Living w/Objective Violence

Time Out

Roman Holiday

Wishes

Where are you...?

Pompeii

Colours...

On Authenticity

Michael Jacksonian Ballet...

Straight Shot

The Elucidation

For a noble beginning
A romance can begin worthily
With the most enjoyable tale there is:
That is, the [Story of the] Grail, whose secret
No one should ever reveal or recount;
For the story might reveal so much
Before it's recited to the end
That someone could suffer for it
Who had not violated the secret;
The wise thing, then, is to leave it
And simply pass it by;
For, unless Master Blihis is lying,
No one should reveal the secret.
Now listen to me one and all
And you will hear a tale
That will be a delight to listen to,
For in it will be the seven guards,
Who throughout the world have charge
Of all the good stories that have ever been told.
These writings will recount
What sort of people the seven guards are,
How [they act] and what end they will come to;
For you have never heard the story
Told or recounted truthfully;
Yet how and why the powerful country
Of Logres was destroyed
Was noised and bruited widely;
Time was, it was much discussed.

The kingdom went to ruin,
The land was so dead and desolate
That it wasn't worth two bits;
They lost the voices of the wells
And the maidens who dwelled in them.
Indeed, the maidens served a very important purpose:
No one who wandered the highways,
Whether at night or in the morning,
Ever needed to alter his route
In order to find food or drink;
He had only go to one of the wells.
He could ask for nothing
In the way of fine and pleasing food
That he would not have forthwith,
Provided he asked reasonably.
At once a damsel would come forth
From the well, as I understand:
Travelers could not have asked for one more beautiful!
In her hand she'd be bearing a golden cup
With bacon, meat pies, and bread.
Another maiden would come carrying
A white towel and a gold and silver
Platter, in which was
The food that had been requested
By the man who'd come to be fed.
He was warmly received at the well;
And if this food did not please him,
She would bring a number of others,
Joyfully and generously,
According to his desires.
One and all, the maidens
Happily and properly served
All those who wandered the highways
And came to the wells for food.

King Amangon was the first to violate their hospitality:
He behaved wickedly and underhandedly;
Afterwards many others did likewise
Because of the example given
By the king who should have protected the maidens
And guarded and kept them safe.
He forced himself upon one of the maidens
And deflowered her against her will
And took the golden bowl from her
And carried it off along with the girl,
Then had her serve him ever afterwards.
Ill luck was to come of it,
For no maiden served again
Or came forth from that well
To help any man who happened by
And requested sustenance there;
And all other [travelers] followed [the king's example].
God! Why didn't the other vassals
Act according to their honor?
When they saw that their lord
Was raping the maidens
Because of their beauty,
They likewise raped them
and carried off the golden bowls.
Never afterwards did any maiden serve
Or come forth from any of the wells;
Know that this is the truth.
My lords, in this way
The land went into decline
And the king who had so wronged them
And those who'd followed his example
All met a dreadful end.
The land was so wasted
That no tree ever bloomed there again,
The grasses and flowers withered,
And the streams dried up.
Afterwards no one could locate
The court of the Rich Fisher,
Which had made the land resplendent
With gold and silver, splendid furs,
Precious brocaded silks,
Fine foodstuffs and cloth,
Gerfalcons and merlins,
Goshawks, sparrowhawks, and falcons.
In earlier days, when the court could be found,
There was throughout the land
Such an abundance of riches,
Of all those I've named here,
That everyone, rich or poor,
Was awestruck at the wealth.
But now it has lost everything.
In the kingdom of Logres
Were all the riches of the world;
The peers of the Round Table
Came there in the time of King Arthur;
None so good have been seen since then.
These were such good knights,
So worthy and so strong and so bold,
So sturdy and so brave,
That as soon as they heard
Tell of the adventures
They wished to restore the wells.
They all swore an oath together
To protect by their arms
The maidens who'd come forth
And the bowls they'd be carrying,
And to destroy the lineage
Of those who had so harmed them
That they had stopped
Coming forth from the wells.
Whenever they captured one
They had him hanged or slain.
The knights gave alms and prayed
To God that He might restore
The wells to the state
In which they had been originally;
And for the honor they would thus pay them
They intended to request their service.
But no matter how hard they searched
They could never find them;
They could never hear any voices
And no maiden ever ventured forth.
Yet they did find something
That greatly amazed them,
For in the forests they found maidens
More beautiful than you could wish;
With them were knights
Heavily armed and on their chargers;
They stood beside the maidens
And fought against anyone
Who wished to carry them off,
Killing many a knight.
Because of the maidens, I believe,
There were many battles in the land.
King Arthur could not keep
From losing many a good knight there,
But he gained many a good one too,
As the story will tell you.
The first knight captured
Was named Blihos Bliheris;
Sir Gawain captured him,
Thanks to the great prowess he possessed,
And sent him to surrender to Arthur.
Blihos mounted his horse and rode without delay
To the court, where he surrendered.
But the king did not recognize him,
Nor did anyone else;
Yet such good stories did he tell
That no one grew tired
Of listening to his words.
The members of court asked him
About the maidens who rode
Through the forest; since they'd never
Been there, they had every reason
To ask and inquire.
The knight told his stories so well
That they gladly listened to him,
And the maidens and knights
Stayed awake many a night
To hear and question him.
He said to them: "You wonder indeed
About the maidens you see
Going through these forests,
And you can't stop asking
Where we were born.
I'll tell you the truth:
We are all offspring of the damsels—
There will never be any more beautiful in the world—
Whom King Amangon raped.
The wrong will not be righted
So long as this world lasts.
The peers of the Round Table
In their nobility and honor,
In their worthiness and strength,
Made a great effort to restore
The wells that the squires,
The knights and the gentlemen—
I'll just tell you the essentials—
The men all travel together,
Along with the maidens
Who have returned to that land.
Through forest and countryside
They must to wander thus
Until God allows them to find
The court from which will emanate the joy
That will bring splendor back to this land.
Such adventures will come to those
Who seek the court
As were never before experienced
Or recounted in this land."
What he told and related to them
Was most pleasing and agreeable to all.
Soon afterward
The good knights of the court
Met to discuss this matter:
Let each knight equip himself,
Then all will seek earnestly
For the court of the Rich Fisher,
Who was so skilled in magic
That he could take on a hundred shapes;
Some would seek him in one guise
And others in another.
My lord Gawain found the Rich Fisher
During the reign of King Arthur,
And truly went to his court.
Later you will be told
Of the joy he brought about there,
Which restored the whole kingdom.
But even before Gawain
A very young knight
Had discovered it first,
And no one could find in all the world
A braver knight than he.
Afterwards the young man of whom
I've just spoken came to the Round Table;
His deeds outshone those
Of all knights who'd come before
Or who could still be found in all the world.
First he was held in low esteem,
Then found to be of noble estate;
The knight who was seeking the court
Sought so long throughout the land
That he found it, it's true,
And many among you know of him:
He was Perceval the Welshman.
He asked what purpose the Grail
Served, but he failed to ask
Why the lance bled
When he saw it, or about the sword
Of which half was missing
And the remainder lay in the bier
Upon the corpse, or the manner
Of the great disappearance.
But I tell you in no uncertain terms
That he asked who the dead man
Was who was in the room
And about the precious silver cross
That led the procession.
Three times a day for three hours
There were such loud lamentations
In the room that no man would have been so brave
As not to have been frightened by the noise.
Then, after they had finished the service,
They hung four censers
On four precious candelabra,
Which stood at the corners of the bier.
The cries immediately ceased;
At that point, everyone lay in a faint.
The long and wide room
Remained empty and frightful;
The stream of blood flowed
From a vase that held the lance
Through the precious silver conduit.
Then the palace completely filled
With people and knights
And the most sumptuous feast
In all the world was prepared.
Then the unknown king
Came forth in splendid array;
He came forth attired from a chamber.
He arrived so magnificently attired
That no one could describe
His robe or adornments,
So splendid were they;
On his finger he had a beautiful ring;
His sleeves were tightly laced
And on his head was a golden circlet—
Its stones were worth a fortune;
He wore a belt with a beautiful buckle;
No one could ever find
A more handsome man alive.
Anyone who had seen him earlier
That day dressed as a fisher
Would rightly be uneasy.
As soon as the king took his seat
You would have seen all the knights
Seated at the other tables.
The bread was served immediately
And the wine set before them
In large gold and silver bowls.
Afterwards you would have seen the Grail
Come through a chamber door
Without servant or attendant
And serve from itself most properly
Onto precious gold platters
Worth a great fortune.
It placed the first course
Before the king, then served
All the others who were present;
The courses that it brought them
And the foodstuffs it gave them
Were a marvel to behold.
Then came the great marvel
To which no other can compare.
But you'll never hear me speak of it
Because Perceval must tell it
Later in the story.
It's a great crime and great shame
To break up such a good story
And not tell it properly.
When the good knight comes
Who found the court three times,
Then will you hear me relate
Point by point, omitting nothing,
The truth about whom the wells served
Where the knights were,
And what purpose the Grail served;
And I'll tell you everything
About the bleeding lance
And why the sword was in
The bier—I'll tell you everything
And leave nothing out.
I'll explain to the people
Who had never heard anything about them
Both the grief and the disappearing,
Just as this process is meant to unfold.

My lords, it is the proven truth
That the court was found seven times
In the seven branches of the story;
But you do not know what this means.
Understand that the seven branches
Are in truth the seven guards;
Each guard will tell for himself
That he found the court;
It should not be told in advance.
Now in this composition it is time
For me to identify each of the seven guards;
I do not want to omit any one,
But must identify and tell about them,
Just as they are, from beginning to end.
The seventh branch, the most pleasing,
Is entirely about the lance
With which Longinus struck the side
Of the King of Holy Majesty.
The sixth, without a doubt,
Is about the great struggle, the great torment.
The fifth will tell you in its turn
About the wrath and loss of Husdent.
The fourth is the Story of the Swan:
No coward was Carahet,
That dead knight in the skiff
Who first came to Glamorgan.
Next is the third, about the goshawk
Which so frightened Castrar;
Pecorin, Amangon's son, always
Bore the wound upon his forehead;
Now I've named the third for you.
The second, according to the good story-tellers,
Is not in verse;
It is the Story of the Great Sorrows,
How Lancelot of the Lake came
To the place where he lost his strength.
Finally, there is the last story:
Since I have embarked on this task
I have to tell about it,
And you'll not hear me put it off;
It is the Adventure of the Shield—
And there's never been a better one!
These are seven genuine stories
That all proceed from the Grail.
This adventure brought about
Joy, whereby the population multiplied
After the great destruction.
Through these adventures the court
And the Grail were truly found again,
And through them the kingdom was so replenished
That the streams that had stopped flowing
And the springs that had surged forth
Long ago but were now dried up
All flowed again through the meadows;
The grass was once more green and thick
And the woods leafy and shaded.
On the day the court was found again,
Throughout all the land
The forests became so dense and deep
And so beautiful and thickly grown
That everyone who was traveling
Through the land marveled.
But then there returned a band of people
Full of bitter resentment:
Those who had come from the wells
But were not recognized.
They built castles and cities,
Towns, villages and strongholds,
And for the damsels they built
The magnificent Castle of Maidens;
They built the Perilous Bridge
And the great Proud Castle;
Nobly and graciously
They set over them a troop
Of peers from the rich household;
In their great pride they set up
In opposition to the Round Table;
This became known to everyone.
Within the castle each knight had his ladylove;
They led a splendid existence.
There were three hundred sixty-six
Defenders of the castle,
And each of these had lordship
Over twenty knights;
The total number I'll not fail
To give: they came to
Seven thousand six hundred eighty-six.
They exerted themselves mightily, but in vain;
Know well, all you who live in the world,
That you wouldn't find any of them alive today.
They rode through that land
And made war on King Arthur;
The good knights left the court
To fight against them;
I know that when they captured one
They held him prisoner rather than free him.
King Arthur wanted to go there
To sap and destroy the castle;
But everyone who hated him in those days
Attacked him at that point
And made mighty war against him.
It was pointless to seek war elsewhere.
At that time the wars were so intense
That they lasted a good four years—
So the story tells us,
As does he who wrote the book.
I tell them to you one by one
Because he wishes to show each of you
What purpose the Grail served,
For the service it performed
Was revealed to him by the good master.
The good purpose it served will no longer
Be hushed or hidden, for he will
Teach it openly to all.
So you have heard from me
About King Arthur, how he
Was at war for four years
Against the people of his land;
But he brought all this to an end
In such a way that no vassal or neighbor
Failed thereafter to do his will,
Either freely or by force;
This is the proven truth.
Know, moreover, that the war
Redounded to the king's honor
And to their shame, as most people know.
Then on that day the rich household
Took leave of the court
And went to hunt in the forests.
Those who wished to fish
Followed the good rivers.
This was how they comported themselves:
Some spent time playing at love,
Some passed their time in other ways.
They relaxed thus the entire winter
Until the summer came.
Now Chrétien will relate here
The exemplum you have heard;
Then Chrétien will not have wasted
His effort, for he'll have aimed and striven
By command of the count
To put into rhyme the best story
That's ever been told in royal court:
It is the Story of the Grail,
The book of which was given him by the count.
Now you'll hear how he acquits himself.
- Anonymous (Author), William W. Kibler (Translator)

Ear to the Shell

Remember Me

Time. The span between the 1st note of a song, and the last.

Death Cabs

Cell Phone's Ringing

Enemy Guns

"Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it."

-Cornelius Tactitus

When I Go...

...the Response

Appalachia Rising

You Won't Kill Me?

Gold Rush

Inhumanity

It came via Snail Mail...

from W Magazine

It's been a year since Lindsey Jordan found herself in the unique position of hiring a PR team during her senior year of high school, but the 19-year-old still hasn't gotten used to the seemingly endless adoration and attention given to her band Snail Mail. One recent afternoon, she camped out in the sleek offices of her label, Matador Records, for a nonstop day of interviews. "There was some European festival we were playing and I didn’t even know about it—I saw the flyer on Instagram," she recalled. "I was like, Why does no one tell me anything!"

When you've gone from having Mom drive you in from the suburbs to see your favorite bands play in Baltimore to regularly sharing the stage with those exact same bands within just a few years, a little disorientation is probably natural. Her newfound status as teen rock star will be further cemented on June 8, when Matador releases Snail Mail's debut album, Lush, which includes the single “Let’s Find an Out,” released on Wednesday.

Jordan first showcased her preternatural ability to the industry in 2016, when Snail Mail released their EP Habit—a “really over-the-top, melodramatic explosion of emotion,” as Jordan now sums up the angst of suburban adolescence captured in a guitar-heavy nutshell. Still, even in the thick of it all, Jordan showed self-awareness, peppering her lyrics with lines like “When I’m 30, I’ll laugh about how dumb it felt.” Indeed, the six songs, which made up just 28 minutes of music in total, managed to be strong enough to not only put the band on a rollercoaster of fame, but also sustain it for nearly three years. (“It’s been, like, chill,” Jordan said of the ratio of their comparatively teeny musical output to the nonstop press.)

Snail Mail's success is especially remarkable given that the band never intended to last: The group formed after Jordan—who’s been playing guitar since age five, and listening to bands like Beach Fossils and Future Islands since age 11, thanks to her early fascination with record stores—posted a four-song EP on Bandcamp, which she worked on in between roller skating through the halls of her high school and partaking in its “Feminist Club.” She only convinced two of her friends to form a band in order to see the group Sheer Mag for free, by playing with them—and just two weeks after their first-ever practice session.

“We were planning on parting ways after that,” Jordan recalled. But to their surprise, the band stuck: First came merch—T-shirts with the band’s name emblazoned across a hot dog—and then, much more seriously, Sister Polygon Records’ release of Habit, which included the standout single “Thinning.”

Predictably enough, by Jordan’s junior year, things were starting to get out of hand: She was spending more and more time in the principal’s office pleading for a few weeks off in order to, say, make Snail Mail’s debut at South by Southwest. Sure, Jordan got thrown out of her own show for drinking, which has become something of a tradition for the band—”They always let us back in to play, but then they make us get out before or after,” she said with a laugh—but it was also most definitely a business endeavor. They’d created such a profitable stir that the band had to hire “a whole bunch of people” because Jordan simply couldn’t keep up with her e-mail anymore.

Finally, a couple of months later, in May 2017, after missing “a crazy, f**ed-up amount of school days, like 50 or something in just my senior year,” Jordan somehow graduated—an accomplishment that pales in comparison to the rest of that year, which saw Snail Mail release their first-ever music video; gain the approval of Pitchfork, which declared Jordan “the wisest teenage indie rocker we know”; tour with acts as big as Girlpool, Waxahatchee, and Beach Fossils; book a Tiny Desk concert with NPR; lead The New York Times’ package “proving” that women are making the best rock music today; and, finally, sign with Matador Records, which “went into the abyss and back” with Jordan to make sure Snail Mail's upcoming album would be “completely perfect.”

Lush is also quite personal, but in a different way. Habit was originally “100 percent just not intended for anyone to hear,” and so much like “just writing in a diary” that Jordan found herself thinking, “Wow, if this ever got out, I’d be f**ed.” Essentially, she did it for herself, which is why she considers the EP to be “a personal milestone in pretty much every aspect”—fittingly enough for a prequel to Lush, which she considers to be “another real marker of maturity.” That’s true not just in terms of its focus on guitar work, but also through processing all of the pressure and “really weird situations” that writing Habit has led her to, including figuring out how to “separate all the weird hype and press from the person I am when I’m just alone in my room, writing, reflecting, by myself, with a guitar.”

It hasn’t escaped Jordan that she could have been more prolific in order to capitalize on the hype; she simply hasn’t wanted to. “I just want to make sure everything is as real and genuine for me as possible,” she said, pointing out that Lush is “definitely more gay” than Habit, which she wrote before she was out. “I didn’t really intend to make it a message or anything, but it’s nice to be able to write about someone and say ‘her’ or ‘she’ and not be worried about what my friends or family would think,” she continued. (For the record, everyone has always been “chill” about her sexuality; the only people she felt she officially had to come out to were her parents: On Christmas one year, her mom asked her why she wouldn’t marry her bandmate, Alex. “I was like, Uh, ‘cause I’m gay, and she was like, Oh, sorry,” Jordan recalled with a laugh.)

“Sorry”—albeit a sarcastic one—was also Jordan’s response when Pitchfork published a video of the band earlier this year, prompting many to angrily ask, “Why is she so young?” Still, Jordan would take astonished “She’s 12, and she’s a girl!” over “Teenage boys being like, You’re hot” any day—the type of reactions she knows will stick around even as the band grows more established and into the spotlight. She also has no illusions about how doing so will pretty much automatically disqualify Snail Mail from the DIY punk scene that its members grew up in, even though each of them still personally upholds its political, accepting values.

“We definitely aren’t a punk band,” Jordan sighed. She added, “I wish we were." (To be fair, she said, she isn’t writing punk songs—though she may do so “one day.”) As for the more immediate future, the album’s release will bring along a two-month-long tour with bands like Belle and Sebastian, which will end with Jordan finally moving out of her parents’ house—and presumably staying as far away as she can from “nasty-a**, roach-infested New York,” which, being claustrophobic, she didn’t take too kindly to while finalizing the record. Instead, she’s thinking about moving to Asheville, in North Carolina, or maybe even to Durham. I asked her if there was even a music scene there, which prompted her to laugh and admit, “I don’t think so.” Maybe now there will be one.

Statuesque Brides

More Hips - ‘This Is America’ Is The Epitome Of Preachy PC Art

I argued a while back that the increasingly dominant character of the art championed by our cultural elites is didacticism: “an absence of substantial or profound artistic content, compensated for by loud, didactic political messaging. We know what we’re supposed to feel, whether or not the work of art actually makes us feel it.”

By contrast, “Good art does not have to avoid philosophical and political themes. It can certainly convey the artist’s perspective, but it does so by showing us the world as seen from that perspective. It starts by showing us characters and events that are interesting on their own terms, not merely as illustrations to accompany a treatise. The wider intellectual themes should emerge from the details, not be imposed on them. Good art shows before it tells.” But nowadays we cannot merely be entertained by a good story. We must be lectured.

Now along comes an example of this that is so extravagant, I could not have invented it. An actor named Donald Glover, who raps under the lame pseudonym Childish Gambino, released a video that went viral, getting 50 million views in just a few days and being extravagantly praised by various elite or semi–elite cultural publications. By now you should know to click on it at your own risk, but also be warned that there is a certain amount of gratuitous violence.

For those who prefer not to bother, let me sum it up for you. The music itself, if you can call it that—and I would prefer you didn’t—is of no interest at all. I would probably say this about most of today’s popular music, particularly anything in the genres known as “rap” or “hip-hop.” But friends who take this kind of music more seriously generally agree that the piece is unexceptional even by contemporary standards. Moreover, the mumbled lyrics are mostly gibberish, except for the repeated, spoken refrain, “This is America.”

It is spoken, not with pride, but as an indictment, and that gets to the real content of the video: a series of images that are supposed to be biting social commentary on racism and violence. But an ordinary viewer would easily miss at least half of it. This also is widely acknowledged, because numerous people have put out guides to the video (like this one) purporting to explain the social and political significance of everything in it.

The symbols seem either too subtle or too ham-handed. On the one hand, were we really supposed to recognize that the initial pose of Glover’s weird twitching dance style is supposed to be borrowed from the “Jim Crow” caricature of a nineteenth-entury minstrel show performer? On the other hand, when Glover shoots a group of gospel singers with a machine gun—the wrong gun, albeit—it seems to be ticking off the “mass shooting” box a little too obviously. Certainly, many of the explanations seem strained—the warehouse in which the video is shot has white columns, symbolizing the fact that white supremacy is America’s foundation! They seem like attempts to read in a social message that is not plausibly there.

But the important thing is that people believe the message to be there, and they believe this hidden, symbolic content is what gives the video value and makes it great.

References, allusions, and what are now called “Easter Eggs” have long been a part of art and literature. But you can see a Shakespeare play and still get the story if you don’t know Hyperion from a satyr. The references enhance the story for those in the know, but there is more to the story than a pastiche of references, and the allusions merely serve the communication of the artist’s own unique message.

What is the message of “This is America”? That racism exists? It reminds me of the comment about Aziz Ansari’s shtick that inspired my earlier observation about our didactic culture.

Dev learns a lesson. The lesson is that sexism exists. Presumably viewers are to learn this also. It is difficult, though, to imagine a viewer likely to be simultaneously surprised by and receptive to such lessons. This is not a blow to the patriarchy; this is ‘Sesame Street.’

All the earnest guides to the hidden symbolism of “This Is America” remind me of what Tom Wolfe said in The Painted Word. Modern art galleries have it all wrong. They put the Jackson Pollock painting up on the wall at full size, with a little block of text explaining it off to the side. To really capture the spirit of Modernism, Wolfe argued, they should reproduce the painting in a little box off to the side, as a mere illustration, and put the words of the critics and theorists up on the wall.

In this case, the only appropriate way to watch Glover’s video is in one of those tiny boxes off to the side of a webpage, while you read all of the notes pontificating about its historical references and hidden messages—because they are the real point, not the video.

If you object that this is just a music video—well, this is what I thought, until a bunch of people started telling me how important it was. But I suppose that’s where the logic of Beyoncé thinkpieces takes us: we have a culture that is both lowbrow and pompously didactic at the same time.

Then again, you might object that I am not the target audience for this video and that it was made to speak to a narrower audience that would get the references. But didn’t we all decide a while back that being trapped in our own cultural “bubble” was a bad thing? We already have too many people talking to their own in-group in an esoteric code accepted by each other but unconvincing to anyone else. We already have too much of that on important issues, and far too much of it on the topic of race.

Didacticism is the art of balkanization and tribalism. That’s because it shouts the same message over and over again, it appeals only to those who already want to hear it and repels those who don’t. You will see exactly the same thing with “This Is America.” Those who are inclined to write off America as inherently racist will watch it over and over again. Those who are not will merely find it irritating and ignore it. It will serve as yet another signifier of tribal identity, rather than a story that is capable of reaching across entrenched lines.

- Robert Tracinski is a senior writer for The Federalist. His work can also be found at The Tracinski Letter.

More Lips

Realizations

Now I Remember...

Trotsky

A Return to Mars?

It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on...

dring- dring- dring
(Mind the phone)

---

Droped my cellphone down below
Ain't that just like me?

The Mother

Tonantzin

Mexico City's 17th-century Basilica of Guadalupe—built in honor of the Blessed Virgin and perhaps Mexico's most important religious building—was constructed at the base of the hill of Tepeyac, believed to be a site used for pre-Columbian worship of Tonantzin. It has been asserted that the word Guadalupe in this appellation may derive from Coatlaxopeuh, meaning “the one who crushes the serpent”,[citation needed] and perhaps referring to Quetzalcoatl.

- Wikipedia

She for Whom All Sacrifices are Made

Broken Social Scene

The seas has made a wall for its defence
of falling water. Those whose impertinence
leads them to its moving ledges
it rejects. Those who surrender
it will with the next wave drag under.

Sand is the beginning and the end
of our dominion.

The way to the dunes is easy.
The shelving sand is stiffened in the rain
and loosened again in the sun’s fingers.
Children, lustful of the glistening hours
drink and are insatiate. Wind under the eyelids,
confusion walling their ears, their bodies glow
in the cold wash of the beach.

And after,
they walk with rigid feet the planked street of the town.
They miss the slipping texture of the sand
and a sand pillow under the hollow instep.
They are unmoved by fears
that breed in darkening kitchens at sundown
following storm, and they rebel
against cold waiting in the wind and rain
for the late sail.

Did you, as I,
condemn the coastal fog and long for islands
seen from a sail’s shadow?

The dunes lie
more passive to the wind than water is.
This, then, the country of our choice.

It is infertile, narrow, prone
under a dome of choral sound:
water breaking upon water.

Litter of bare logs in the drift—
the sea has had its sharp word with them.
Wild roses, wild strawberries cover the dune shoulder
It is a naked restless garden that descends
from the crouched pine
to shellfish caught in flat reflecting sands.

We lose the childish avarice of horizons. The sea ends
against another shore. The cracked ribs of a wreck
project from the washed beach.
Under the shell-encrusted timbers
dripping brine
plucks at the silence of slant chambers
opening seaward. What moving keel remembers
such things as here are buried under sand?

The transitory ponds and smooth bar slide
easily under the advancing tide,
emerging with the moon’s
turning.

Clear lagoons
behind the shattered hulk, thin
movements of sea grass on the dune rim
bending against cloud, these things are oursI
Submissive to the sea and wind,
resistful of all else, sand
is the beginning and the end
of our dominion.

-Mary Barnard, "Shoreline"

Strange Effects

French Girls

How Young Are We?

WHEN the 'arf-made recruity goes out to the East
'E acts like a babe an' 'e drinks like a beast,
An' 'e wonders because 'e is frequent deceased
Ere 'e's fit for to serve as a soldier.
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

Now all you recruities what's drafted to-day,
You shut up your rag-box an' 'ark to my lay,
An' I'll sing you a soldier as far as I may:
A soldier what's fit for a soldier.
Fit, fit, fit for a soldier . . .

First mind you steer clear o' the grog-sellers' huts,
For they sell you Fixed Bay'nets that rots out your guts -
Ay, drink that 'ud eat the live steel from your butts -
An' it's bad for the young British soldier.
Bad, bad, bad for the soldier . . .

When the cholera comes - as it will past a doubt -
Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout,
For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out,
An' it crumples the young British soldier.
Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier . . .

But the worst o' your foes is the sun over'ead:
You must wear your 'elmet for all that is said:
If 'e finds you uncovered 'e'll knock you down dead,
An' you'll die like a fool of a soldier.
Fool, fool, fool of a soldier . . .

If you're cast for fatigue by a sergeant unkind,
Don't grouse like a woman nor crack on nor blind;
Be handy and civil, and then you will find
That it's beer for the young British soldier.
Beer, beer, beer for the soldier . . .

Now, if you must marry, take care she is old -
A troop-sergeant's widow's the nicest I'm told,
For beauty won't help if your rations is cold,
Nor love ain't enough for a soldier.
'Nough, 'nough, 'nough for a soldier . . .

If the wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loath
To shoot when you catch 'em - you'll swing, on my oath! -
Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er: that's Hell for them both,
An' you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.
Curse, curse, curse of a soldier . . .

When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck,
Don't look nor take 'eed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck
And march to your front like a soldier.
Front, front, front like a soldier . . .

When 'arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,
Don't call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch;
She's human as you are - you treat her as sich,
An' she'll fight for the young British soldier.
Fight, fight, fight for the soldier . . .

When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine,
The guns o' the enemy wheel into line,
Shoot low at the limbers an' don't mind the shine,
For noise never startles the soldier.
Start-, start-, startles the soldier . . .

If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

- Rudyard Kipling, "The Young British Soldier" (1890)

Black Panther

Slavoj Žižek, "Quasi Duo Fantasias: A Straussian Reading of 'Black Panther'"

WE WERE WAITING for a film like Black Panther, but Black Panther is not the film we were waiting for. [1] The first sign of ambiguity is the fact that the movie was enthusiastically received all across the political spectrum: from partisans of black emancipation who see in it the first big Hollywood assertion of black power, through liberals who sympathize with its reasonable solution — education and help, not struggle — up to some representatives of the alt-right, who recognize in the film’s “Wakanda forever” another version of Trump’s “America first” (incidentally, this is why Mugabe, before he lost power, also said some kind words about Trump). When all sides recognize themselves in the same product, we can be sure that the product in question is ideology at its purest — a kind of empty vessel containing antagonistic elements.

The plot begins many centuries ago, with five African tribes fighting over a meteorite that contains vibranium, a metal that can store apparently limitless energy. One of the warriors gains superhuman abilities by eating a “heart-shaped herb” that bears traces of the metal. He becomes the first “Black Panther,” uniting all but one tribe to form the nation of Wakanda. For centuries after, the Wakandans isolate themselves from the world, which believes them to be an undeveloped African country; in fact, they are highly developed, using vibranium to develop advanced technology. Already this starting point seems problematic: recent history teaches us that being blessed by some precious natural resource is rather a curse in disguise — think about today’s Congo, which is an inoperative “rogue state,” precisely because of its incredible wealth of natural resources (and the way they are ruthlessly exploited for it).

The scene then shifts to Oakland, which was one of the strongholds of the real Black Panthers, a radical black liberation movement from the 1960s, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the FBI. Following the path of the Black Panther comics, the movie — without ever directly mentioning the real Panthers — in a simple but no less masterful stroke of ideological manipulation efficiently kidnaps the name, so that its first association is now no longer the old radical militant organization but a superhero-king of a powerful African kingdom. More precisely, there are two Black Panthers in the film, the king T’Challa and his cousin, Erik Killmonger. Each of them stands for a different political vision. Erik spent his youth in Oakland and then as a US army black-ops soldier; his domain is poverty, gang violence, and military brutality, while T’Challa was raised in the secluded opulence of the Wakanda’s royal court. Erik advocates a militant global solidarity: Wakanda should put its wealth, knowledge, and power at the disposal of the oppressed all around the world so that they can overthrow the existing world order. Meanwhile T’Challa is slowly moving away from the traditional isolationism of “Wakanda first!” to a gradual and peaceful globalism that would act within the coordinates of the existing world order and its institutions, spreading education and technological help — and simultaneously maintaining the unique Wakandan culture and way of life. T’Challa’s political arc makes him a doubtful hero torn between different paths of action from the usual hyper-active superhero, while his opponent Killmonger is always ready to act and knows what to do.

No, Black Panther is not the film we were waiting for. One of the signs that something is wrong with this picture is the strange role of the two white characters, the “bad” South-African Klaue and the “good” CIA agent Ross. The “bad” Klaue doesn’t fit the role of the villain for which he is predestined — he is all too weak and comical. Ross is a much more enigmatic figure, in some sense the symptom of the film: he is a CIA agent, loyal to the US government, who participates in the Wakandan civil war with an ironic distance, strangely non-engaged, as if he is participating in a show. Why is he selected to shoot down Killmonger’s planes? Isn’t it that he holds the place of the existing global system in the film’s universe? And, at the same time, he holds the place of the majority of the film’s white viewers, as if telling us: “It’s okay to enjoy this fantasy of black supremacy, none of us is really threatened by this alternate universe!” With T’Challa and Ross at the helm, today’s rulers can continue to sleep in peace.

That T’Challa opens up to “good” globalization but is also supported by its repressive embodiment, the CIA, demonstrates that there is no real tension between the two: African aesthetics are made seamlessly compatible with global capitalism; tradition and ultra-modernity blend together. What the beautiful spectacle of Wakanda’s capitol obliterates is the insight followed by Malcolm X when he adopted X as his family name. He signaled that the slave traders who brought the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their family and ethnic roots, of their entire cultural life-world. An inspiration for the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X’s mission was not to mobilize African Americans to fight for the return to some primordial African roots, but precisely to seize the opening provided by X — an unknown, new (lack of) identity engendered by the very process of slavery. This X, which deprives black Americans of their ethnic tradition, offers a unique chance to redefine (reinvent) themselves, to freely form a new identity much more universal than white people’s professed universality. (As is well known, Malcolm X found this new identity in the universalism of Islam.) This precious lesson of Malcolm X is forgotten by Black Panther: to attain true universality, a hero must go through the experience of losing his or her roots.

Things thus seem clear, confirming Fredric Jameson’s insistence on how difficult it is to imagine a really new world, a world which does not just reflect, invert, or supplement the existing one. However, the movie offers signs that disturb this simple and obvious reading — signs that leave Killmonger’s political vision radically open. Reading the film in the way Leo Strauss read Plato’s and Spinoza’s work, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost, we can recover this apparently foreclosed potential.

A careful Straussian reading draws attention to signs that indicate that the obvious hierarchy of theoretical positions has to be inverted. For example, although Milton follows the church’s official party line and condemns Satan’s rebellion, his sympathies are clearly with Satan in Paradise Lost. (We should add that it doesn’t matter if this preference for the “bad side” is conscious or unconscious to the author of a text; the result is the same.) Does the same not hold for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of his Batman trilogy? Although Bane is the official villain, there are indications that he, much more than Batman himself, is the film’s authentic hero distorted as its villain: he is ready to sacrifice his life for his love, ready to risk everything for what he perceives as injustice, and this basic fact is occluded by superficial and rather ridiculous signs of destructive evil.

So, back to Black Panther: which are the signs enabling us to recognize in Killmonger the film’s true hero? There are many; the first among them is the scene of his death, in which he prefers to die free than to be healed and survive in the false abundance of Wakanda. The strong ethical impact of Killmonger’s last words immediately ruin the idea that he is a simple villain. What then follows is a scene of extraordinary warmth: the dying Killmonger sits down at the edge of a mountain precipice observing the beautiful Wakanda sunset, and T’Challa, who has just defeated him, silently sits at his side. There is no hatred here, just two basically good men with a different political view sharing their last moments after the battle is over. It’s a scene unimaginable in a standard action movie that culminates in the vicious destruction of the enemy. These final moments alone cast doubt on the film’s obvious reading and solicit us to deeper reflection.

[1] In my reading, I rely on Duane Rousselle, Christopher Lebron, and on an email exchange with Todd McGowan.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Other-isms

Back in the 1930s, Hitler offered anti-Semitism as a narrative explanation of the troubles experienced by ordinary Germans: unemployment, moral decay, social unrest—behind all this stands the Jew, i.e. the “Jewish plot” made everything clear by way of providing a simple “cognitive mapping.” Does today’s hatred of multi-culturalism and of the immigrant threat not function in a homologous way? Strange things are happening, financial meltdowns occur, which affect our daily lives, but are experienced as totally opaque. The rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation: it is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life. There is thus an interconnection between the rising anti-immigrant tide in Western countries (which reached a peak in Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree) and the ongoing financial crisis. Clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact of being caught in the whirlpool of non-transparent financial abstraction. The true “foreign body,” which cannot be assimilated, is ultimately the infernal self-propelling machine of the Capital itself.

There are good reasons to think of Breivik’s ideological self-justification as well as of reactions to his murderous act. The manifesto of this Christian “Marxist hunter” who killed more than 70 people in Oslo is precisely not a case of a madman’s rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of “Europe’s crisis,” which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism, the very inconsistencies of which are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye is how Breivik constructs his enemy out of the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism, Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space (Marxist radical Left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism). The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features (“Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot” translates into the Bolshevik radical Left, plutocratic capitalism, and ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise. Even more indicative is the way Breivik’s self-designation shuffles the cards of the radical right-wing ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic. Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education, but he favors a “secular” society, supports abortion, and declares himself pro-gay. Furthermore, Breivik combines Nazi features (also in part—for example, his sympathy for Saga, the Swedish pro-Nazi folk-singer) with the hatred for Hitler: one of his heroes is Max Manus, the leader of the Norwegian anti-Nazi resistance. Breivik is not so much racist as anti-Muslim: all his hatred is focused on the Muslim threat. And, last but not least, Breivik is anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel, since the State of Israel is the first defense line against the Muslim expansion. He even wants to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them, or, as he wrote in his “Manifesto”:

There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.

His figure thus embodies the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi. But how is this possible?

A key is provided by the reactions of the European Right to Breivik’s attack. Its mantra was that, in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed “legitimate concerns about genuine problems” which mainstream politics is failing to address, such as the corrosion of Europe by Islamicization and multi- culturalism. Or, to quote The Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy “as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere.”1 (Incidentally, it would be nice to hear a similar appreciation of the Palestinian acts of terror, going along the lines of “these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate the Israeli politics.”) A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a “multicultural” Israel has no chance to survive, and apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist- rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation, which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews. The implicit deal is that “we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst.” The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of the last centuries, Jews themselves were the first “multicul- turalists”: their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant. (Actually, one should note here that, in the 1930s, in direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism, Ernest Jones, the main agent of the conformist gentrification of psychoanalysis, engaged in weird reflections on the percentage of foreign population a national body can tolerate in its midst without putting in danger its own identity, and thereby accepting the Nazi problematic.) At the end of this road lies the extreme possibility which should in no way be discarded—that of a “historic compromise” between Zionists and Muslim fundamentalists.

But what if we are entering a new era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion, since there is “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, Breivik was right in his choice of target: he didn’t attack the foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards the intruding foreigners. The problem is not the foreigners; it is our own (European) identity. Although the ongoing crisis of the European Union appears as a crisis of economy and finances, it is in its fundamental dimension an ideologico-political crisis. The failure of referendums about the EU constitution a couple of years ago gave a clear signal that voters perceived the EU as a “technocratic” economic union, lacking any vision which could mobilize people (until the recent protests, the only ideology able to mobilize people was the anti-immigrant defense of Europe).

Recent outbursts of homophobia in East European post-communist states should also give us a pause to think. In early 2011 there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands paraded in peace, with no violence or other disturbances. In gay parades that took place at the same time in Serbia and Croatia (Belgrade, Split), police were not able to protect the participants who were ferociously attacked by thousands of violent Christian fundamentalists. These fundamentalists, not Turkey, stand for the true threat to European legacy. So, when the EU basically blocked Turkey’s entry, we should have raised the obvious question: What about applying the same rules to Eastern Europe? (Not to mention the weird fact that the main force behind the anti-gay movement in Croatia is the Catholic Church, well known for numerous paedophiliac scandals.)

It is crucial to locate anti-Semitism in this series, as one of the elements alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. In order to ground its Zionist politics, the State of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake: it decided to downplay, if not outright ignore, the so-called “old” (traditional European) anti-Semitism, focusing instead on the “new” and allegedly “progressive” anti-Semitism masked as the critique of the Zionist politics of the State of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard Henri-Levy (in his The Left in Dark Times) recently claimed that the anti-Semitism of the twenty-first century will be “progressive” or there will be none. Brought to its logical conclusion, this thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of anti-Semitism as a mystified/displaced anti-capitalism, where, instead of blaming the capitalist system, the rage is focused on a specific ethnic group accused of corrupting the system. For Henri-Levy and his partisans, today’s anti-capitalism is a disguised form of anti-Semitism.

This unspoken but no less efficient prohibition against attacking the “old” anti­Semitism is taking place at the very moment when the “old” anti-Semitism is returning all around Europe, especially in post-communist East European countries. We can observe a similar weird alliance in the US: how can the US Christian funda­mentalists, who are, as it were, by nature anti-Semitic, now passionately support the Zionist policy of the State of Israel? There is only one solution to this enigma. It is not that the US fundamentalists changed, it is that Zionism itself, in its hatred of the Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the State of Israel, paradoxically became anti-Semitic, i.e., constructed the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project along anti-Semitic lines. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: Fox News, the main US voice of the radical Right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, recently had to demote Glen Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were becoming openly anti-Semitic.2

The standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the State of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, the State of Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticized, but that the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes. When the unconditional Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argumentation is best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse. It shows two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” These are today’s allies of the State of Israel. Jewish critics of the State of Israel are regularly dismissed as self-hating Jews; however, are the true self-hating Jews, those who secretly hate the true greatness of the Jewish nation, not precisely the Zionists making a pact with anti-Semites? How did we end up in such a weird situation?

The fantasmatic status of anti-Semitism is clearly designated by the statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A. B. Yehoshua provided an adequate comment to this statement:

This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.3

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles. They are what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves”—not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who can never be pinned down to a determinate form. In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity.4 It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”; what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew.5 What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?

One of the supreme ironies of the history of anti-Semitism is that Jews can stand for both poles of an opposition: they are stigmatized as upper class (rich merchants) and low class (filthy), as too intellectual and too earthly (sexual predators), as lazy and workaholics. Sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in; sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and uprooted universal cosmopolitanism, indifferent towards all particular ethnic form. The focus changes with different historical epochs. In the era of the French Revolution, the Jews were condemned as too particularist, as they continued to stick to their identity, rejecting the need to become abstract citizens like everyone else. In late nineteenth century, with the rise of imperialist patriotism, the accusation is turned around, and Jews become all too “cosmopolitan” lacking all roots.

The key change in the history of Western anti-Semitism occurred with their political emancipation (the granting of civil rights), which followed the French Revolution. In the early modernity, the pressure on them was to convert to Christianity, and the problem was: Can one trust them? Did they really convert, or do they secretly continue to practice their rituals? However, in the later nineteenth century, a shift occurs which culminates in the Nazi anti-Semitism. Conversion is now out of the question, meaningless. Why? For the Nazis, the guilt of the Jews is directly rooted in their biological constitution. One does not have to prove that they are guilty, as they are guilty solely by being Jews. The question remains: Why?

The key is provided by the sudden rise, in the Western ideological imaginary, of the figure of the wandering eternal Jew in the age of Romanticism, i.e., precisely when, in real life, with the explosion of capitalism, features attributed to Jews expanded to the whole of society (since commodity exchange became hegemonic). It was thus at the very moment when Jews were deprived of their specific properties, which made it easy to distinguish them from the rest of the population, and when the “Jewish question” was “resolved” at the political level by the formal emancipation of the Jews (i.e. by granting to Jews the same rights as to all other “normal” Christian citizens) that their “curse” was inscribed into their very being. They were no longer ridiculous misers and usurers but demoniac heroes of eternal damnation, haunted by an unspecified and unspeakable guilt, condemned to wander around, and longing to find redemption in death. So it was precisely when the specific figure of the Jew disappeared that the absolute Jew emerged, and this transformation conditioned the shift of anti-Semitism from theology to race. Their damnation was their race; they were not guilty for what they did (exploit Christians, murder their children, rape their women, or, ultimately, betray and murder Christ), but for what they were. Is it necessary to add that this shift laid the foundations for the Holocaust, for the physical annihilation of the Jews as the only appropriate final solution of their “problem”? Insofar as Jews were identified by a series of their properties, the goal was to convert them, to turn them into Christians, but, from the moment that Jewishness concerns their very being, only annihilation can resolve the “Jewish question.”

The true mystery of anti-Semitism, however, is why it is such a constant. Why does it persist through all historical mutations? Perhaps this is somewhat similar to what Marx said about Homer: the true mystery to be explained is not its origins, its original form (how Homer’s poetry is rooted in early Greek society) but why it persists in its supreme artistic charm today, long after the social conditions that gave birth to it disappeared. It is easy to date the original moment of European anti-Semitism. It all started not in Ancient Rome but in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, which was awakening from the inertia of the “Dark Ages” and experiencing a fast growth in market exchange and the greater prominence of money. At that precise point, “the Jew” emerged as the enemy: the usurper, the parasitic intruder who disturbs the harmonious social edifice. Theologically, this moment is also the moment of what Jacques le Goff called the “birth of the Purgatorium,” the idea that the choice is not only between Heaven and Hell but that there has to be a third, mediating, place, where one can make a deal, pay for one’s sins (if they are not too great) with a determined amount of repentance—money again!

So where are we today? Asked about his anti-Semitism, the Croat nationalist rock- singer Marko Perkovic Thompson said in an interview: “I have nothing against them and I did nothing to them. I know that Jesus Christ also did nothing against them, but still they hanged him on the cross.” This is how anti-Semitism works today: it is not we who have anything against the Jews; rather, it is how the Jews themselves are. On top of it all, we are witnessing the final version of anti-Semitism, which reached the extreme point of self-relatedness. The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power. Theirs is the position of the “part of no-part” in every organic nation-state community, and it is this position, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, that makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this State, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, to live in their interstices. And it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” the foreign excess disturbing the community of the nation-state. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.

This brings us to the political stakes and consequences of Zionist anti-Semitism. On August 2, 2009, after cordoning off a part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes and allowed Jewish settlers to move immediately into the empty houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event, which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media, is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process. Five months earlier, on March 1, 2009, it was reported6 that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. If implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000—a move that would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians. A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of limited relevance: the actual construction of new homes in the settlements required the approval of the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister. However, 15,000 of the planned units have already been fully approved, with an additional 20,000 of the planned units lying in settlements that are far from the ”green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank, i.e., in the areas Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians. The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground which will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The dream that underlies this politics is best rendered by the wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby hill somewhere in the West Bank. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall, but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass, trees and so on. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be, namely empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

This process is sometimes covered in the guise of cultural gentrification. On October 28, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center could build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity, the Museum of Tolerance, on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. (Who but) Frank Gehry will design the vast complex consisting of a general museum, a children’s museum, a theater, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls, cafeterias, etc. The museum’s declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and among people of all faiths—the only obstacle (overrun by the Supreme Court’s ruling) being that the museum site served as Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948 (the Muslim community appealed to the Supreme Court that museum construction would desecrate the cemetery, which allegedly contained the bones of Muslims killed during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).7 This dark spot wonderfully enacts the hidden truth of this multi-confes­sional project: it is a place celebrating tolerance, open to all, but protected by the Israeli cupola, which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance, as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for true tolerance.

And as if this were not enough, as if one should repeat a gesture to make its message clear, there is another, even vaster, similar project going on in Jerusalem. Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multi-year development plan in the so-called “holy basin,” the place of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City, as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital. “The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny.”8 As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history. Conveniently, many of the “unauthorized” Palestinian houses had to be demolished to create the space for the redevelopment of the area.

The “holy basin” is an infinitely complicated landscape, dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone’s benefit—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest that has long suffered neglect. However, as Hagit Ofran of Peace Now noted, the plan aimed to create “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” Raphael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University put it even more bluntly: “The sanctity of the City of David is newly manufactured and is a crude amalgam of history, nationalism and quasi-religious pilgrimage … the past is used to disenfranchise and displace people in the present.” Another big religious venue, a “public” inter-faith space under the clear domination and protective cupola of Israel.

What does all this mean? To get at the true dimension of the news, it is sometimes enough to read two disparate news items together. Meaning emerges from their very link, like a spark, exploding from an electric short-circuit. On October 13, 2007, the Vatican’s press representative Federico Lombardi confirmed that the Vatican had suspended a priest occupying a high place in Vatican hierarchy who, in an interview for Italian TV, publicly admitted his homosexuality, insisting that he doesn’t feel in any sense guilty for practicing homosexuality. He was suspended because he broke the Church law. The obscenity of this message becomes clear the moment one juxtaposes it with the fact that hundreds of pedophiliac priests are not suspended, but a priest is suspended if he publicly admits his orientation. The message is unmistakable here: what matters is appearance, not reality.

On the very same day these reports hit the media (March 2), Hilary Clinton criticized the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical,” claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly by while land in the West Bank is taken from them day by day? When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, etc., one should ask a simple question: What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e. when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)? What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank, the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop burning and religious desecration up to individual killings)—all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regula­tions. Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation,9 described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers, and other permits. It is this micro-management of daily life that does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion. One has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.10 Palestinians often use the problematic cliche of the Gaza Strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world”; however, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality which makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we can only accept that fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already resembles a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks by illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the State of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of some settle­ments, etc.); but, as many observers noted, these measures cannot but appear half-hearted, counteracting a politics which, at a deeper level, is the long-term politics of the State of Israel which massively violates the international treaties signed by Israel itself. The reply of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities is basically: we are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us? And the answer of the State is basically: be patient, don’t rush too much, we are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way.

The same story seems to go on from 1948: while Israel accepts the peace condi­tions proposed by the international community, it bets that the peace plan will not work. The wild settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the last act of Wagner’s Walkuere, reproaching Wotan that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realizing Wotan’s own true desire which he was forced to renounce under external pressure, in the same way that the illegal settlers only realize the State’s true desire it was forced to renounce because of the pressure of the international community. While condemning the open violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements, continues to strangle the Palestinian economy, etc. A look at the continuous changes of the map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all. The condemnation of extra-statist anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of “illegal” settlements obfuscates the illegality of the “legal” ones. Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased “honesty” of the Israeli Supreme Court. By way of occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Consequently, in the Israel-Palestinian conflict also, soyons realistes, demandons Vimpossible! If there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted negotia­tions, it is that the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution, i.e. the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really wants it (Israel would probably prefer a little bit of West Bank that it is ready to cede to become a part of Jordan, and the Palestinians consider also the pre-1967 Israel as a part of their land), it is somehow accepted by both sides as the only feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution—a bi-national secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. To those who dismiss the bi-national state as a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence, one should reply that, far from being utopian, the bi-national state already is a fact. The reality of today’s Israel and West Bank is that it is one state (i.e. the entire territory is de facto controlled by one sovereign power, the State of Israel), divided by internal borders, so that the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform it into a secular democratic state.11

Furthermore, this entire topic is to be seen against the background of a long-term rearrangement of the political space in Western and Eastern Europe. Until recently, the political space of European countries was dominated by two main parties that addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-center party (Christian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, the people’s party) and a Left-of-center party (socialist, social- democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrower electorate (ecologists, communists, and so on). The latest electoral results in the West as well as in the East signal the gradual emergence of a different polarity. There is one predominant centerist party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with a liberal cultural agenda, including tolerance towards abortions, gay rights, and religious and ethnic minorities. Opposing this party is an increasingly stronger anti-immigrant populist party, which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neofascist groups. The exemplary case here is Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centerist liberal party of the Prime Minister Donald Dusk and the conservative Christian party of the Kaczynski brothers. Similar tendencies are discernible in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Hungary. How did we come to this?

After decades of the (promise of) a welfare state, when financial cuts were limited to short periods and sustained by a promise that things would soon return to normal, we are entering a new epoch in which the crisis—or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency—with the need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, dimin­ishing free health and education services, making jobs more and more temporary, etc.) is permanent, turning into a constant, becoming simply a way of life. After the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1990, we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear—fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), fear of ecological catastrophe, but also fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear). Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos, the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was that anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected them to far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now found it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society: “it is our country, love it or leave it.”

Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. But a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of (ethnic, religious, sexual) differences share with the anti-immigration advocates the need to keep others at a proper distance. The others are OK, I respect them, but they should not intrude too much into my own space. The moment they do it, they harass me with their smell, their dirty talk, their vulgar manners, their music, their cuisine, and so on. I fully support affirmative action for the blacks, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music. What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs in Guantanamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred; a parent, teacher, or priest who abuses and corrupts children—all these are toxic subjects who disturb my peace.

In today’s market we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) and warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, or politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife-beating remain out of sight?

The mechanism of such neutralization was best formulated back in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French fascist intellectual condemned and shot in 1945, who saw himself as a “moderate” anti-Semite and invented the formula of “reasonable anti-Semitism”:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti­Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism.12

Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the “immigrant threat”? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unrea­sonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures, or, as today’s Brasillachs, some of them even Social Democrats, are telling us:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection.

This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. It practices the regression from the Christian love of the Neighbor back to the pagan privileging of our tribe (Greeks, Romans, etc.) versus the barbarian Other. Even if it is cloaked as a defense of Christian values, it is itself the greatest threat to Christian legacy.

Notes

1 Editorial on “Norway’s Challenge,” July 24, 2011.

2 Another figure in this series of anti-Semitic Zionists is John Hagee, the founder and National Chairman of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel. At the top of the standard Christian conservative agenda (Hagee sees the Kyoto Protocol as a conspiracy aimed at manipulating the US economy; in his bestselling novel Jerusalem Countdown, the Antichrist is the head of the European Union), Hagee has been to Israel 22 times and has met with every prime minister since Begin. However, despite his professed “Christian Zionist” beliefs and public support for the State of Israel, Hagee has made statements that definitely sound anti-Semitic: he has blamed the Holocaust on the Jews themselves; he has stated that Hitler’s persecution was a “divine plan” to lead the Jews to form the modern state of Israel; he calls liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind”; he admits that a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran that he favors will lead to the deaths of most Jews in Israel. (As a curiosity, he claims in Jerusalem Countdown that Hitler was born from “a lineage of accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.”)

3 A. B. Yehoshua, “An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism,” Azure no. 32 (spring 2008), available online at http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=18 [date accessed August 7, 2013].

4 A taboo question should be raised: what does the fixation of Arab countries and worldwide Muslim communities on the State of Israel mean? It cannot be accounted for in terms of the real threat to the Arab nation (after all, Israel occupies a tiny piece of land), so its role is obviously symptomatic. When regimes as different as the utterly corrupt Saudi monarchy and the anti-establishment populist movement focus on the same enemy, an external intruder, does this not bear witness to a strategy of avoiding the true internal antagonism?

5 I am here, of course, paraphrasing Lacan’s famous statement: “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture.”

6 See Tobias Duck, “Israel Drafts West Bank Expansion Plans,” Financial Times, March 2, 2009.

7 See Tom Tugend, “Israel’s Supreme Court OKs Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem Project,” Observer, October 29, 2008.

8 See Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner, “Parks Fortify Israel’s Claim to Jerusalem,” New York Times, May 9, 2009.

9 See Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: Norton, 2008).

10 We witnessed a similar oppression without (too much) open brutality in post-1968 Czechoslovakia. In his dissident classic Normalization, Milan Simecka described how, after 1968, the hardline communists enforced the “normalization” of the Czech population, their awakening from the dream of 1968 to crude socialist reality. There was little direct brutal pressure, since most of the job was done through the gentle art of low-level everyday corruption and blackmail, in the style of: “You want your children to go to university? Then just sign a statement which will not even be published, saying that you were seduced in participating in 1968 events and that you now see it was a mistake.” Is not something similar going on in our late capitalist liberal societies, where there is no open brutal pressure, just small everyday clear signals that it is better for your career not to overstep certain limits? There is nonetheless a key difference between late socialist corruption and our late capitalist corruption, a difference which concerns the status of appearance. What mattered in socialist regimes was maintaining the appearance—just recall the (deservedly) famous example of the vegetable store seller from Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless,” who obediently displays in the window of his store official propaganda slogans, although neither he nor his customers take them seriously. What matters is the gesture of obedience. In liberal capitalism, however, not only does nobody care (within certain limits, of course) what slogans one puts in the window, but also provocative ones are welcomed, if they help the sales. The market is the greatest ironizer. Recall how big companies sometimes use for publicity purposes ironic paraphrases of communist topics. One cannot imagine the authorities in state socialism doing the same with capitalist topics.

11 I owe this line of thought to Udi Aloni.

12 See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 48.

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Anti-Semitism and its Transformations’