor of purely physical criteria led regulars of such clubs, little by little, to a slightly different system, which can be considered the fantasy of the dominant culture: the Sadean system. (201–02, emphasis in original) (Les hommes et les femmes qui fréquentent les boîtes pour couples renoncent rapidement à la recherche du plaisir [qui demande finesse, sensibilité, lenteur] au profit d’une activité sexuelle fantasmatique, assez insincère dans son principe, de fait directement calquée sur les scènes de gang bang des pornos <<mode>> diffusés par Canal . [...] Dans la société libérale où vivaient Bruno et Christiane, le modèle sexuel proposé par la culture

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officielle (publicité, magazines, organismes sociaux et de santé publique) était celui de l’aventure: à l’intérieur d’un tel système le désir et le plaisir apparaissent à l’issue d’un processus de séduction, mettant en avant la nouveauté, la passion et la créativité individuelle [qualités par ailleurs requises des employés dans le cadre de leur vie professionnelle]. L’aplatissement des critères de séduction intellectuels et moraux au profit de critères purement physiques conduisait peu à peu les habitués des boîtes pour couples à un système légèrement différent, qu’on pouvait considérer comme le fantasme de la culture officielle: le système sadien. [243–44, emphasis in original]) 52. The book offers a corrective to the models of primitive society we encountered not only in Freud, but also in Adorno and Horkheimer. Adorno and Horkheimer allude to primitive society as a counterpoint to Sadean materialism and rational society more generally in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where orgies are the collective origin of enjoyment and hence a protest against the dictates of a constraining civilization focused on the maximization of individual power (82–83). Elementary Particles charges sexually liberal society—a society of sons who have all become primal fathers—with giving up on any dream of community (“un rêve communautaire”) and destroying the “last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society” (“le dernier îlot de communisme primitif” [116])—the household. With this destruction, the narrator informs us, nothing divides the individual from the marketplace, and nothing quells man’s sense of exposure to inimical forces (96). Even for the loser Bruno, collective sex is not always a rebellion against the hypostatization of reason and the body’s servitude to the dictates of consumerism. As Bruno writes in a tract on the nudist colony of Cap d’Agde, sex is recognized as a commodity (179). Sex here is the natural outgrowth of humans’ contractual freedom in a democracy predicated on choice. The dream of collectivity within a sexuality deemed primitive is particularly tenacious, however, and embroils people in contradictions. In an effort to replace traditional bonds with new ones along liberal principles, New Age havens such as the Lieu du Changement try to resuscitate the festivities of “primitive societies” (96) (“les sociétés primitives” [116]). However, these attempts only solidify the victimization present within humanity conceived of as a primal horde of alpha, beta, and omega males (106–12). 53. For a criticism of Agamben’s ethics see LaCapra, History 156–57. 54. Michel Foucault’s call for a change in the economies of bodies and pleasures at the end of his first volume of The History of Sexuality (esp. 159) (L’Histoire de la sexualité) and his analysis of pleasure in volume two, The Use of Pleasure (L’Usage des plaisirs), echo through the description of the biological mutation taking place (and make the shared first name of Foucault and Djerzinski all the more important). If Agamben ‘inherits’ and to some degree ‘completes’ Foucault’s analyses of biopower and sovereignty, Houellebecq can be seen as engaging with both as well. The narrator of Elementary Particles mentions that Foucault’s ideas (together with Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze) have supposedly fallen into disrepute at the turn of the millennium (262). Fitzpatrick has clearly taken issue with

NOTES

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

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Agamben’s readings of Foucault, arguing that Agamben overlooks certain continuities in their analyses (56–58). Erik Vogt corroborates this assessment in “S/Citing the Camp” (77–78). Cf. Eakin 36–39 and Shulevitz 47. From the kernel of utopian belief to which New Agers cling over against the slogans of the twentieth century (such as progress and development) arises the mystical nucleus of Michel’s scientific innovation. According to the narrator, this aspect of New Ageism lends testimony to a profound human desire for the sacred (260). Scholars’ remarks about “the final solution” (Cruickshank 115) and “a pagan holocaust of being” (Abecassis in reference to the di Meola story [819]) in Elementary Particles attempt to capture both Houellebecq’s apocalyptic view of human history, as well as his post-apocalyptic tone. See Kakutani’s scathing review, where she indiscriminately meshes Houellebecq’s views with the distasteful ones of his characters (E2). Shulevitz rebuts this conflation in her own review, and Crowley examines why the texts encourage such a collapse between authorial persona and main characters. The subject matter also requires a novel type that, while incorporating elements of the Bildungsroman, novel of ideas, and morality tale, is fundamentally new. See Steinfeld 14. Crowley argues against the accusations of misogyny (25). As the sex scenes in Platform attempt to recuperate the utopian dimension of Elementary Particles for the real world, the narrator’s description of a succession of perfect, infinitely varied sexual experiences sometimes becomes ridiculous (Scheuerwegen 41). He explains: “Each person remains trapped in his skin, completely given over to his feelings of individuality [...]. When there’s no longer any possibility of identifying with the other, the only thing left is suffering—and cruelty” (190–91) (“Chacun y restait enfermé dans sa peau, pleinement livré à ses sensations d’être unique [...] Quand il n’y a plus de possibilité d’identification à l’autre, la seule modalité qui demeure c’est la souffrance–et la cruauté” [199–200]). The narrator expressly delimits contempt from hatred. After Valérie’s death he does not feel any hatred, but a sense of “great contempt” for the West (361) (“un immense mépris” [369]). Houellebecq echoed the anti-Islamic statements of three Muslim characters in Platform in an interview in the magazine Lire, calling Islam the “stupidest” religion. Various Islamic groups in France took him to court; he was eventually acquitted of inciting racial and religious hatred. See Diard Pascale, Rushdie, Khiari, and Salhi. Throughout the novels under discussion, the characters obsess about mixed-race couples among the young (Whatever 115; Elementary Particles 159; Platform 233). Abecassis, discussing the Paulinian and Pascalian underpinnings of Houellebecq’s world-view as expressed in Elementary Particles, writes of a “broken dialectic of the Either/Or variety” (824). His insights are no less applicable to Whatever, in which the Catholic faith plays the role ascribed to the pseudo-progressive utopia in the later book.

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67. The novel seemed peculiarly prescient, with the bombing of an Indonesian club for Western tourists in October 2002 and the racial unrest in French banlieues in the fall of 2005. 68. This is foreshadowed in Whatever. As the narrator blends his futile omniscience regarding ‘soft’ difference with outrageous scenes of racism and misogyny, he also shows how the effort to avoid ‘hard’ differences is doomed. In the scene I mention in the chapter, he attempts to convince his homely colleague to murder a mixed-race couple that is having sex on the beach. From the narrator’s perspective, their superficial good looks meld with their ethnicity and gender as he portrays them as society’s undeserving winners (111–20). 69. See Michel’s admission, shortly before the bomb blast, that he conceives of society as a “natural environment—like a savannah, or a jungle—whose laws I had to adapt to” (330) (“un milieu naturel – disons une savane, ou une jungle – aux lois duquel j’aurais dû m’adapter” [339]).

Chapter 7 Cognitive Dissonances: Elfriede Jelinek 1. In a trenchant analysis to which I alluded earlier, LaCapra takes Agamben to task for the kind of hypostatization of the victim the Italian philosopher undertakes in the various parts of Homo sacer, in particular in Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz). The experience of the Muselmann is approximated, at times, to the Kantian sublime. Such problematic writing raises questions about the possibility of historical witnessing and testimony, and LaCapra obviously believes these are insufficiently addressed in Agamben’s work. In one passage the historian relates Agamben’s efforts to an aspect of victimhood and victimization I have been indirectly discussing in this book, namely avoiding the reification of the victim qua victim (History 175–76). 2. It should be noted that LaCapra is careful in his analysis, and I do not want to elide this aspect of his aforecited comments. In particular, the last quotation refers to Maurice Blanchot, where LaCapra prefaces his thoughts in History in Transit with the phrase: “It may be debatable [...]” (149). In the case of Agamben, however, LaCapra is less hesitant. 3. Schaad speculates on some of the reasons why this may be so: the radical class critique dressed in high cultural language, the repetitive nature of the moralizing argument, the lack of characters with whom the reader/viewer could identify, the prevalence of death as a repetitive mechanism, the monoculture of violence, woman as the collusive agent of destruction, feminine passivity, the lack of humanity, and man’s predatory “tourism” (12–13). 4. One of the foremost Jelinek scholars, Marlies Janz, maintained as recently as 1995 that the political aspects of the writer’s oeuvre had until then been disregarded. 5. Cf. Streeruwitz 34–36. Interest in Jelinek often articulates itself as a fascination with her clothes; see Gerstl 29 or Zeemann 157. 6. In this chapter, as in the preceding ones, I distinctly use feminine or masculine pronouns.

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7. For my discussion of post-dramatic theater I have drawn primarily on HansThies Lehmann’s book, Postdramatisches Theater (here esp. 11–39, 449–73). A translation appeared after this book was completed; page numbers thus refer to the German edition from 2005. Also see Poschmann as well as Lehmann’s 2002 volume, Das Politische Schreiben. 8. While Lehmann in his preface to the third edition of Postdramatisches Theater suggests that these may be successive phases in the evolution of theater, with the emergence of post-dramatic practices during the phase of dramatic theater, I would argue that these phases should be seen as coexistent moments. 9. The high level of affective involvement might seem to be at odds with the deconstructive positions of Jelinek’s texts, in particular her hybrid texts for the theater. In other words, an anti-figural effort on her part should counteract our sense of having been psychologically or even physically violated. This assumes, of course, that a certain level of mimetic identification must be at work to generate a sense of empathy or Mitleid through theatrical practice and that Jelinek’s deconstruction of traditional drama is at odds with this kind of mimetic identification. Bärbel Lücke argues in the context of Bambiland and Babel that Jelinek’s dramas put Derridean insights into play in order to touch on the condition of the split subject. Jelinek’s dramas about the Iraq War of George “Jesus” Bush slide between good and evil, slip from rationalism to religion, and constitute myth from pseudo-rationality. In doing so, Lücke has suggested, they excavate a psychoanalytic dimension to our contemporary culture of war: incestuous familial constellations, phantasmatic desires to sublimate lack, and the instinct for autoimmunization against all vicissitudes attempt to somehow capture human psychology. Lücke’s interpretation assumes that the non-representational element of Jelinek’s dramas mirrors our conscious and unconscious states all the more effectively. Especially because Jelinek’s post-dramatic theater works through the implications of the deconstructed and decentered subject of desire, we as audience members feel assaulted (266–71). 10. From the beginning of her work, she has been intrigued by the possibilities of criticizing foundations, as Barthes practiced it. Janz has devoted attention to Jelinek’s indebtedness to Barthes (Elfriede 3–6, 8–17, “Mütter” 93). See also Jelinek’s early essay “The Endless Innocence” (“Die endlose Unschuldigkeit”), in which she rearticulates some of Barthes’ ideas from Mythologies. 11. This is a point Jelinek broaches as early as 1975 (“Die endlose Unschuldigkeit” 49–82). 12. Horace Engdahl describes this turn away from characters as liberating in his speech before the Swedish Academy on December 10, 2004: “Literary genres pale to disappearance under Jelinek’s hand. Her plays are not theatre, rather ‘texts to be spoken’, liberated from the tyranny of dramatical roles.” 13. DeMeritt has discussed the concept of “shallowness,” esp. in relation to postmodernism in A Sport Play (261–69). 14. Karl Kraus and the Wiener Gruppe, to whom Jelinek has always admitted her debt, should be mentioned here.

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15. Lehmann has seen this “aesthetic of risk” as post-dramatic theater’s greatest contribution to our historical moment. When society’s metacommunication functions too well—when there is nothing that cannot be talked about rationally—theater retains the purpose of rattling us, shaking us out of communicative torpor, and making affective response possible (471–73). Jelinek complicates Lehmann’s scenario: all libidinal and cognitive investment is called into question. 16. Cf. his essay “The Death of the Author” (142–48) (“La mort de l’auteur” [491–95]). 17. See Wirth 19; Poschmann 35; Lehmann 46–47. 18. Certainly, Jelinek’s polarized reception lends eloquent testimony to Wirth’s findings, namely that theater increasingly posits a group of listeners/viewers who are of the same opinion as the information imparted to them (19). 19. To my mind, the question arises: is “falsch” the opposite of “echt,” or is “falsch” the opposite of “wahr”? 20. Cf. Roland Barthes’s essay “Myth Today,” in Mythologies (109–59). 21. In proper German, one would expect to read “das meiste, was es gibt.” 22. Elsewhere I compared this model to a more accessible analogue from visual art: to sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s House, an imprint of the Victorian house in East London that was torn down. In place of floorboards, ceilings, roof, and pipes, there remains Whiteread’s concrete cast. See the image online at http://www.artistsineastlondon.org/08_house/04text.htm (accessed October 20, 2005). 23. If Rachel Whiteread serves as an analogue for the first theatrical metaphor, we might think of Josiah McElheny’s mirror-objects standing on mirrored surfaces, such as Modernity ca. 1952, as an analogue for the second theatrical metaphor. Caught in the mirror-objects’ curved mise en abîme, we are replicated nowhere in McElheny’s art objects; we are outside the space of reflection created in this careful mise en scène. See his Modernity ca. 1952, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2004) at http://www.donaldyoung. com/mcelheny/mcelheny_ indeximage.html (accessed October 20, 2005). 24. A similar movement occurs in her later polemical essay, “Sense Whatever. Body Senseless.” Any opening toward the outside is sealed off; we are no longer addressing the actors but speaking among ourselves. The audience colludes in the self-aggrandizement, when Jelinek turns against the actors once more and brings us full circle to the semblance (Schein) of the appearance (Erscheinung) with which she started (11). Within the last two sentences, there is the transition from the “I” with its aggressive posturing to the “we,” which includes us in the dismissal of and menacing threat to the actors. We, too, are supposedly fed up with the actors, and as Jelinek moves from the direct address to the impersonal third-person plural to talk about him/them, she closes the circle in on the audience. With a dismissive gesture, we communicate among ourselves that we, powerful, have plenty of actors to choose from and that we, exasperated, have had entirely enough of them. 25. In this essay, Jelinek fleshes out the fashion analogy she used in “I Would Like to Be Shallow.” She brings in her reflections on language, which take on increasing importance in her own pronouncements about writing throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. In an analogy that

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melds Walter Benjamin’s messianic philosophy of language with her earlier fashion metaphor and sexual colloquialisms, she takes the actors to task for refusing to relinquish the kingly mantle of language (cf. Benjamin, “Task” 1: 258; “Aufgabe” 4.1:15). The problem is not the actors’ mimetic desires, but rather their attachment to a high language that does not belong to them and that ultimately saps their virility. The female author, who no longer “dares” tug at this mantle (“die Autorin nicht, die traut sich längst nicht mehr”), notes that others yank, albeit to little effect (8). If in Jelinek’s earlier theatrical essay the director was engaged in masturbatory narcissism, it is now the actors who have a narcissistic relationship to language. Language is not, however, a pretty dress. Instead, it gives theater durability and the ability to stand on its own. The focus here is on language in its performative aspect. Jelinek spins out the metaphor further, so that the actors disappear in their identification with the king’s, indeed the emperor’s, new clothing. True to the fairytale, the emperor’s new clothing disappears suddenly in the deceptive progression from king to emperor in this fashion show. The actors, together with their figures, vanish in a puff of smoke. The transition is made here to Jelinek’s distinctly traumatic Sprechtheater, which is preoccupied with “language as a wound that never heals” (“die nie heilende Wunde Sprache” [8]). It speaks the characters rather than the other way around (cf. Poschmann 281–82). 26. In “Sense Whatever,” Jelinek explicitly thematizes the preoccupation with the authorial persona that her post-dramatic Sprechtheater engenders. The actors, speaking a language foreign to them, cannot help replicating the tactics of the language they speak. In the manner in which language tries to hide under the theater’s and the actors’ metaphorical skirts and become the crinoline, the actors now try to hide under the author’s skirts. Jelinek’s ludic impulse when she refers to the game of pick-up-sticks brings with it the disorientation of the actors. About herself, she says: “I throw them into the room like Mikado-sticks, these men and women, where they tried to hide in vain under a different name, of course very often under mine” (“ich werfe sie wie Mikadostäbe in den Raum, diese Männer und Frauen, wo sie sich unter anderem Namen, selbstverständlich sehr oft dem meinen, vergeblich zu verstecken suchten”). The shift from present to past tense (“suchte”) indicates a long duration for this kind of behavior. The destabilization of Jelinek’s theater requires a surrogate behind (or better said: under) whom the stick figures can hide. Her theater of speech, in which actors are only actualized in the moment of their speaking—“The actors ARE speech, they don’t speak” (“Die Schauspieler SIND das Sprechen, sie sprechen nicht” [8–9, emphasis in original])—functions by way of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism (chapter 1). The authorial persona grows in importance as the dramatis personae and actors diminish, and Jelinek occupies this commanding position with unease. She becomes the inadvertent victim of her own project. If Jelinek’s 1983 text augmented directorial power, she now is explicitly concerned with her own increased stature as author and the resentment this augmentation engenders. Although this amplified importance may rest on a misunderstanding of Jelinek’s project—and she presents the situation as if this were the case—the authorial figure becomes more important nonetheless.

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27. The parallels to Mayröcker’s artistic manner of approaching and retracing the patriarchal tradition are worth noting. Jelinek, however, more aggressively brings to the fore the strangeness of the incorporated material, which cannot be assimilated. 28. Certainly, Jelinek writes in a self-lacerating, ironic manner and immediately downplays her deification at the very moment that she claims this ultimate ground (the only possible ground for her project is this transcendent one). She goes back on the auratic dimension for the actors or herself and veers away from the Messianic language philosophy we might have suspected from the allusion to Benjamin’s philosophy of language (1:253–63) (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” [4.1: 9–21]). Nonetheless, the polyglot nature of the author, who assumes a foreign speech, “ein fremdes Sagen,” for her purposes, renders her omnipotent within the theatrical space and time of the performance. 29. Jelinek uses the incongruous verb “geraten”—to stumble into, to fall prey to—in conjunction with the noun for sympathetic understanding, “Einklang.” 30. She begins her article with “I’m very interested in fashion” (“Ich interessiere mich sehr für Mode” [26]). 31. The Lehrstücke have recently found favor again. See Fredric Jameson’s Brecht and Method, esp. the chapter on “Doctrine/Lehre” (35–88). 32. See also her statements in the email exchange with Gerhard Fuchs, where she comments on views of her as “opfersüchtig” (Rudolf Burger)—“addicted to being a victim.” She writes: “I would really once like to ascertain why those, who never were victims, sometimes, like myself, are so irreconcilable, while the victims can forgive. But naturally only the victims can forgive, the others do not even have the possibility” (“ich möchte wirklich einmal ergründen, weshalb diejenigen, die nie Opfer waren, manchmal, wie ich, so unversöhnlich sind, während die Opfer vergeben können. Aber natürlich können nur die Opfer vergeben, die anderen haben gar nicht die Möglichkeit” [12]). 33. While citation has received attention in the context of a general media critique in Jelinek’s oeuvre, the author’s “foreign speech” must also be seen in the context of her reception of canonical authors. In what seems to be a footnote to her dramatic texts Clouds.Home. and Totenauberg (a pun on Heidegger’s Todtnauberg), she refers to some of the authors on whom she draws in “Sense Whatever”: “Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin” (9). 34. While on the one hand she embraces the many voices of tradition, fashion, TV, and so on, the speaking self’s voice is a distinctly Jelinekian one. 35. The feminine pronoun is particularly pertinent to her early novels such as Women as Lovers (Die Liebhaberinnen, 1975) or Lust (1989) and in plays such as What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband (Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaft, 1979) or Illness or Modern Women (Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen, 1987). 36. See, e.g., Sportstück 62, 174, 141, 154–63. 37. Cf. 25, 26, 60. In a nearly untranslatable passage, the victim plays on the German word for “select,” which resonates with “to read” as well as with “weed out.” The bundle leads us to believe that it is like a book: “I’m not of the elect, rather, I’m all read out [/picked] over, even before I came

NOTES

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

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under your pressure [/print]” (“Auserlesen bin ich nicht, eher schon ausgelesen, noch bevor ich unter Ihren Druck geriet” [74]). The “shaft” or “Schacht” takes on an additional meaning in Jelinek’s text: it also refers to Heinrich von Kleist’s character Penthesilea, who in her Jelinekian incarnation delves into her heart’s “shaft” to find her own death (Vogel, “Harte” 123). On the temporal aspects of Jelinek’s text with its athletic scansions, see Juliane Vogel (“Harte” 121–22). See Jelinek’s interview with Wolfgang Kralicek and Klaus Nüchtern, in which she parodically uses the Viennese diminutive ending on “angel” to describe herself. This movement between aggrandizement and self-diminution is clearly present in the stage directions. While the author professes indifference to how the male voices speak the choral parts, she is very specific in her directions nonetheless. At the end, she writes: “This is only one possibility among many, every one is fine for me” (“Das ist nur eine Möglichkeit unter vielen anderen, jede ist mir recht” [17, stage directions in italics]). A humorous compendium of newspaper headlines about Schleef’s production, ranging from “Sechs Stunden Sesseldrücken” to “Der Olymp in Olympia—Ein Theaterkraftakt,” can be found in Hermann Beil’s Weltkomödie Österreich (408–10). Juliane Vogel has linked the figures’ insensitivity to pain with the autonomy of language in Jelinek’s most recent works. Jelinek has left behind human dialogue—speech tied to a specific time and action—in favor of the language of the dead (“Harte” 123).

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Index of Name s

Abecassis, Jack, 143; 226 n. 3; 227 n. 6; 227 n. 7; 227 n. 9; 228 n. 20; 233 n. 48; 233 n. 50; 235 n. 57; 235 n. 66 Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 24–5, 29, 137, 150–4, 160, 169, 173, 179, 184; 204 n. 11; 210 n. 36; 229 n. 27; 229 n. 28; 229 n. 29; 229 n. 30; 230 n. 31; 230 n. 32; 230 n. 33; 231 n. 34; 231 n. 35; 231 n. 36; 231 n. 38; 231–2 n. 39; 232 n. 40; 232 n. 41; 234 n. 53; 234–5 n. 54; 236 n.1; 236 n. 2 Agee, James, 68; 211 n. 48 Arasse, Daniel, 80; 213–14 n. 17; 214 n. 20; 214 n. 21; 214 n. 22; 214 n. 23; 218 n. 3 Barthes, Roland, 119, 174–5, 182; 221 n. 3; 237 n. 10; 238 n. 20 Baudrillard, Jean, 1–4, 6–7, 10, 19, 26, 67–71, 108, 193; 205 n. 25; 209 n. 24; 218 n. 2 Benjamin, Walter, 25, 63, 101, 132, 152; 218 n. 3; 226 n. 68; 231 n. 36; 238–9 n. 25; 240 n. 28 Bloom, Harold, 80, 82; 214 n. 18; 214 n. 21; 217 n. 46 Bois, Yve-Alain, 108–9; 220 n. 23 Bottum, J., 29, 40; 203 n. 2 Boyarin, Daniel, 18; 197 n. 34; 198 n. 43 Bresson, Robert, 53, 67, 71; 208–9 n. 20

Breton, André, 113, 115, 119, 121, 123; 222 n. 11; 222 n. 17; 224 n. 37 Brown, Laura S., 184 Brüderlin, Markus, 74; 212 n. 1; 214 n. 22 Canetti, Elias, 35, 56 Caruth, Cathy, 105; 199–200 n. 55; 218 n. 4; 219 n. 10 Celan, Paul, 77, 79–81; 213 n. 11; 213 n. 12; 214 n. 25; 214 n. 27; 216 n. 43 Celant, Germano, 225 n. 52 Crowley, Martin, 140, 167; 226 n. 2; 227 n. 9; 227–8 n. 13; 232 n. 43; 235 n. 58; 235 n. 60 Cruickshank, Ruth, 136, 141; 226–7 n. 3; 227 n. 9; 235 n. 57 Darwin, Charles, 10–14, 135, 142, 157; 197 n. 29; 197–8 n. 37; 198 n. 38; 198 n. 39; 198 n. 40; 221 n. 9 Debord, Guy, 150; 209 n. 24; 229 n. 25; 229–30 n. 28 Delahaye, Luc, 68–70; 212 n. 55 Derrida, Jacques, 62, 117, 119, 135, 198; 208 n. 8; 222 n. 12; 222–3 n. 21; 223 n. 30; 234–5 n. 54 Dever, Carolyn, 8; 196 n. 19 Eccher, Danilo, 84, 92 Ellison, Ralph, 59; 206–7 n. 38

262

INDEX OF NAMES

Fetz, Bernhard, 216 n. 39 Fitzpatrick, Peter, 153; 230 n. 29; 230 n. 33; 231 n. 37; 232 n. 40; 234–5 n. 54 Foster, Hal, 211 n. 42 Foucault, Michel, 25; 234–5 n. 54 Freeman, Derek, 196–7 n. 27 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4, 8–24, 27–8, 30, 31, 33–5, 46–7, 61, 101–9, 111–18, 120, 126, 131, 133, 140, 156–8; 196 n. 20; 196 n. 24; 196 n. 25; 196–7 n. 27; 197 n. 29; 197 n. 30; 197 n. 31; 197 n. 32; 197 n. 33; 197 n. 34; 197 n. 36; 197–8 n. 37; 198 n. 38; 198 n. 42; 198 n. 43; 198 n. 44; 198 n. 46; 198–9 n. 47; 199 n. 51; 199–200 n. 55; 200 n. 57; 200 n. 58; 200 n. 59; 200 n. 60; 201 n. 61; 201 n. 64; 201 n. 65; 201–2 n. 67; 203 n. 3; 203 n. 4; 203 n. 5; 204 n. 11; 204 n. 13; 218 n. 1; 218–19 n. 5; 219 n. 6; 219 n. 7; 219 n. 9; 219 n. 11; 219 n. 13; 219 n. 14; 219 n. 15; 220 n. 17; 220 n. 21; 220 n. 22; 220 n. 23; 221 n. 4; 221 n. 5; 221 n. 9; 222 n. 10; 222 n. 12; 222 n. 13; 222 n. 18; 222 n. 20; 223 n. 29; 225 n. 51; 226 n. 68; 230 n. 33; 234 n. 52 Gauß, Karl-Markus, 64–5; 207 n. 2; 207 n. 4; 209 n. 27 Gay, Peter, 11, 154; 197 n. 28 Gilman, Sander, 198 n. 43 Girard, René, 3–4, 24, 27–42, 44–5, 47, 49–50, 52, 60, 62, 72, 85, 102, 108–9, 137, 154, 181; 203 n. 2; 203 n. 3; 203 n. 4; 203 n. 5; 203 n. 7; 203 n. 8; 203 n. 10; 204 n. 11; 204 n. 12; 204 n. 15; 204 n. 16; 204 n. 17; 204 n. 20; 205 n. 22; 205 n. 33; 207 n. 4; 208 n. 8; 208 n. 9; 211 n. 54;

219 n. 11; 227 n. 10; 228 n. 20; 239 n. 26 Grabner, Fritz, 209 n. 25 Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse, 196 n. 23 Habermas, Jürgen, 91; 201–2 n. 67; 217 n. 47 Haneke, Michael, 3–4, 27, 47, 49, 50–61, 63–73, 85, 101, 105, 108–9, 114, 128, 161; 205 n. 24; 206 n. 37; 207 n. 1; 207 n. 2; 207 n. 3; 207 n. 5, 207–8 n. 7; 208 n. 8; 208 n. 11; 208 n. 16; 108 n. 17; 208 n. 18; 208 n. 19; 208–9 n. 20; 209 n. 22; 209 n. 23; 209 n. 25; 209 n. 28; 210 n. 36; 210 n. 38; 210 n. 39; 211 n. 43; 212 n. 56; 212 n. 57; 212 n. 58; 212 n. 59; 219 n. 12; 226 n. 68 Hentig, Hans von, 6, 8; 195 n. 11 Honneth, Axel, 44–45, 59; 206–7 n. 38; 207 n. 39; 207 n. 40 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 4, 20–4, 26–7, 30–1, 46, 92, 135; 198 n. 42; 201 n. 65; 201–2 n. 67; 202 n. 68; 202 n. 71; 202 n. 74; 202 n. 76; 233 n. 49; 234 n. 52 Houellebecq, Michel, 3, 5, 135–8, 140–1, 143, 145–7, 149–55, 157, 160–2, 165–7, 169–70, 173; 207 n. 40; 209 n. 31; 226 n. 1; 226 n. 2; 226–7 n. 3; 227 n. 4; 227 n. 5; 227 n. 6; 227 n. 9; 227–8 n. 13; 228 n. 16; 228 n. 22; 228–9 n. 23; 229 n. 25; 232 n. 43; 232 n. 45; 233 n. 50; 234–5 n. 54; 235 n. 57; 235 n. 58; 235 n. 64; 235 n. 66 Huyssen, Andreas, 24, 95; 205 n. 29; 215 n. 33 Janz, Marlies, 187; 236 n. 4; 237 n. 10 Jappe, Georg, 127, 129, 131; 225 n. 56 Jay, Martin, 201 n. 65

INDEX OF NAMES

Jelinek, Elfriede, 3, 5, 52, 73, 111, 123, 152, 169–91; 205 n. 24; 207–8 n. 7; 236 n. 4; 236 n. 5; 237 n. 9; 237 n. 10; 237 n. 11; 237 n. 12; 237 n. 14; 238 n. 15; 238 n. 18; 238 n. 24; 238–9 n. 25; 239 n. 26; 240 n. 27; 240 n. 28; 240 n. 29; 240 n. 33; 240 n. 34; 241 n. 38; 241 n. 39; 241 n. 40; 241 n. 43 Kafka, Franz, 25, 73, 151–2; 204 n. 11; 231 n. 36 Kastberger, Klaus, 121–2; 221 n. 7; 221 n. 8; 222–3 n. 21; 223 n. 30; 224 n. 39; 224 n. 42; 225 n. 50 Kermode, Frank, 89; 205 n. 23; 212 n. 4; 216 n. 45; 217 n. 48 Kiefer, Anselm, 3–4, 73–85, 89, 92, 95–9, 101, 108; 212 n. 9; 213 n. 11; 213 n. 12; 213 n. 13; 213 n. 16; 213–14 n. 17; 214 n. 18, 214 n. 19; 214 n. 20; 214 n. 21; 214 n. 22; 214 n. 24; 214 n. 26; 214 n. 27; 214 n. 28, 215 n. 29; 215 n. 33; 215 n. 34; 215 n. 37; 217 n. 46, 217 n. 51; 217 n. 52; 217–18 n. 55; 218 n. 3; 220 n. 23 Kracauer, Siegfried, 146 LaCapra, Dominick, 4, 28, 154, 169, 184; 193 n. 4; 201 n. 63; 203 n.1; 218 n. 4; 225 n. 61; 231 n. 37; 231–2 n. 41; 234 n. 53; 236 n. 1; 236 n. 2 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 172, 177; 237 n. 7; 237 n. 8; 238 n. 15; 238 n. 17 Leiprecht, Helga, 170–1 Levine, Michael P., 8 Lilla, Mark, 140; 228 n. 14; 228 n. 15; 233 n. 47 Linville, Susan, 220 n. 16

263

Lipovetsky, Gilles, 141, 143–6, 149; 228 n. 19; 228 n. 20; 228 n. 21; 232 n. 42; 233 n. 47 Lücke, Bärbel, 172; 237 n. 9 Maier, Charles S., 195 n. 13 Mayröcker, Friederike, 3–5, 111–33, 135–6, 170–1; 221 n. 1; 221 n. 2; 221 n. 3; 221 n. 4; 221 n. 5; 221 n. 6; 221 n. 7; 221 n. 8; 221 n. 9; 222 n. 10; 222 n. 11; 222 n. 15; 222–3 n. 21; 223 n. 23; 223 n. 24; 223 n. 26; 223 n. 29; 223 n. 30; 223 n. 31; 224 n. 34; 224 n. 35; 224 n. 40; 224 n. 42; 224 n. 43; 224 n. 44; 224 n. 45; 225 n. 49; 225 n. 53; 225 n. 55; 225 n. 56; 225 n. 58; 225 n. 59; 225–6 n. 64; 226 n. 69; 226 n. 70; 227 n. 4; 227 n. 27 Menasse, Robert, 232–3 n. 46 Metelmann, Jörg, 48, 50, 60, 62–3, 65; 207 n. 1; 208 n. 8; 208 n. 13; 208 n. 18; 209 n. 23; 210 n. 32; 210 n. 37; 210 n. 38; 212 n. 58 Minnow, Martha, 7–8, 19; 195 n. 12; 195 n. 15; 195 n. 16; 195 n. 17; 195–6 n. 18; 220 n. 24 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 106; 220 n. 16 Nevers, Camille, 58–9, 71 Paul, Robert A., 11, 13–14, 17–18, 113; 196–7 n. 27; 197 n. 28; 197 n. 29; 197 n. 36; 198 n. 42; 198 n. 43; 202 n. 72; 219 n. 8; 220 n. 21; 221 n.9 Pynchon, Thomas, 88 Ransmayr, Christoph, 3–4, 73–7, 80–6, 88–92, 94–9, 101, 108, 123, 131, 161, 169; 212 n. 1;

264

INDEX OF NAMES

Ransmayr, Christoph—Continued 212 n. 3; 212 n. 7; 212 n. 9; 213 n. 10; 213 n. 11; 214 n. 18; 214 n. 28; 215 n. 32; 215 n. 34; 215 n. 37; 215–16 n. 38; 216 n. 39; 216 n. 44; 217 n. 46; 217 n. 48; 217 n. 50; 217–18 n. 55 Reich-Ranicki 73; 212 n. 1 Ricciardi, Alessia, 114; 220 n. 17; 220 n. 25; 222 n. 12 Riess-Berger, 119; 223 n. 22; 223 n. 24; 223 n. 25; 223 n. 27; 225 n. 60; 226 n. 69 Rock, Paul, 193 n. 6; 195 n. 12 Ryan, William, 195 n. 15 Saltzman, Lisa, 214 n. 24; 214 n. 27; 214 n. 28; 218 n. 3; 220 n. 23 Santner, Eric, 18, 20, 106, 108; 197 n. 31; 198 n. 43; 198–9 n. 47; 199 n. 53; 200 n. 60; 219 n. 15; 220 n. 16; 231 n. 36 Schaad, Isolde, 171; 236 n. 3 Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin, 21; 201 n. 66; 201–2 n. 67; 202 n. 75 Schmidt, Friedrich, 201 n. 65 Schmidt, Katharina, 76, 78; 212 n. 9; 213 n. 14 Schmidt, Siegfried J., 113, 128–9; 221 n. 4, 225 n. 56; 225 n. 57; 225 n. 59 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin, 221 n. 2; 223 n. 23; 224 n. 34 Scribner, Charity, 220 n. 17; 222 n. 13; 222 n. 20 Sebald, W.G., 195 n. 14; 205 n. 29; 231 n. 36 Sloterdijk, Peter, 3–4, 24, 27, 35–47, 54, 56–7, 72, 96, 101, 108, 128, 136–7, 153, 161; 204 n. 21; 205 n. 25; 205 n. 26; 205 n. 27; 205 n. 30; 205 n. 32;

205–6 n. 34; 206 n. 35; 209 n. 31; 219 n. 12; 227 n. 5; 227 n. 10 Sontag, Susan, 66–7; 211 n. 46; 211 n. 48; 211 n. 50; 211 n. 53 Steiner, Uwe, 205 n. 27 Steinfeld, Thomas, 235 n. 59 Streeruwitz, Marlene, 206 n. 37; 236 n. 5 Strigl, Daniela, 224 n. 45 Suppan, Karl, 208 n. 13; 208 n. 16; 210 n. 33 Tàpies, Antoni, 117, 126–7, 130; 222 n. 11; 224 n. 47; 224 n. 48; 225 n. 49; 225 n. 62; 225 n. 63 Vogel, Amos, 55; 208 n. 16; 208 n. 17; 209 n. 24 Vogel, Juliane 131, 186, 188; 223 n. 23; 226 n. 65; 241 n. 38; 241 n. 39; 241 n. 43 Walklate, Sandra, 5, 6; 194 n. 9 Wall, Thomas Carl, 210 n. 36; 230 n. 29 Wessely, Christian, 210 n. 37 Whitebook, Joel, 21 Wiggershaus, Rolf, 21 Williams, Raymond, 193 n. 4 Wirth, Andrzej, 176, 182; 238 n. 17; 238 n. 18 Wittstock, Uwe, 215 n. 34; 217 n. 50 Woodward, Kathleen, 220 n. 17 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 11, 19; 196 n. 23; 196–7 n. 27; 198 n. 43; 199–200 n. 55; 200 n. 57; 200 n. 59