For a Radical Ethics of Equality* (in English)

For a Radical Ethics of Equality*

June, 22 2007 

By Ezequiel Adamovsky 

What does it mean today to be Anticapitalist? Today, left identity is an identity in crisis. Reconstructing a movement for radical emancipation is therefore going to require a critical examination of our legacy. This task quickly reveals that one of the biggest shortcomings of the left tradition is to be found in the lack of an ethical dimension to political action. The following essay attempts to analyse the reasons behind this inherited ethical vacuum and its impact on left practices. It goes over some key moments in the history of the relationship between moral thinking and emancipatory politics, including the Marxist tradition’s rejection of moral thinking and some later attempts to recover it. Furthermore, it argues the absolute necessity of anchoring all militant will to radical egalitarian ethics, capable of guiding our actions in a clearly emancipatory direction.

The radical lefts, be they Marxist, Communist, Guevarist, Socialist, Anarchist, Autonomist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Leninist, etc., beyond doctrinal differences, spring from a shared basic thrust: the desire to live in common, in a society of equals free from oppression and exploitation. This is the perennial historical truth of the left.

However, these ideas have been, and continue to be, put to uses that deviate from that fundamental thrust, which at times may even contradict it. An examination of the implicit motives behind left-wing discourses throughout history quickly reveals examples of a clearly ideological use. “Ideological” in the Marxist sense of the expression: Leftist discourses whose function is to mask or channel wills to power that are not or cannot be openly expressed. This implicit function consciously or unconsciously subverts the primary emancipatory vocation that originally gave rise to the ideas of the left.

Let us look at some historical examples. The ideas of Socialism, Communism or Marxism, for example, were used on a number of occasions during the 19th and 20th centuries for their capacity to demolish liberal individualism. The critique of the atomisation of society and the empire of selfishness generated by liberal capitalism has found extremely powerful weapons in the arsenal of leftist thought. However, these weapons have not always been used to further an emancipatory project. They have also been used to justify the forcible homogenisation of society under a political banner. As individualism erodes the collective, these projects have sought to restore a national collective (with or without private property or the market). Various examples of this use of leftist ideas can be cited: Mussolini’s fascism began among the same ranks as Italian revolutionary socialism. The course taken by the Duce is by no means unique: it is similar to that of other Socialists such asSorel and to dozens of referential thinkers across the world. The old Communist party of the USSR is nowadays a nationalist, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic group that nevertheless preserves its communist thinking in more than just the name. In all these cases, only those elements that are “convenient” are taken from leftist ideas, such as the culture of a strong State, the subordination of the individual to the needs of the collective, the critique of liberal democracy, etc. The more clearly emancipatory ideas – equality, self-determination, cooperation, solidarity, and liberty – are left by the wayside.

Alongside this ideological use of leftist ideas, Marxism can sometimes be found being used as an “ideology of modernisation”. Lenin himself argued that Socialism is “soviet power plus electrification”. This use has fed the self-justifying discourse of several dictatorships, from the Chinese elites who headed the restoration of Capitalism, to theoreticians of “African Socialism” such as Julius Nyerere or tyrants of “scientific Socialism” such as the Somali Siyad Barre. Once again, from the wide range Marxist ideas, only those of strong State planning (supported by compulsory unanimity from below), the imperative of developing productive forces, and the critique of the bourgeoisie and of liberalism in the name of an equality (restricted to the purely economic sphere) are taken up.

There is another ideological use of leftist ideas, also related to the ideal of “modernisation”, that has existed in variable proportions in socialist movements all over the world. The “anti-capitalism of the professional and managerial classes” described by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, which, rather than aiming for the emancipation of the workers, looked to a world “scientifically” directed by an elite of “people who possess the knowledge”. By using Marxism, private property is made the object of criticism, but the implicit ideal is one of techno-bureaucratic social management. Once again, self-determination, liberty, and the autonomy of a socially cooperative whole are left by the wayside.

Finally, there are “inverted” uses of left wing ideas. Instead of using them to justify the homogeneity of society, the scientific dominion of a bureaucratic vanguard, or a strong State, they are used to mask the most radical individualism. Many people or small groups of “anarchists” and “autonomists” (or however you want to call them) take the leftist tradition of rejecting oppression, the State, and authority in general, but only to claim their own personal rights to act according to their own will, being accountable to nothing and nobody. In this case, leftism acts as an “aesthetic” varnish and a “lifestyle” to justify an attitude that is as selfish as that of bourgeoisie, and which is often much more elitist in its disdain for “ordinary” people.

 Some historical effects of leftist ideas put into practice can be added to this analysis: the crimes of Pol Pot and Sendero Luminoso; the GULAG and the massacre at Tiananmen; the repression of left wing companions in the name of Socialism wherever a (single) party has taken power; the “vanguardist” manipulation of others and those countless everyday examples of mutual petty hostility and “internal totalitarianism” that anyone who has been involved in a left wing party or group is familiar with. All this in the name of left wing ideas.

 How is it that such sublime ideas coexist with such contradictory uses and effects? How is it that the ideas of the left so often become a path to the practices of the right? 

Ideas without ethics

 If the implicit humanism of the ideas of the left has so often been absent in its practices, it is because the left tradition, or at least its hegemonic currents, lacks an ethical dimension. Indeed, any concern for the ethical evaluation of actions has been actively eradicated from its politics.

Reduced to the simplest formula, the problem of ethics consists in establishing the criteria that help us to define which behaviours or actions are good, and which ones are bad (and should therefore be avoided). Ethics normally includes, explicitly or implicitly, the notion of responsibility for actions, that is to say, to whom or what should I be morally accountable for what I do or fail to do. It usually also includes  - often implicitly- some “situational” provision, which determines the specific contexts in which the general code can be legitimately broken. Taking Christianity as an example: the ethics, explicitly formulated in the Ten Commandments and in the doctrine of sin, emanate directly from the divine; the laws are eternal and go beyond the fickle opinions of men. Breakers of this code answer directly to God (beyond the fact that the Church or temporal power can, in the meanwhile, punish or forgive actions). The pastoral presence of God, whose gaze reaches into the darkest corner of every soul, acts as guardian and guarantor of ethical behaviour in the herd. As with all ethics, in practice, Christian ethics include ad hoc provisions that makes it more flexible in extreme situations. Despite the commandments, it is not a mortal sin to kill someone in self-defence, nor to steal an apple rather than starve to death.

How does the left orient its political decisions, from the broad strategic lines of a party, to the day-to-day actions of a militant? What code of legitimate behaviour do we use, and to whom do we respond for the things that we do or do not do?

The visceral rejection of ethics by many people on the left never ceases to surprise me. I have seen countless companions become jumpy when, for one reason or another, they hear someone else use vocabulary referring to the universe of moral. If forced to discuss failings in someone’s behaviour they always clarify that “it is not a question of morals”, as if it was not proper for someone on the left to talk about things being “good” or “bad”. Although many people on the left are among the most altruistic, kind and charitable people to be found in this world, most would doubtless be uncomfortable with being considered “good” or “kind” (an adjective that, in the cultural universe of the left, evokes a sense of “weakness”).

This strange contradiction in militant culture came about because the left has rejected the question of moral evaluation of behaviour, reducing ethics, to a mere “logic”. Thus conducts and actions are not guided by what could be considered “good” or “bad”, but by what is “correct” or “incorrect”. The measure of “correctness” is defined not by ethics, but by its correspondence to a given political truth: a correct action is one that follows the correct political line. A political line is established as being “correct”, not through an exercise of ethical evaluation, but based on the knowledge of a truth (for example, the direction in which “Historical Laws” point, the assumed dictates of “revolutionary conscience”, the postulates expressed in this or that canonical text by Marx, Bakunin, etc.) An action that pushes in the correct historical direction – for example, inciting a group of young people to join a direct action, deliberately keeping from them information about its possible consequences – can be considered “correct” independent of whether it is ethically reprehensible. The important thing is not that the action is correct because it is “good”, but because it could be “effective”.

The eviction of ethics

Ethics and leftism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, traces of serious consideration of the ethical dimension can be found in the (misnamed) “Utopian Socialism” of the 19th century and in a number of minor currents within Socialist and Anarchist traditions. For Kropotkin’s anarchism, for example, an ethics of a new type, one that was different from religious and metaphysical precepts, was fundamental to “give men an ideal” and to “guide them in action”. Worried by the amorality of the time, derived from liberalism, Darwinism or the ideas of Nietzsche, Kropotkin worked intensively from 1904 until his death in 1921 to write a treatise on ethics. He argued for an ethics of solidarity and sought to demonstrate that it was universal, emanating from the naturally sociable nature of mankind (and animals) and the impulse to “mutual aid”. Similar concerns can be found in Tolstoy’s “Christian Socialism”, which had become a genuine mass movement by the beginning of the 20th century. From the teachings of a Christ stripped of his divine status, Tolstoy derived general ethical mandates (unconnected with any religiosity) that should not only guide political action, but should also prefigure the world we are aiming for: love thy neighbour, humility, forgiveness, etc.

However, the Marxist tradition fiercely opposed any ethical discourse. Marx himself dismissed such concerns as irrelevant: in the Communist Manifesto he considers them a distraction that interferes with understanding of the material basis of poverty and social ills, and in The German Ideology he went so far as to argue that “communists do not preach any moral at all”. Students of Marx have recently suggested that his rejection of ethics was simply the result of a “tactical” necessity to mark a difference between his ideas and other debates current at the time, and that Marxism is, in fact, a form of humanism that contains a strong implicit ethics. Nevertheless, even these authors recognise that Marx’s attitude profoundly marked the Marxist tradition, which from that point on maintained hostility towards any ethical discourse (with the exception of a marginal variant of “ethical Marxism”, represented by authors such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, or Mihailo Markovic). Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theorist of the Second International, dedicated his bookEthics and the materialist concept of History (1906) to arguing that historical progress obeys laws that have very little to do with moral ideas. Therefore, he argued, Socialists should look to science for guidance in their actions, because “science is always above ethics”. In his article  “Tactics and Ethics” (1919) Lukács agreed with Kautsky in that decisions about political tactics should answer only to the tribunal of history: if they are in accordance with “the sense of world history”, then they are “correct”, and therefore, by necessity “ethical”.Many other examples can be found. What is important for our purposes is that this type of reduction of the ethical dimension to a mere problem of “logic” or of understanding what is correct or incorrect in terms of some Laws of historical necessity, was translated in practice – not only among Marxists but also among people on the left in general – into an eradication of all sense of personal responsibility, and the typical principle according to which “the end sanctifies the means”.

Within the Marxist tradition itself, there were early reactions against this alliance between politics and “science” that left no room for ethics. In Religion and Socialism, a noteworthy book written in 1907 and now all but forgotten, Anatoli Lunacharski – who would soon form part of the first Bolshevik government – proposed complementing Marxism’s “austere, modest and arid philosophy”, with aesthetics and ethics, a “science of values” of the sort that is lacking today. Essentially, Marx and Engels occupied themselves with “knowing” the world; but the “the complete relationship between man and the world is only attained when the processes are not only known, but also valued”; action “emerges only from knowledge and evaluation”. Science does not occupy itself with questions of the heart: it responds to “how?” and “why?”, but it is not concerned with questions of “good?” or “bad?”. Religion, on the other hand, responds to these questions and reaches a practical conclusion: “it proves the presence of evil in the world” and “attempt to defeat it”. It is taking this function of ethical and aesthetic evaluation into account that Lunacharski argues that Socialism should “imitate” religion (needless to say, forgetting its theological and dogmatic elements) and become a genuine cosmology.

The relationship that Lunacharski traces between the ethical element and the problem of hegemony is very interesting. It is clear that Socialism is the cause of the proletariat; but is it also good for all humanity from a moral point of view? Lunacharski complains that orthodox Marxists reject that question, because for them it is enough that it be correct for the proletariat alone (they say that Socialism is not a faith that looks to win converts outside the working class). Nevertheless – our author goes on to say-, this is a limited conception: the proletariat needs to achieve “ideological hegemony” if it wants to reach power (something they would not be able to do alone, against everyone else). If it is to conquer the support of the non-workers, he concludes, it is necessary for Socialism to present itself as a high ideal for everyone who is not corrupted by his or her class interest.

Lunacharski’s position was rejected by practically all of his contemporaries, and Marxism remained an “arid philosophy” without any ethical dimension. And yet, although not explicitly expressed in its doctrines and theories, the left tradition has not lacked an implicit ”militant culture”, that values some things above others. Less present in its books than in its practices, some of these implicit values of the left derive from its alliance with science and the ensuing rejection of ethics. For example, few political traditions have valued intelligence, study, canonical authors, and theory as a guide to action so much. Few have so highly awarded the “virtues” of intransigence, orthodoxy, firmness or unconditionally sticking to an organisation, philosophy or programme. On the other hand, there is a notable “punishment” within left cultures of other conditions that, from an alternative point of view, could be considered “virtues”: kindness, flexibility, capacity for negotiation, disposition to dialogue and consensus, respect for others, doubt. Although rejected in theory, an implicit moral world nevertheless exists in the practices of the left, which clearly distinguishes between the “righteous” and “sinners”. 

The type of “virtues” stimulated by the alliance between socialism and science are precisely those that create most problems for cooperation between equals.  By guiding its actions in accordance with the mandates of a transcendental Truth (extracted from science, knowledge of supposed historical Laws, or some canonical text), the left makes itself impenetrable to others in two ways. On the one hand, it shuts its ears to the simple “opinions” of the uninitiated (that is to say, those who have not demonstrated a grasp of the Truth), which leads to a conspicuous unwillingness to reach agreements with them; on the other hand, it implicitly rejects any responsibility towards its fellows. Protected by the Truth, the left remains untouchable to the judgements of others. By retiring themselves from the world of equals in this way, leftists often adopt that typical air of self-sufficiency and arrogant condescension towards others, and that vanguardist style that can be found even amongst those who declare themselves opposed to all vanguards (but who nevertheless feel themselves to be “illuminated” by their own Truth). In this way, we end up in the paradox indicated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than two hundred years ago, in one of those ironic phrases laden with truth that he liked to shoot against his fellow philosophers. He questioned those who would say they loved Humankind, but only to avoid the obligation of loving any human being in particular. Rousseau’s critique remains useful today to illustrate the tragedy of a left without ethics.

Communism as an (immanent) ethics of the equals

If it is not from science, where should we find guidance for political practice? If not to Truth, to what or whom should our actions be accountable? Here let us return to the problem of the left and the ethical dimension that is indispensable if we are to protect it from ideological abuse, and to clearly separate it from right-wing practices. The beginning and end of any anticapitalist politics – and this is the central thesis of this essay – should be aradical ethics of equality.

A radical ethics of equality is, above all, an immanent ethics. Unlike other ethics – for example, that of Kant, that of the Socratic philosophers, or that included in religious principles – that claim to come from some eternal order (rational, natural or divine), ours should be firmly anchored in this world. As with all of social life, the universe of moral criteria should be put within the grasp of real men and women. To say it in another way, the content of this ethics should be the fruit of social agreements that recognise the needs of life in common, from the most universal (that is to say, those that relate to human beings as a species) to the most historical and situational. That an ethical code be something more or less permanent and widely shared does not mean that it should be considered eternal or universal, nor that its authority should be deposited in gods or transcendental Truths. An immanent ethic is an ethic that comes from us.

A radical ethic of equality is also an ethic of dialogue. It recognises that society is not made up of isolated individuals, but nor is it a collective that exists beyond the specific individuals who compose it (to postulate a collective over and above people, as certain leftists do, is to fall once again into the transcendental). Personal existence, as the young Bakhtin knew, is only possible in interaction with the other: it is by the means of the image, the body, the gaze, and the word of my fellows that I exist as a whole person. Social life is nothing more than this ongoing dialogue with our fellows, those who are alive, those who have died, and those who are yet to come. An ethical existence is, therefore, that of people who know themselves to be obliged to be able to answerto the other for what they are, for what they do, and for what they fail to do. An ethics of dialogue therefore requires commitment to our fellows, a personal existence that assumes its responsibility for the other, and which does not look for excuses or alibis nor does it retreat into the monologue or to devotion to a transcendent (be it God, Science, the Nation, the People, Class, the Party or the Individual). An ethical existence without alibis, is one of fidelity to the specific situation and of accountability to others for every act. And it can only be considered a radical ethics of equality if the commitment is to the other just as they are. (Accepting accountability for one’s actions only before those who think or act in the same way as I do – the Party or the “conscious” militants – is nothing more than another form of vanguardism that makes us immune to the imperative to be responsible to “ordinary” men and women.) This radical commitment to others just as they are does not mean ignoring class differences and the antagonism that shape our society. For we are talking about an ethics of equality, whoseraison d’être is precisely that of protecting life in common from those who, under any excuse, attempt to place themselves above others. That is why those who have refused to accept being equals, at all times and in all places have feared dialogic and immanent ethics. It is because the “unequals” cannot be accountable to others, that the justification of their privilege (“private law”) has always rested upon some authority or transcendent. Radical egalitarian ethics is, by definition, power’s fiercest enemy.

What would the specific content of an ethics of equals be? What virtues would it promote? What conducts would it condemn? It would be, firstly and fundamentally, and ethics of caring for the Other, expressed in a codification of virtues and defects that values all that which aims at cooperation, solidarity, empathy, humility, respect for diversity, the capacity for consensus, etc., and which “represses” impulses to competition, selfishness, ambition to power, intellectual arrogance, stubbornness, obsequiousness, or narcissism.

Having reached this point, it may sound perhaps disappointing to find out that a radical ethics of equality would not be very different, in its specific content, from the moral codes that human beings have produced since times immemorial. However, if one does not have a vanguardist disposition, there is nothing to be ashamed in  this absence of big novelties. Perhaps communism is, at the end of the day, nothing more nor less than the realisation of the dreams of a life together as equals that have always existed in all times and in all places.

——-

* This text is part of the book by Ezequiel Adamovsky Más allá de la vieja izquierda: seis ensayos para un nuevo anticapitalismo (forthcoming 2007).

Empire Burlesque

The master theorist of the resurgent global left may have been outsmarted by the current economic meltdown. But his all-too-perfect system may never have to acknowledge such real-world inconsistencies.

BY SCOTT MCLEMEE

Ten years ago, as the antiglobalization movement began imposing itself on both the windowpanes of Starbucks and the narcotic slumbers of the mass media, there emerged in the United States a certain fable about what was (at the time) the newest New Left. It verged on a belief in the Immaculate Conception.

The fable went, roughly, like this: Protesters in the streets of Seattle and elsewhere were challenging the effects of the worldwide expansion of the free market, and some even identified themselves as anticapitalist; yet the movement itself was for the most part uninfluenced by any doctrine handed down from earlier generations. The age was not just postcommunist but postideological. And so was its radicalism, however contradictory that might seem. The movement was opposed to a system it was not especially interested in analyzing. Spontaneity, authenticity, and passion mattered more than theory. Indeed, the movement had no theory.

Until, that is, it suddenly did, in the form of a book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called (starkly and simply) Empire, published by Harvard University Press in 2000. By the summer of 2001, the New York Times was assuring its readers that Empire was not just the definitive radical critique of globalization but the locus of “the Next Big Idea” that leftist intellectuals everywhere had been yearning for—so “hot” that it was “sending frissons of excitement through campuses from São Paulo to Tokyo.” One felt the need to get jiggy with it.

The spectacle of the Gray Lady in fashionista mode was hardly an improvement on the fallback position of most other critics of the reemergent global left, who continued to dismiss any leftish political formation as an idea-free zone for self-expression. Indeed, these perspectives were, if anything, two sides of the same coin. Each reflected a complete disengagement from the actual efforts at thinking and theorizing then under way. After all, in normal circumstances, journalists and pundits have no incentive to follow the debates in subterranean intellectual provinces—and the latter, for their part, tend not to send out press releases. So the claim that Hardt and Negri had synthesized the most profound of neo-Marxist analyses of the new-world order fast took hold in media circles, in no small part because several aspects of their theory—a free-floating vision of an unmobilized “Multitude” aligning, however inchoately, against a receding, Borg-like “Empire”—seemed, in its broad outlines, at least, to fit the received wisdom about where globalization was headed.

The system Hardt and Negri called Empire, in other words, seemed to have the solvent-grade ability to efface old-style political conflict that globalist cheerleaders like Thomas Friedman had been attributing to the spread of free trade. Empire, in this reading of things, would bring an end to war between nation-states and extend democracy across the globe. Old forms of political sovereignty were giving way to a decentralized but increasingly powerful structure of global financial institutions, transnational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. And the economy of Empire was driven by the productivity of “immaterial labor” (ideas, creativity, symbolic manipulations, postindustrial services) rather than ruthless exploitation of the sweated variety.

This analysis did not so much resemble Lenin’s strategy of supporting colonial struggles—the traditional neo-Marxian touchstone for reckoning with the spread of empire—as it played off the hope voiced by German democratic socialist Karl Kautsky that a regime of “ultra-imperialism” would emerge from the first World War, knitting the industrialized countries of Europe and America into an irenic alliance that could bring progress to the less favored sectors of the planet. But such doctrinal Old Left positions did not, perhaps, furnish the most salient possible comparisons. There were moments when Hardt and Negri sounded not only like Friedman but like Alvin Toffler on a speculative binge. Still, the elements of an earlier Marxian template were present. As Empire spread across the world, so did the other major player in this grand narrative: the Multitude.

This category (delineated in Empire, then revisited by Hardt and Negri in a sequel, Multitude, in 2004) somewhat resembled an older one, the proletariat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But its locus of activity was no longer the old-fashioned factory—for now all aspects of human existence were integrated into global capitalism, so that nearly everyone was engaged in some form of social production, however indirectly. A student, for example, was doing the labor of acquiring skills that could be used on entering the job market.

Hence, the scope of the Multitude was vast, and its composition heterogeneous. It embraced both the pierced and tattoed computer programmer in Boston and the refugee in Rwanda who wore the T-shirt that the programmer had donated to an international relief agency. Each struggled for some margin of control, in life and work alike. And so globalization was uniting them in the struggle for democracy within the emerging order of Empire—albeit in the long run.

In the very, very long run.

Four new works by Negri appeared in English in 2008—the year we all found ourselves well downstream from that era when debate over globalization and its discontents took the form of extrapolating long-term trends. The problem now is to find a way through the ruins. I have been studying the books in a state of heightened (indeed, strained) attention—with powers of concentration periodically stimulated and shattered by arteriosclerotic convulsions in the world’s financial markets—but also through tears in my eyes.

They are tears of perplexity and frustration. It is not that Negri’s most recent books pose difficulties, both conceptual and programmatic, that his earlier ones did not. The ambiguities have been there all along, as have the opacities. Still, they seemed poetic—not just in that terms likeEmpire and Multitude possessed a certain evocative, science-fictional luminosity, but also in something like the root sense of poesis. They did not simply name possibilities; they seemed to create a new thing in the world, if only by inciting the political imagination to new efforts. But the latest books do not have that quality. Negri’s analysis of the emerging system is itself a system—if not a world unto itself—and the movement of his thought is now largely centripetal.

Two of the titles, Reflections on Empire and The Porcelain Workshop, have an explicit pedagogical intent, consisting of “lecture” and “workshop” presentations (respectively) on the conceptual infrastructure of the Negrian system. The other two, In Praise of the Common andGoodbye Mr. Socialism, consist of transcripts of discussions between Negri and an acolyte. WithIn Praise, the editor and interlocutor is Cesare Casarino, a cultural theorist who teaches at the University of Minnesota— clearly an advanced initiate, making for a volume that is something like a colloquy on the Negrian synthesis. By contrast, Goodbye is a set of topical interviews, with Raf Valvola Scelsi (the editor of an Italian anthology on cyberpunk) posing questions covering political developments from the fall of the Berlin Wall through the World Economic Forum’s series of meetings in the Swiss town of Davos in the mid-2000s.

The ensemble does not break new ground, but rather drives the plow once again through old furrows, digging them deeper. And in time, it scrapes against what seems to be Negri’s bedrock: an almost mystical sensibility. This outlook takes the form of deference to the ethical authority of poverty and to the seldom-grasped political radicalism of love, and there are invocations of the transformational and redemptive role of “the flesh.”

Some of this is moving, when it is not baffling—and the question of the revolutionary left’s relationship with religious belief is certainly more complex than Marx’s oft-quoted but usually misunderstood reference to the “opium of the people” would suggest (one hears little, for instance, of that phrase’s preceding sentence, which describes religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and the “heart of a heartless world”). Negri mentions to Casarino that his initial experience of political activism, in the early 1950s, was as a member of Catholic Action: “We brought the question of class struggle to bear on theology in ways that already anticipated 1960s liberation theology.” But such epiphanies flicker only briefly, amid much longer periods of an almost neoscholastic mode of philosophizing. Revolutionary theory becomes revolutionary practice through the path of contemplation.

This seems an ironic complaint. Thirty years ago, Negri was a leader of the most confrontational wing of the Italian left (if not, as state prosecutors charged, the mastermind of the Red Brigades), and much of his work published since the late 1990s was done in prison, after he returned from exile in France to serve out the balance of a judicial sentence. Arguably, the man has earned the right to his armchair. Perhaps he should even be encouraged to stay in it from now on, lest anyone get shot.

And to be sure, the most recent iteration of his politics is built up around the themes of that earlier radicalism. Negri reconfigures the classic Marxist antagonism between labor and capital by developing a complex social metaphysics erected from distinctions borrowed from other philosophical registers. It takes the shape of an interlocking network of oppositions drawn from Spinoza (the “constituent power” of society versus the “constituted” state), Foucault (the “biopolitical” productivity of human populations versus governmental “biopower”), and Deleuze (the transition from “disciplinary” society, with its panoptic institutions, to the regime of open-ended and insatiable “control”). The result is a somewhat paradoxical fusion of Marxist class-struggle politics with a rather old-fashioned postmodernism (the sort rarely seen, in its pure form, after the late 1980s), which sought to establish an epochal division to separate itself from the social and cultural order of modernity. For Negri, that breach corresponds to a major transformation within capitalism itself, coming somewhere between the upheavals of 1968 and the oil crisis of 1973.

In this schema, laid out and elaborated to varying degrees in all four of the newest Negri translations, the characteristic form of modern capitalism is the factory, and its assembly line is the locus that embodies the pace of work and the division of labor. Class struggle focuses on the desperate need of the capitalist to extract the most labor possible from each moment spent by the worker on the premises, while paying as low a wage for it as can be managed. By contrast, Negri argues that the postmodern mode of capitalism is driven not only by the imperative to exploit its labor pool as efficiently as possible but also by the need to innovate constantly. The factory is no longer its prototypical site—for it ceaselessly reinvents the processes and conditions of production and obliges workers to retrain and relocate themselves, just to keep up.

Much of this is familiar from the literature of postindustrialism. And the postmodern vision of capitalist production tracks to a whole series of social and cultural transformations, including the weakening of labor unions and the fragmentation of working-class communities. It is not a story that people on the left usually tell with enthusiasm. But in Negri’s analysis, the transformations over the past four decades or so of capitalist development came about as efforts to contain and subordinate the capacities of a workforce that grew only bigger and more mobile and more creative all the time. In Goodbye Mr. Socialism, he says that the swarm of the Multitude—i.e., the “subaltern classes”—have “a fixed capital richer than that of the bosses, a spiritual patrimony more important than what the others boast, and an absolute weapon: the knowledge essential for the reproduction of the world.”

That’s all nice to hear—but we’d still like more money. Health insurance would be good, too. As much of Negri’s work at least tacitly acknowledges, the union movement—which has supplied the traditional means for workers to extract an increased wage from those who command the economy—has been kicked in the face repeatedly over the same period of rampantly globalized capitalism. So in the world beyond the reach of Negrian certitude, much of the difference has been made up through credit cards and multiple jobs. Well, not anymore it won’t be. But what will fill the gap? What, as old question goes, is to be done?

The great perplexity involved in reading Negri comes from the sense that surely his concepts must, sooner or later, enter sublunary orbit, and hover over the terrain of politics, and provide something resembling an actual plan of action. But this is not quite what happens. The problem is not that the framework is abstract. Rather, it is that the system is just too beautiful. When actualities run counter to the theory, they are absorbed, and the theory instantly corrects itself by making flaws into features.

The peaceful nature of Empire being the most important example. With sovereign power no longer held by nations—but rather by the decentralized, delocalized, yet panoptically efficient global institutions of Empire—the age of conquest and colonial subjugation came to an end. Mind you, this shift did not imply that the days of military force had passed—but that henceforth all wars would be, in essence, civil wars within the common space of the world order.

Clearly, someone at the Pentagon did not get the memo. But that is not, it seems, a problem with the schema: “Iraq was the American attempt to get its hands on Empire,” Negri tells Scelsi, “an attempt at a coup d’état by means of permanent war, now a constitutive element of imperial development.” In response, “the global order is configured more and more against American hegemony.” The resistance is manifesting itself through “powers diffused and consolidated around four or five continental poles.”

Which sounds rather like the argument that the world has returned to its condition circa early 1914—a set of great powers, a system in which a handful of supersovereignties divide up the geopolitical map. But the devil is in the details. For Negri, the model of the universal, homogenous Empire is still in force. “From the monetary point of view,” he contends in Reflections on Empire, “the United States is increasingly exposed and weakened on the financial markets: and this is also excellent news. In short, in all probability the United States will soon be forced to stop being imperialist and recognize itself as being within Empire.”

Any resemblance to mainline thinkers, such as Fareed Zakaria, who likewise foresee a multipolar— or “nonpolar”—world order of fast-diminishing US influence is quite beside the point. After all, the implications of Negri’s logic are far more wonderful than anything bourgeois punditry would permit itself. For by subordinating the American imperialists to Empire, global depression would actually reduce international tensions. A look back at the geopolitical fallout from the last great global depression in the 1930s does not exactly lend credence to this somewhat sunny view. But the point, in Negri’s view, is that the world has changed.

Of course, it is also possible that the outcome might be a little more dystopian: decades of resource wars, perhaps, with the scarce commodities in question being not just oil but food and drinking water. In that case, expect more attempted coups d’état against the command structure of Empire.

What makes all of this nearly unbearable for the garden-variety leftist reader—and Negri’s work cannot have much of an audience elsewhere on the continuum of political opinion—is that everything grows exponentially woollier the closer it gets to questions of agency. Who, in the system of Empire, has the means and the motive to change things? And why? And how? (Who in particular, that is, for a category so boundlessly capacious as the Multitude embodies the worst features of utopian, counterculturalist, and populist thought, all at once.)

We learn that it is necessary to preserve “the common” from exploitative incursions, with “the common” in Negri’s idiom meaning not, say, public lands, but rather the culture, information, and forms of life created outside capitalist production. This is, even, the definitive axis of struggle for the Multitude: the point around which a new communist politics for the twenty-first century becomes possible.

Here, readerly perplexity begins to compound itself. Negri is not totally wrong. Questions regarding the control of intellectual property are tremendously important. Preserving and expanding the possibility of noncommodified forms of human creativity is sometimes a matter of life and death—as the revolutionaries in Chiapas and during the Prague Spring found in the course of very divergent ideological battles. But so is defense of “the common” in the pre-Negrian sense: the world of shared material resources and human needs. We all have to breathe, for example. The ability to do so for free may not last forever. At the present rate, good air will be a commodity one day, like the gasoline now destroying it.

So is it really the case that—as Negri would have it—struggle over immaterial production is the definitive zone of engagement for the left? Assuming it is still a worthwhile thing to be able to exercise control over certain tangible aspects of the economy—wages, benefits, and working conditions, for example—just where and how is the Multitude to do so? Not through state power, evidently, given that actual sovereignty rests in the disembodied Empire. But where does that leave us? What instruments do we have? Other than free software, that is?

“I want a Left that knows how to swim in the sea that we have in front of us and in which each of us is immersed,” says Negri in Goodbye Mr. Socialism, “a Left that knows how to reinvent itself.” Yes—and wanting it is a first step. But the sea level is rising, and a few weeks spent reading Negri feel like an advanced course in drowning.

Scott McLemee contributes the Intellectual Affairs column to http://www.insidehighered.com.

Milton’s republic

Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.

At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?”

In an era of civil war, such liberalism could be a revolutionary force. Milton placed his literary genius at the service of Cromwell’s commonwealth, becoming secretary for foreign tongues. Yet as a staunch republican he also warned his master of the dangers of autocracy. He was aware that middle-class revolutions have a habit of selling out their left wing. Even as the restoration of the monarchy loomed, he published a reckless, despairing proposal for a new republican constitution.

Once the new royalist government was in place, Milton went into hiding, and some of his more offensive books were burnt. He was arrested and held in custody, but escaped with his life through the intercession of powerful friends. He then devoted himself to an epic poem mourning the loss of the paradise on earth in which, as a radical humanist and revolutionary Puritan, he had invested his fondest hopes. He is buried alongside his father in St Giles’, Cripplegate, in the City of London, an interment in Westminster Abbey being politically out of the question.

Milton did more than hymn the praises of revolt, as Blake and Shelley did. He was also a political activist and propagandist, an architect of the modern liberal state. As a militant ideologue in the defence of liberty, he assisted in the revolutionary upheaval that brought modern Britain to birth – a revolution all the more successful for us having quite forgotten that it ever happened.

Terry Eagleton is the author of the book How To Read A Poem

Interview with Simon Critchley, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex

Conducted by: Tom McCarthy (General Secretary, INS) 
Venue: Office of Anti-Matter, Austrian Cultural Institute, London 
Date: 29/03/01 
Present: Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, Corin Sworn, Anthony Auerbach, Penny McCarthy, Victoria Scott, Paul Perry, Alexander Hamilton, Jen wu, Others

Tom McCarthy: You write in your book Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature that the task of philosophical modernity is the thinking through of the first death, the über death, which is the death of God. So my first question is: what is the meaning of this death?

Simon Critchley: It’s a big question. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, and that’s written on toilet walls all over the world. But he then went on to say: ‘And we have killed him.’ So modernity, by which I mean that social, economic and intellectual process that begins in the early seventeenth century, culminates in the fact that we no longer require God as a metaphysical underpinning for our beliefs. So the death of God is part of a historical process. And philosophy, at a certain point – it’s arguable when that starts – also shifts its emphasis. In mediaeval philosophy, human beings were creatures, and all creatures were dependent on a creator who was himself uncreated, the self-caused cause of everything, a causa sui. So God was at the centre of the web, holding the universe together. With the advent of the modern world that focus moves to the human subject – so that for someone like Descartes, the first point of certainty in a philosophical system is no longer the existence of God but the existence of the self. 
Now, the problem with that is that the nice thing about God and religion is that it provides an answer to the question of the meaning of life. It does this by positing something outside of earthly life, the divine order. So the death of God in a sense is unimportant; what’s important is that it raises the question of the meaning of life. What is the meaning of life if there can be no religious basis to the meaning of life? There are various responses to that. One obvious one is that if religion is no longer the realm in which the question of the meaning of life is to be thought through, then what other realm is? One obvious candidate is art. Art becomes the way in which questions of the meaning and value of life are articulated; and the aesthetic movement associated with that is Romanticism. In Romanticism, the energy of religion gets transformed into an artwork: an artwork that would reveal God, or something like God, in nature – but what that actually means is an artwork that would provide meaning for a human self. For the German Romantics such as Schlegel, the aesthetic form capable of bearing that question of meaning is the novel, and the task becomes writing the great novel of the modern world. And then different spheres take up that same challenge over the next two hundred years. If you’re a Marxist you believe that realm of meaning is fundamentally socio-economic, for example.

TMcC: There’s something that confuses me, and perhaps confuses Nietzsche as well. The madman who announces the death of God in that passage from The Gay Science paints a horrific picture of skies decomposing and it getting darker and darker all the time. It’s not a great joyous liberation; there’s an absolute terror there. But then elsewhere in Nietzsche there is a sense of joy, albeit an ambiguous one: we must go forwards in joyous terror and terrible joy and so on. So is Nietzsche ultimately happy or sad that God is dead? Or is he just stating a fact?

SC: What makes Nietzsche interesting as a thinker is that he’s full of a religious passion. Nietzsche’s real twin intellectually is someone like St. Paul. He’s much closer to him than to John Locke or David Hume. Nietzsche is traumatised by the death of God, because he realises that it’s a collapse of the basis of meaning. You find a similar line of thought in Dovstoesky. Dostoyevsky says that the only thing that keeps humans above the level of cattle is the belief in the immortality of the soul. The name for this problem is nihilism. In my work I’ve tried to place the question of nihilism at the centre of philosophical concerns. Nihilism is the situation where, as Nietzsche says, the highest values devalue themselves: Daß die obersten Werte sich entwerten. The death of God is part of that process: God has become empty, nothing. The philosopher who most represents that position, for Nietzsche, is Schopenhauer – what he calls ‘European Buddhism’. In fact we could think about the whole contemporary interest in Buddhism as a way of thinking about the nihilism problem: nothing has any meaning, therefore I’ll affirm the void, and I’ll engage in practises of the self – yoga, tantric sex…

TMcC: Is that where devaluation slips over into transvaluation?

SC: In one sense, yes: nothing has any value, so I’ll affirm the nothing; nothing is the guarantor of meaning. But Nietzsche refuses that: that’s just exoticism. So the task facing the philosopher, and also the artist, is one of responding to nihilism. What people always get wrong with Nietzsche is calling him a nihilist. Nietzsche is diagnosing nihilism in modern culture. It’s that question, the question of nihilism, that I want to put at the centre of my agenda. It’s not a question which is a central one for much philosophy in the English-speaking world. It’s a question that’s been deemed to be almost indecent, because in a sense we can ironise our way out of it.

Victoria Scott: Can you explain the difference between passive and active nihilism?

SC: Nietzsche’s like the bible, in that it’s a question of interpretation, and there are various ones. Nihilism as a theme is explored in The Will to Power, which is put together by his nasty fascist sister, so it’s a miscellany, a collection of fragments. Books One and Two deal with nihilism, and early on in Book One there’s a discussion of passive nihilism and active nihilism. 
My interpretation is that passive nihilism is the European Buddhism I outlined a moment ago. Another version of passive nihilism would be to say: Nothing is of any value, but hey, so what, we can just get along without any of this anxious metaphysical stuff. That would be pragmatism, as typified by Richard Rorty’s response: he just shrugs his shoulders and says: Nihilism was something that preoccupied certain highly-strung European intellectuals in the nineteenth century; we’ve got beyond that. 
Then there’s active nihilism. Some people identify Nietzsche’s position with active nihilism. Now, they’re not wrong, but I think what Nietzsche means by active nihilism is what would have been reported in the press of his time as Russian nihilism. Terrorism. Nietzsche picks up the idea of nihilism from the Russian novelist Turgenev. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons there’s a conflict between the nihilist Bazarof and those who defend the status quo. So nihilism for Nietzsche was about a conflict within Russian culture between a pro-Europe, liberal, reformist view of Russia on the one hand, and on the other people who believed in the creative power of destruction through acts of violent insurrection to overthrow the stale liberal order. These people called themselves nihilists; and they had an implicit belief in science. So Bazarov in Turgenev’s book is very into science -

TMcC: Just like the anarchists Kropotkin or Bakunin -

SC: Yes. So that’s what Nietzsche means by active nihilism. Which was then part of the drama of Turgenev’s fiction, and also Dostoyevsky’s. And there’s a whole story about how that version of active nihilism moves through to Chinchevsky and Bakunin and Lenin. In many ways Bolshevism could be seen as active nihilism, the violent overthrow of the established order. There’s a link as well between a scientific, positivist conception of the world and insurrection. 
Now, Nietzsche doesn’t endorse that position at all. Essentially he’s neither a passive nor an active nihilist. He comes up with a third option which he calls eternal return or eternal recurrence. Again, what that means is debatable. I’ve got an interpretation – do you want me to go into it?

TMcC: Does it involve Vico?

SC: No. Well, it could do.

TMcC: Go ahead.

SC: Nietzsche’s response to nihilism is the doctrine of eternal return. You could read that in a cosmological way, as a belief that the universe is cyclical and is going to recur. Or, as you hinted, Vico’s notion of cycles of history could be seen as signalled. I think that’s all window dressing, though; I don’t think that’s what Nietzsche means. For him, eternal return is much more of a moral doctrine. 
There’s a story told by the poet Heine about Kant walking on the heath with his servant just after writing the first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he takes God away. He looks at his servant and suddenly feels so sorry for him because he’s taken God away from him that he writes a second Critique, just to give God back. The essential thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that traditional metaphysics, God, freedom and immortality, is cognitively meaningless. We cannot know whether God exists, whether the soul is immortal and so on. That’s the First Critique. Then in the Second Kant says: But we can still maintain the idea of God, or immortality of the soul as a postulate, a postulate of practical reason. So although I cannot know whether God exists, I can still act as if he did, and that can orientate my ethical activity. 
Nietzsche ups the ante and takes it a stage further. He says: Well, this is ridiculous. What would it be to fully affirm the fact that God doesn’t exist? To fully affirm the complete meaninglessness of the universe? And to be able to do that again and again and again. If you’re capable of that thought, of affirming that this universe is not for us, that we’re just here by sheer chance, and you can do that again and again, then you’re equal to the force of eternal return. It’s a sort of moral test.

TMcC: There seems to be not just an aesthetics of recurrence going on in Nietzsche’s thought, but also one of transformation. Transfiguration is a meme that he throws up again and again.

SC: Yes. It’s an almost physical practise: to be able to physically withstand that vertigo of meaninglessness and then transfigure oneself in relationship to that. I’ve got my doubts about that, but that’s what Nietzsche says.

TMcC: Now, the other giant of philosophical modernity is Hegel; and death in his work seems to me to be even more central and instrumental than it is in Nietzsche. How would you characterise the way in which death, for Hegel, is bound up with knowledge?

SC: Death for Hegel is a conceptual process. But that’s deceptive, because everything’s a conceptual process for Hegel. But Hegel’s notion of death would be that to conceptualise something is to kill it. So if I name this thing, this orange, that’s on the table here in front of us ‘an orange’, in so far as I name it and it becomes separate I deaden it. So in that sense Adam in the Garden of Eden was a serial killer.

TMcC: That’s Kojeve’s take on it, too, isn’t it?

SC: Yes. Language is murder. Language, as conceptuality, is the murder of things by making them approximate to us. Then it becomes a question of: If language is murder, if creation is murder, then what does one then do, aesthetically? Blanchot talks about the two slopes of literature: there’s one slope where the human subject comprehends everything by murdering it – which Blanchot would identify with the Marquis de Sade. He puts Hegel and Sade together. So sadist literature and sadist art would be the art which kills its objects by conceptualising them. So pornography would be that. The way pornography captures its objects is by killing them. I think that’s true: it’s not just an objectification of people; it’s a killing of them too.

TMcC: Within that Blanchodian schema pornography would be the model for all cognition…

SC: Yes. But then for him the other slope of literature would be a form of art which leaves things to themselves in some way. So I would write a poem about the orange which let the orange be the orange and would put the reader in the position of letting the orange orange. Letting things thing.

TMcC: So someone like Francis Ponge -

SC: Ponge would be the -

Penny McCarthy: Or Wallace Stevens -

SC: Stevens would be the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in the English language, full stop – in my humble opinion. And Ponge, who writes these lovely poems about oysters…

TMcC: He writes about oranges too.

SC: I think maybe he does. And Rilke, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. What do you say to the angel? What you say to the angel is not ‘I’ve discovered the secret of the universe!’ because they’ll know that already because they’re an angel. What you say to the angel is: ‘bridge, bottle, orange, jug, pen’. Wim Wenders understands this in Wings of Desire: what appeals to angels is the ordinary. So art can be about the condition of ordinary things, and let those things thing.

TMcC: There’s a wonderful moment somewhere in Derrida, which I think you cite in one of your books, where he talks about engaging with the world as being like a dredger that goes through and engages with the sand beneath the sea but ultimately lets most of it slip back and ’sand’.

SC: Yes. There are different ways of being a philosopher or an artist. One is by eating everything: this would be the model of Hegel. It’s a caricature of Hegel, and Hegel’s obviously better than a caricature. But Adorno has that nice phrase: ‘Idealism is the rage of the belly turned mind.’ So the idealist philosopher is like a ravenous belly that eats up the entire universe. The idealist philosopher or artist gorges themselves on reality and shits it out as works which declare the meaning of reality – whether that’s the great novel of the modern world or a system of science. The other, contrary model would be to attend to things in their particularity and let them be. Blanchot’s point is that we can do neither. So most art is characterised by an ambiguity. By the way, Derrida’s thinking specifically of a place on the South coast of France – I’ve actually been there -

TMcC: Les Saintes Maries -

SC: Yes: Les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the Camargue, which is full of mud. There’s a lot of dredging that goes on, as indeed there is where I live on the Essex coast. The task is dredging that mud. One version of philosophy would be to ingest all that mud and turn it into conceptual water, or bowls. Another version would be for the philosopher or artist to filter through that material and let that matter be. And in that second version there’s an acknowledgement of the impotence, or at least the limits, of creativity.

TMcC: You mention Blanchot. My organisation, the INS, is massively indebted to Blanchot, obviously. Not only does his work elaborate the irreducible, impossible paradox you’ve been describing, but it also conceives of death as a space and literature as a space. But I wonder if one could say that the two spaces are equivalent for Blanchot, or do they have a relation like two bits of acetate that slide over one another?

SC: Well, for Blanchot in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (he changes a bit later on) there are these two slopes to literature: there’s literature as sadism and there’s literature as letting things thing. The first slope is a form of murder – so that’s one conceptual death. The second, trying to let things be, is another death-like condition. What Blanchot is trying to attend to in his work as I see it is a relationship to a space of dying which can’t be controlled or appropriated by the human self. And so literature, for him, is the exemplary way in which that space is to be attended to. There might be other ways of attending to it – visually, whatever – but for Blanchot literature has this overwhelming privilege.

TMcC: I love that expression ‘attend to’. Blanchot uses these avatars that attend to it, most notably Orpheus. Blanchot’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth is different from the popular one – in fact, it’s interestingly the same one that Cocteau uses in the film we’re screening later this week -

SC: Oh yes. There might be a relation. What Cocteau knew of Blanchot I don’t know. What year was the Cocteau film made in?

TMcC: Fifty-something. It’s post-war, because the landscapes are unmistakably post-war. But Blanchot’s Orpheus, in going to the underworld, has not gone there to get Eurydice back: what he really wants is the night at the heart of the night, the other night, the night whose face is eternally turned away. He wants death itself in its full absence and deathness. And another trope crops up at this point: sacrifice. That seems an enormously loaded figure, or motif. How do you understand it?

SC: It’s not a term I’ve used. I’m very hesitant about that, mostly because of the question of the holocaust. ‘Holocaust’ is the Greek term for sacrifice, and is, as many Jewish historians have pointed out, a rather questionable way of naming that event of mass death. Sacrifice of what to whom?

TMcC: Sacrifice takes place within a proscribed system of exchange…

SC: Yes, exactly: sacrifice has a meaning that’s recuperable.

Anthony Auerbach: If modernity arises from the death of God to some extent – and then there’s an investment in Romanticism and post-Romanticism, in which death is the space of meaning – so in Blanchot literature and death are kind of equivalent spaces because they’re spaces of meaning, which somehow can’t be found in life any more – so is it then possible that the holocaust, historically, is the death of death? And that this is why the question is so stressed in our age: because up till that moment death could be that site of meaning, but the holocaust proved that it’s not what we expected, or what we hoped?

SC: Yes. Firstly, Blanchot is a child of Romanticism. There’s a wonderful essay of his called ‘The Athenaeum’ from The Infinite Conversation, where he puts his finger on the central problem of Romanticism: that it was about producing the great ‘novel’ of the modern world (be that an actual novel or, say, Wordsworth’s Prelude) and it failed to do so. So a feature of Romanticism is both its aspiration to a work and the fact of failure. Blanchot’s ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ sees in Hegel and Sade literature as work, which would be death; and then the other slope takes on in another direction with the recognition of failure. It’s very tempting to see the holocaust in that historical perspective: it would be a work of death.

There’s a lot of discussion about the uniqueness of the holocaust, or the Shoah, or whatever we call it; but it seems to me that that uniqueness could only consist of one thing: the application of technology to mass death. The curious thing about the holocaust in comparison to other forms of mass death – in war, or what was going on in Rwanda or Kosovo – is its dispassionate relationship to death. The Nazis didn’t really hate the Jews with a passion; they thought they were vermin that had to be exterminated, which is different. They didn’t hate them the way a Kosovo Serb hates a Kosovo Albanian; other forms of genocide seem to be premised upon that passion. What’s unique about the holocaust is the attempt to depersonalise and take the passion out of death, and turn it into this industrial process.

Now, we could see that in some sort of weird continuity with the ambitions of the modern world. This is how Zigmund Baumann sees it in Modernity and the Holocaust. Basically, there are two views on the holocaust: it’s either the outcome of modernity or it’s a novum, something new in history. I think both are true. It’s an outcome of modernity: as Adorno says, it’s a consequence of rationalisation -

Anthony Auerbach: A consequence, or a flip side of…

SC: Yes, the dialectical underbelly of rationalisation processes that we associate with the Enlightenment. Or it’s what someone like Fackenheim sees as a novum, a new event in history. I think it’s both. Now, that completely reorganises, and should reorganise, the way we consider philosophical and artistic creation.

AA: And reconsider cherished notions about death?

SC: Also, yes. If I could go back to what I was saying about Nietzsche: what people get excited about in his work is this notion of affirmation: an affirmation in relation to death. I can affirm the meaninglessness of the universe and the ultimate meaninglessness of my own life, and heroically assume that. There’s something almost disgusting about that thought after the holocaust, it seems to me. Adorno puts his finger on this quite well in the final part of Negative Dialectic. He’s concerned with after Auschwitz. He says that a new categorical imperative has imposed itself on humankind: not to let Auschwitz repeat itself, and not to hand Hitler posthumous victories. He goes on to say that the situation of the death camps is best described not by descriptions of them, but by, for example, the work of Beckett. Why? Because it doesn’t say anything about them; it doesn’t attempt to represent what took place.

So then there’s this question of death and representation: What would be the least disgusting aesthetic response to this situation? At one end of the scale we’ve got Spielberg and Schindler’s List, which for all its sincerity is a disgusting film. At the other end we’ve got, say, Remains of the Day, which is all about processes that are bound up with what becomes the holocaust, but it’s much more oblique. Or, in the French context, Landsman’s Shoah -

TMcC: That’s the eight-hour epic…

SC: Right. Landsman’s aesthetic, which is organised by lots of these concerns I’ve been talking about, is that he’s not going to represent what happened and he’s not going to judge what happened. He has interviews with, for example, an SS officer who was at one of the camps, and he’s got a semi-hidden camera; and the SS officer wants to either say he’s sorry or exculpate himself from guilt – and Landsman’s saying: ‘No, I’ve got no interest in that; I don’t care about what you feel. Just tell me what happened. What happened when the trains arrived? Who opened the doors? How did people get from there to there? How did they get into the rooms? Who put the Zyclon B in? What happened to the bodies? Who dug the ditches? How deep were they? How many?’ – these things. So there’s a sense in which that attention to factual description without representing the event would be adequate to that event. So to go back to the question: the way in which we’d be able to approach death is by not representing it, having an oblique relationship to it. So some cherished philosophical ideas of death, heroic ideas, would be gone. Beckett is interesting because he’s the anti-heroic figure.

TMcC: We were talking about Beckett at lunch. Paul Perry’s formulation of it was that Beckett puts all the markers in and then takes them away at the last minute. In the first draft of Happy Days, for example, the play started with a nuclear blast and a radio voice saying ‘Nuclear War has been declared; London’s gone, New York’s gone etc’ – and then Beckett just cut that but left the post-apocalyptic landscape intact. You get that throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. There are points where he almost spells it out, like where Vladimir says to Estragon towards the end of Waiting for Godot: ‘Can’t you see the bodies piled up in mounds? Can’t you smell the decomposition?’ He could almost be talking about Auschwitz. Come to think of it, it’s almost like Nietzsche’s madman in the market place.

SC: Or the farmers in Cumbria!

TMcC: Ah, well, this all opens up to another term I want to bring in, not least because I know you’re writing a book about it at the moment -

SC: Yes, it brings us neatly to humour.

TMcC: Yes. Beckett is also incredibly funny. It’s not a separate thing: his deep ethical engagement with this whole problematic and his humour are completely bound together. I mean, how do you see comedy and death as fitting together?

SC: They’re in an intimate relationship. Comedy is much more tragic than tragedy, I always think, and much more about death. Tragedy is about making death meaningful – with some exceptions: you could say that in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus there’s a different relationship to death. But conventionally the tragic hero takes death into him- or herself and it becomes meaningful; we experience catharsis in relation to that and we all go away happily. Comedy is about the inability to achieve that catharsis. So either you can’t die in comedy, which is why Waiting for Godot’s a tragi-comedy: nobody can hang themselves and it’s funny. Or if they do die they pop back up to life, like in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Now what’s the more tragic thought: life coming to an end or life going on forever? The latter’s much more tragic. Swift explores this in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels: there are the Immortals, the Struldbrugs, who are marked with a red circle in the middle of their foreheads, and lie around in corners having lost all interest in life and not even speaking the language they grew up with. They’re tragic figures. The worst thing would be not death but life carrying on forever, and comedy’s about that. It’s also linked to depression and all sorts of things like that.

Anthony Auerbach: But is the repetition in Beckett the joke? Or is that the real tragedy? This theatre of the absurd that just starts again exactly the same once it’s finished. Does that have something to do with Nietzsche’s doctrine of recurrence?

SC: What’s great about Beckett is that you’re given the high drama of European culture through a strangely comical Anglo-Irish lens which is much more pragmatic and down to earth. Beckett’s ridiculing to some extent. He would be interested by the idea of eternal return but Nietzsche’s laughter is a laughter of affirmation and ecstasy, whereas Beckett’s laughter is a laughter of derision, a sardonic laughter, which is actually much more tragic. Jokes leave you in that position. The philosophically most nuanced discussion of Beckett is Adorno’s by several kilometres. But what Adorno will not see in Beckett is the laughter. Adorno will say things like ‘Laughter is the fraud practised on happiness’, ‘Laughter is complicity with domination’. I think that’s a mistake. Blanchot also misses the humour in Beckett. The humour in Beckett is at the level of idiom, in the fine grain of detail. There’s all sorts of stuff that we might want to call ‘Irish’ – although that would be too easy, but something like that – and it’s that that philosophy misses.

TMcC: I see the humour in Beckett as being slapstick, too. That’s the element he’s getting from Buster Keaton. It’s sort of like Bataille’s reading of Hegel. Hegel is all about an elimination of matter, turning it into golden shit as you say; but with Bataille matter becomes ‘that non-logical difference which represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law’. It’s something that gets in the way of the perfect Aufhebung, or synthesis, resolution. And I think that lots of the slapstick in Beckett is about that failure: the failure of tragedy, the failure of matter to get aufgehobt, to go up there and be sublime. We want to go to the heavens as heroes but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.

SC: Exactly: we’re human.

Paul Perry: I’m thinking of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. It’s a study of a bullfight. He talks about the suppressed humour of the horses which have been disgorged and drag their entrails round the stadium, a kind of slapstick humour. Then there’s legislation, because of the North’s opprobrium, which makes them put these leather things around so the audience can’t see – but the horses still die. But he talks about the act of seeing, and the audience laughing in this grim moment of the horses’ disembowelling. He’s basically also discussing death and humour.

TMcC: But Hemingway never leaves that heroic mode that Beckett’s left way behind. Even Hemingway’s clowns are Homeric figures. Now, there’s something that you, Simon, said about tragedy and comedy and immortality that broaches the whole field of time. We haven’t really discussed this yet. Heidegger’s work is all about time: for him, time is the horizon of being, and time is facilitated by death – decay and death is what makes time possible. And there’s an emphasis on travel – which is something that interests this organisation, the INS, as well. Heidegger has this expression Holzwege – and didn’t he actually compose his work as he strode in manly fashion through these black German forests?

SC: So he would like us to believe.

TMcC: Is it not true, then?

SC: Oh, he walked a lot. He was a great walker.

TMcC: But do you see him as relevant to the discussions we’ve been having?

SC: Oh, very much so. I teach Heidegger a lot; it’s a big part of my job. It’s always a complicated pleasure, because he’s the sort of bête noir of twentieth-century European philosophy. So in relation to death and time: the first section of Being and Time ends up with the idea that we have to get the whole of human existence into our grasp. He calls that ‘care’. Care works through a three-fold structure at the head of which is Being-already-in-the-world as fallen. But that needn’t occupy us. What he then goes on to talk about is that in order to get existence into our grasp as a whole we have to have an idea of the end of existence; and as the end of existence is death, we must get death into our grasp. So the logic of Heidegger’s position is that death has to be something we comprehend. So it’s a logical point on the one hand. 
On the other, it’s also a hugely pathetic point. Heidegger’s discourse on death owes much more to the Christian tradition, particularly Augustine and Paul, than to other philosophers. Nietzsche says that to be authentic, to become what I am, I have to shatter myself against death and appropriate that within me, and affirm it like a tragic hero: that’s what Nietzsche calls fate. By the time we get to Heidegger, the choice for him in Being and Time is either to choose oneself as a hero or to choose the ‘they’, the ordinary mass, as one’s hero. Heidegger says you should choose yourself as a hero: Werde, was du bist – Become what you are. Now I just don’t think that’s possible. I think that death is something that always slips from view as you appropriate it. I’ve tried in other work I’ve done to unpick Being and Time along the faultline of the question of death. But death is something that I cannot appropriate. Heidegger says: ‘Death is the possibility of impossibility’. Death is a human possibility – it has to be; but it is also the point at which I can be no more. It’s death. But I can assume that as a possibility, and it can become the basis for becoming an authentic human being. Blanchot and Levinas invert that phrase and talk about death as the impossibility of possibility: so death is what halts my power of projection, my power to do things. But Heidegger is still very much taken with this heroic idea of death. If you look at his speech from 1933 on the death of the allemanic patriot Schlagete, who was shot by the French in 1919 for refusing the treaty of Versailles and then picked up by the National Socialists as a German hero: Heidegger, who’d just become rector of the university and embraced National Socialism, talks about Schlagete facing the French rifles and feeling death great within himself, with the allemanic hills in front of his eyes. It’s a heroic death. 
Beckett’s work would be an undermining of that – which would also have a political corollary. You can see Beckett as a stoic or a resigned pessimist, but there’s a link in his work between this impotence, this inability to do anything, and resistance. In terms of his life, Beckett was heroic.

TMcC: He was in the résistance…

SC: He received the Croix de Guerre from Charles de Gaulle…

TMcC: But then he would refuse to discuss it. He said it was all childish japes: ‘I was just being silly’. And Blanchot, I found out recently – I was reviewing a book on him for the Times Literary Supplement – faced a firing squad: he was put against a wall, and somehow…

SC: It’s a wonderful story. There’s a pamphlet that came out in French in ‘95; it’s just come out in English, with Derrida’s comments on it. It’s called l’Instant de ma Mort – The Moment of my Death. It’s the last thing Blanchot’s written. There’s an memoir of his political involvement in the vaults at Gallimard which will come out when he dies, so there will be more. Anyhow, in l’Instant de ma Mort he recounts how in ‘42 or ‘43 he was living in the French countryside, and for complicated reasons got hooked up with a bunch of people who were occupying a French chateau and were taken out by German guards and lined up to be shot. And they thought that Blanchot, because he spoke a more elevated French, was the proprietor of the chateau, and some sort of landed gentry; so he was allowed to leave. So others died while he got away with it; and one aspect of the story is his unendurable guilt at this; the other aspect is that when he felt the rifles aimed at him, he felt a ‘légereté de l’être’, a lightness of being, which was almost joyous. And that, too, is an intolerable thought for him. So Blanchot, the great writer of infinite dying, harbours this desire for extinction, which is weird.

TMcC: Again and again in this discussion we’ve come back to the thirties, the forties, the period around the war. It drives home how the links between these thinkers are not just conceptual ones: didn’t Blanchot, who had himself dabbled in right wing politics, harbour Levinas, or Levinas’s wife, a Jew, during the war?

SC: Yes.

TMcC: For me, it all crystallises way later when Derrida, in the late sixties, early seventies, in The Post Card, is transcribing a sentence from his notes in which he mentions Heidegger, a former Nazi but someone to whom Derrida is hugely indebted as a philosopher, and Levinas, and himself, both Jews. And he has a footnote saying: ‘I want it to be known that at this point the telephone rang and I had the American operator saying: ‘Will you take a collect call, a reverse charge intercontinental call from a Martini Heidegger?’ – who’s been dead for six or seven years at this point.’ And Derrida says: ‘No. It’s a joke. I refuse.’ But then in an even longer footnote to the footnote he writes: ‘I do accept that there is a link – a telephonic, or telepathic, or tele-something, link between me and Heidegger’s ghost.’ It seems an incredibly overdetermined moment – and one that needs serious annotation in any history of necronautism.

SC: And completely humourless as well…

TMcC: What, him not taking the call?

SC: Yes.

TMcC: But if he had then he’d have worked out in two minutes which PhD student it was playing a joke on him, and it would have closed the whole thing down.

SC: But it was a joke!

TMcC: What would you have done?

SC: I’d have taken the call and we would have had a laugh. I wouldn’t have written a footnote about it in an already overlong book.

TMcC: It was probably you, wasn’t it?

SC: It’s a good joke. If you compare the French and English texts of Beckett, one thing that stands out is the jokes. The ones he writes in French are pretty abstract. There are gags in there – but he’ll amplify the gags when he’s translating himself into English…

TMcC: By adding Anglo-Irish idiom?

SC: Exactly. Christopher Ricks, in Beckett’s Dying Words – which is a good book, even if Ricks has pretty reactionary views about literature – makes that point very well: what Beckett adds when he’s translating himself is a layer of idiom and humour. Which then raises the question of humour and context and translatability and all that. ‘Humour’ is an English word. There is the French ‘humeur’ -

TMcC: But that means something entirely different.

SC: Yes, it means the medical doctrine of the humours. The first recorded use of ‘humour’ meaning something jocular, according to the OED (which should never be trusted), is 1682. The first real theory of humour is by Shaftesbury in 1709, in a book called Sensus Communus: an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. For him, humour is about how one shares common sense, social wit. And it’s a specifically English language invention. If you look at Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, there’s an unattributed article in it, perhaps by Diderot or perhaps not, that begins: ‘L’humeur est quelque-chose qui appartient particulièrement à l’esprit Anglais‘ – something which belongs particularly to the English mind; and he goes on to give a summary of A Modest Proposal by Swift. Now the irony is -

TMcC: – that Swift was imprisoned for writing that!

SC: Well, that and that he was hardly English. At the heart of this English humour you’ve got an Irishness. Sterne was Irish too. So, anyway, there’s something recalcitrantly idiomatic about humour which resists translation. And humour is a practise by which we give meaning to all sorts of stuff, which I don’t think is fully colonised by, say, capitalism or any of that shit. It’s still something remarkable, and we engage in it on a day-to-day basis. We can’t render it – we just do it.

Anthony Auerbach: But is humour possible for Beckett? Because in a sense his characters are already dead. Is Beckett a clue to Adorno’s impatience about existence?

SC: Yes, in a sense his characters have already died. But within the endless pessimism of his prose, the imperative that comes back and back is ‘On, on…’

TMcC: I can’t go on; I must go on…

SC: Yes: fail again, try again, fail again better. There’s this sheer courage that defines Beckett’s work; this relentless determination to push.

AA: Without heroism…

SC: It’s sort of anti-heroic heroism. It’s a heroism that knows we can’t have heroes anymore.

AA: But there’s this kind of wretched monotony about Beckett. Is that a posthumous thing? Not being-towards-death but being-after-death.

SC: I see his characters as all being very much alive, in a useless way – which is how I see us being alive.

AA: But in Endgame…

SC: Yes, in Endgame, as Adorno says, they might all be dead.

TMcC: The danger in that play is that life might begin again. That’s why they’re terrified of the pubic louse and have to stamp it out.

SC: I’ve always thought that Endgame has attracted too much attention. If I were looking for a piece that summarises Beckett I’d go for Krapp’s Last Tape, which is both completely black and very funny and full of this Romantic pathos: at the centre of Krapp you’ve got this image of love.

TMcC: Floating on the punt with the girl…

SC: This impossible moment: ‘She is in my arms, my head in her lap, floating gently up and down in the boat…’

TMcC: ‘Beneath us, all moved…’

SC: So Beckett, for all his logical monotony (he uses logical forms in the prose to produce monotony), has these moments of real pathos.

AA: Lyrical.

SC: Yes.

TMcC: And pastoral. And to do with memory. That’s the ‘out’ in Krapp’s Last Tape: he doesn’t make a new tape; he just listens to the old ones again and again and again.

AA: Do you think that Adorno’s more sensitive to humour in Kafka than in Beckett?

SC: What does he say about humour in Kafka?

AA: The thing that stands out most from Adorno’s writing about Kafka is his interpretation of jokes. He doesn’t say that Kafka’s hilarious, but he still sees those as very important. Do you think there’s a connection between Beckett and Kafka in that sense?

SC: Well, Kafka is the man. For Blanchot, too, Beckett was nearly, but not quite, Kafka. The measure of anybody has to be to be Kafka. I think you can read Kafka in different ways. As a naïve eighteen year old I read the novels in English and got filled with existential angst; but then when my German got good enough I read the Erzählungen and thought: ‘How did I ever take this seriously?’ I mean, a man wakes up to be turned into a giant beetle!

TMcC: But it seems to me that in Kafka, often, redemption happens. It’s quite Christian. Josef K realises ‘Oh yes, I am guilty’, and reconciles himself to his death. It’s almost a heroic death.

SC: ‘Like a dog’. What’s heroic about that?

TMcC: Well, the deaths in the Iliad are pretty gruesome too. Look: Vladimir and Estragon sit around saying: ‘If Godot comes, we’ll be saved.’ But he doesn’t come – whereas for Josef K, there is a kind of martyrdom.

SC: I’d want to get much more Hebraic than Christian at that point. I think it’s about unexpungeable guilt. But here’s a good story: Georg Lukacs was not a fan of Kafka, because Kafka was a modernist and his fiction couldn’t be said to coincide with the ambitions of socialist realism. Lukacs was in the Hungarian government in ‘56; he was the Minister of Culture when the Soviets rolled in and came in the middle of the night for him and the other ministers. So he’s taken from his bed into a truck which went out into the country; and he turns to one of his colleagues and says: ‘Kafka war doch ein Realist!’ – ‘Kafka was a realist’. So Kafka’s fault – that he wasn’t a realist – was made up for by the fact that reality confirmed him.

AA: It’s like Benjamin’s proclamation that the ideas of Kafka will only become known to the masses at the point of their annihilation.

SC: Yes… Philosophy is like Flaubert’s Temptations of Saint Anthony, in which Saint Anthony is prey to various temptations, the last of which is the Spinozist God appearing. Philosophy’s like that: there are are problems with, say, Kant’s philosophy – maybe thirty or forty which we could identify straight off. But what interests me is the way in which that system can represent a temptation, one that you can take on board. When you’re teaching philosophy you want people to be tempted by forms of thought which are not their own, and then to come to a position from which they can reject them. The idea of philosophy being wrong doesn’t interest me, though.

AA: So are you teaching temptation or aestheticism?

SC: Both. You want people to be tempted, and you want them to sublimate. If you’re going to do philosophy you’re going to have to spend eight hours a day reading books, which is the most bizarre way to spend one’s time; it’s a type of renunciaciation. But at the back of that there’s something else. Every great philosophical system constituts a temptation which is neither true nor false; it’s open to a variety of interpretations. A great text is like a machine capable of producing multiple interpretations.

AA: So what of this anxiety about truth? What’s the difference between knowledge and truth? Is it all just a game?

SC: No, not a game. Philosophy is about the truth. I don’t want to diminish that. Teaching the history of philosophy, though: is that the history of truth or the history of falsehood? It’s both. Plato was wrong about all sorts of things, but there’s a truth there in that it led to certain things that came after it. So teaching is about using philosophical texts to break down people’s convictions about truth in the name of truth. Students usually know what the truth is early on; you have to break that down, by saying: ‘Look, try to imagine inhabiting the world that Descartes inhabited; take that on board as a possibility, even if that conflicts with your intuitions.’

AA: I’m interested in Benjamin’s historical philosophy. It’s about an arrest of time: truth for him is instantaneous.

SC: Truth unfolds historically. We can have more truth by having different histories.

AA: Benjamin’s against that. He thinks history should cut into the present in a way that’s politically or messianically charged, and that philosophy shouldn’t be discursive, but rather an aspiration towards doctrine.

SC: Benjamin would see history as the history of the victors: Every document is a document of barbarism. That’s his response to a Hegelian accumulative notion of history. If I were teaching Benjamin, I’d try to show the plausibility of both systems. The notion of messianic time that shatters the present is interesting: Benjamin has this wonderful image of revolutionaries in Paris shattering the clocks – the first revolutionary act is to arrest time. It’s wonderful – but I’m not completely persuaded by it.

TMcC: I wonder if we could rehouse the whole question of truth, and of approaching truth, by taking it out of philosophy and rehousing it in literature. In tragedy, for example: Aeschulus has this formulation, in Agamemnon -

SC: Suffering to truth.

TMcC: Yes: the gods love us, and so they make us suffer – and the reason they make us suffer is so that we may learn the truth. It’s very straight-forward. That’s the formula of tragedy. It takes place in time, and time is the horizon of decay, whether this be in Faulkner or Beckett or Aeschulus -

SC: And in the past.

TMcC: In what sense?

SC: A mythical past.

TMcC: Okay. But it’s always this movement towards truth. And then in other types of literature – say in Kafka: the court of the emperor in The Great Wall of China is like the angels in Rilke or the gods in Aeschulus, the place where truth is. There’s that same impossible gap: I want to be in the court of the emperor, to be taken up by and clasped into its breast, so that I may behold it and join with it; and yet I’m not. It’s the same movement, the same thrust. So I wonder: is that rapprochement you get in literature parallel to the movement towards truth in philosophy, or is it one and the same?

SC: Yes. Philosophy doesn’t begin with people falling into ditches and looking at the stars. The pre-Socratics are interesting; but philosophy really begins in drama; it’s a competitor discourse to tragedy. Which is why Plato’s Republic excludes the poets: they’re the competition; gotta get rid of them.

TMcC: He says: ‘We’ll deck them in flowers and give them the best wine…’

SC: Yes: and then kick the bastards out! 
 

 I am on a Roberto Bolano kick right now, so excuse this indulgence.

Go and read his books; and, will someone please translate his poetry into english.

Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin-American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel Los detectives salvajes [The savage detectives], for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize.

A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: he is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Blanes, the town in northeast Spain where he now lives and works, he purges the sins of both. No other novelist has been able to convey the complexity of the megalopolis Mexico City has become, and no one has revisited the horrors of the coup d’état in Chile and the Dirty War with such mordant, intelligent writing.

To echo Bolaño’s words, “reading is more important than writing.” Reading Roberto Bolaño, for example. If anyone thinks that Latin-American literature isn’t passing through a moment of splendor, a look through some of his pages would be enough to dispel that notion. With Bolaño, literature—that inexplicably beautiful bomb that goes off and as it destroys, rebuilds—should feel proud of one of its best creations.

Our conversation took place via e-mail between Blanes and my home in Mexico City in the fall of 2001.

Carmen Boullosa In Latin America, there are two literary traditions that the average reader tends to regard as antithetical, opposite—or frankly, antagonistic: the fantastic—Adolfo Bioy Casares, the best of Cortázar, and the realist—Vargas Llosa, Teresa de la Parra. Hallowed tradition tells us that the southern part of Latin America is home to the fantastic, while the northern part is the center of realism. In my opinion, you reap the benefits of both: your novels and narratives are inventions—the fantastic—and a sharp, critical reflection of reality—realist. And if I follow this reasoning, I would add that this is because you have lived on the two geographic edges of Latin America, Chile and Mexico. You grew up on both edges. Do you object to this idea, or does it appeal to you? To be honest, I find it somewhat illuminating, but it also leaves me dissatisfied: the best, the greatest writers (including Bioy Casares and his antithesis, Vargas Llosa) always draw from these two traditions. Yet from the standpoint of the English-speaking North, there’s a tendency to pigeonhole Latin American literature within only one tradition.

Roberto Bolaño I thought the realists came from the south (by that, I mean the countries in the Southern Cone), and writers of the fantastic came from the middle and northern parts of Latin America—if you pay attention to these compartmentalizations, which you should never, under any circumstances, take seriously. 20th century Latin American literature has followed the impulses of imitation and rejection, and may continue to do so for some time in the 21st century. As a general rule, human beings either imitate or reject the great monuments, never the small, nearly invisible treasures. We have very few writers who have cultivated the fantastic in the strictest sense—perhaps none, because among other reasons, economic underdevelopment doesn’t allow subgenres to flourish. Underdevelopment only allows for great works of literature. Lesser works, in this monotonous or apocalyptic landscape, are an unattainable luxury. Of course, it doesn’t follow that our literature is full of great works—quite the contrary. At first the writer aspires to meet these expectations, but then reality—the same reality that has fostered these aspirations—works to stunt the final product. I think there are only two countries with an authentic literary tradition that have at times managed to escape this destiny—Argentina and Mexico. As to my writing, I don’t know what to say. I suppose it’s realist. I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing. I had no idea that you liked Teresa de la Parra so much. When I was in Venezuela people spoke a lot about her. Of course, I’ve never read her.

CB Teresa de la Parra is one of the greatest women writers, or greatest writers, and when you read her you’ll agree. Your answer completely supports the idea that the electricity surging through the Latin American literary world is fairly haphazard. I wouldn’t say it’s weak, because suddenly it gives off sparks that ignite from one end of the continent to the other, but only every now and then. But we don’t entirely agree on what I consider to be the canon. All divisions are arbitrary, of course. When I thought about the south (the Southern Cone and Argentina), I thought about Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo’s delirious stories, Bioy Casares, and Borges (when you’re dealing with authors like these, rankings don’t matter: there is no “number one,” they’re all equally important authors), and I thought about that short, blurry novel by María Luisa Bombal, House of Mist(whose fame was perhaps more the result of scandal—she killed her ex-lover). I would place Vargas Llosa and the great de la Parra in the northern camp. But then things become complicated, because as you move even further north you find Juan Rulfo, and Elena Garro with Un hogar sólido and Los recuerdos del porvenir. All divisions are arbitrary: there is no realism without fantasy, and vice versa.

In your stories and novels, and perhaps also in your poems, the reader can detect the settling of scores (as well as homages paid), which are important building blocks in your narrative structure. I don’t mean that your novels are written in code, but the key to your narrative chemistry may lie in the way you blend hate and love in the events you recount. How does Roberto Bolaño, the master chemist, work?

RB I don’t believe there are any more scores settled in my writing than in the pages of any other author’s books. I’ll insist at the risk of sounding pedantic (which I probably am, in any case), that when I write the only thing that interests me is the writing itself; that is, the form, the rhythm, the plot. I laugh at some attitudes, at some people, at certain activities and matters of importance, simply because when you’re faced with such nonsense, by such inflated egos, you have no choice but to laugh. All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, it’s a reflection on politics, and second, it’s also a political program. The former alludes to reality—to the nightmare or benevolent dream that we call reality—which ends, in both cases, with death and the obliteration not only of literature, but of time. The latter refers to the small bits and pieces that survive, that persist; and to reason. Although we know, of course, that in the human scale of things, persistence is an illusion and reason is only a fragile railing that keeps us from plunging into the abyss. But don’t pay any attention to what I just said. I suppose one writes out of sensitivity, that’s all. And why do you write? You’d better not tell me—I’m sure your answer will be more eloquent and convincing than mine.

CB Right, I’m not going to tell you, and not because my answer would be any more convincing. But I must say that if there is some reason why I don’t write, it’s out of sensitivity. For me, writing means immersing myself in a war zone, slicing up bellies, contending with the remains of cadavers, then attempting to keep the combat field intact, still alive. And what you call “settling scores” seems much fiercer to me in your work than in that of many other Latin American writers.

In the eyes of this reader, your laughter is much more than a gesture; it’s far more corrosive—it’s a demolition job. In your books, the inner workings of the novel proceed in the classic manner: a fable, a fiction draws the reader in and at the same time makes him or her an accomplice in pulling apart the events in the background that you, the novelist, are narrating with extreme fidelity. But let’s leave that for now. No one who has read you could doubt your faith in writing. It’s the first thing that attracts the reader. Anyone who wants to find something other than writing in a book—for example, a sense of belonging, or being a member of a certain club or fellowship—will find no satisfaction in your novels or stories. And when I read you, I don’t look for history, the retelling of a more or less recent period in some corner of the world. Few writers engage the reader as well as you do with concrete scenes that could be inert, static passages in the hands of “realist” authors. If you belong to a tradition, what would you call it? Where are the roots of your genealogical tree, and in which direction do its branches grow?

RB The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise. But, as I said, I’m probably wrong. As to my idea of a canon, I don’t know, it’s like everyone else’s—I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, it’s so obvious: Francisco de Aldana, Jorge Manrique, Cervantes, the chroniclers of the Indies, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Rubén Darío, Alfonso Reyes, Borges, just to name a few and without going beyond the realm of the Spanish language. Of course, I’d love to claim a literary past, a tradition, a very brief one, made up of only two or three writers (and maybe one single book), a dazzling tradition prone to amnesia, but on the one hand, I’m much too modest about my work and on the other, I’ve read too much (and too many books have made me happy) to indulge in such a ridiculous notion.

CB Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to name as your literary ancestors authors who wrote exclusively in Spanish? Do you include yourself in the Hispanic tradition, in a separate current from other languages? If a large part of Latin American literature (especially prose) is engaged in a dialogue with other traditions, I would say this is doubly true in your case.

RB I named authors who wrote in Spanish in order to limit the canon. Needless to say, I’m not one of those nationalist monsters who only reads what his native country produces. I’m interested in French literature, in Pascal, who could foresee his death, and in his struggle against melancholy, which to me seems more admirable now than ever before. Or the utopian naiveté of Fourier. And all the prose, typically anonymous, of courtly writers (some Mannerists and some anatomists) that somehow leads to the endless caverns of the Marquis de Sade. I’m also interested in American literature of the 1880s, especially Twain and Melville, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Whitman. As a teenager, I went through a phase when I only read Poe. Basically, I’m interested in Western literature, and I’m fairly familiar with all of it.

CB You only read Poe? I think there was a very contagious Poe virus going around in our generation—he was our idol, and I can easily see you as an infected teenager. But I’m imagining you as a poet, and I want to turn to your narratives. Do you choose the plot, or does the plot chase after you? How do you choose—or how does the plot choose you? And if neither is true, then what happens? Pinochet’s adviser on Marxism, the highly respected Chilean literary critic you baptize Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a priest and member of the Opus Dei, or the healer who practices Mesmerism, or the teenage poets known as the Savage Detectives—all these characters of yours have an historical counterpart. Why is that?

RB Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

CB Women writers are constantly annoyed by this question, but I can’t help inflicting it on you—if only because after being asked it so many times, I regard it as an inevitable, though unpleasant ritual: How much autobiographical material is there in your work? To what extent is it a self-portrait?

RB A self-portrait? Not much. A self-portrait requires a certain kind of ego, a willingness to look at yourself over and over again, a manifest interest in what you are or have been. Literature is full of autobiographies, some very good, but self-portraits tend to be very bad, including self-portraits in poetry, which at first would seem to be a more suitable genre for self-portraiture than prose. Is my work autobiographical? In a sense, how could it not be? Every work, including the epic, is in some way autobiographical. In the Iliad we consider the destiny of two alliances, of a city, of two armies, but we also consider the destiny of Achilles and Priam and Hector, and all these characters, these individual voices, reflect the voice, the solitude, of the author.

CB When we were young poets, teenagers, and shared the same city (Mexico City in the seventies), you were the leader of a group of poets, the Infrarealists, which you’ve mythologized in your novel, Los detectives salvajes. Tell us a little about what poetry meant for the Infrarealists, about the Mexico City of the Infrarealists.

RB Infrarealism was a kind of Dada á la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me. We both went to Europe in 1977. One night, in Rosellón, France, at the Port Vendres train station (which is very close to Perpignan), after having suffered a few disastrous adventures, we decided that the movement, such as it was, had come to an end.

CB Maybe it ended for you, but it remained vividly alive in our memories. Both of you were the terrors of the literary world. Back then I was part of a solemn, serious crowd—my world was so disjointed and shapeless that I needed something secure to hold on to. I liked the ceremonial nature of poetry readings and receptions, those absurd events full of rituals that I more or less adhered to, and you were the disrupters of these gatherings. Before my first poetry reading in Gandhi bookstore, way back in 1974, I prayed to God—not that I really believed in God, but I needed someone to call upon—and begged: Please, don’t let the Infrarealists come. I was terrified to read in public, but the anxiety that arose from my shyness was nothing compared to the panic I felt at the thought that I’d be ridiculed: halfway through the reading, the Infras might burst in and call me an idiot. You were there to convince the literary world that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously over work that wasn’t legitimately serious—and that with poetry (to contradict your Chilean saying) the precise point was to throw yourself off a precipice. But let me return to Bolaño and his work. You specialize in narratives—I can’t imagine anyone calling your novels “lyrical”— and yet you’re also a poet, an active poet. How do you reconcile the two?

RB Nicanor Parra says that the best novels are written in meter. And Harold Bloom says that the best poetry of the 20th century is written in prose. I agree with both. But on the other hand I find it difficult to consider myself an active poet. My understanding is that an active poet is someone who writes poems. I sent my most recent ones to you and I’m afraid they’re terrible, although of course, out of kindness and consideration, you lied. I don’t know. There’s something about poetry. Whatever the case, the important thing is to keep reading it. That’s more important than writing it, don’t you think? The truth is, reading is always more important than writing.

Translated by Margaret Carson