From the second essay, titled ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.’ I like what he has to say about disintegration (that is, dis-integration, becoming un-whole), and his inklings about the police state and the two-party system ought to receive notice. His notion of numericality is relevant to my essay on Oppen: there, for sure, was a poet obsessed with aloneness and singular multiples. His book, Of Being Numerous, might well be worth a comic reading…
That which, generally speaking, should be the content of this little exploration will not be so much the relation between the tragic in ancient and in modern drama as it will be an attempt to show how the characteristic feature of the tragic in ancient drama is incorporated in the tragic in modern drama in such a way that what is truly tragic will become apparent. But however much I shall try to make it apparent, I shall abstain from any prophecy that this is what the times demand; therefore its becoming apparent will be devoid of consequence, and all the more so since the whole age is working toward the comic.
To a degree, existence is undermined by the subjects’ doubt; isolation continually gains the upper hand more and more, something that can best be ascertained by paying attention to the multifarious social endeavors. That they seek to counteract the isolating effects of the age is just as much a demonstration of the isolation as is the unreasonable way they seek to counteract it. Isolation always consists in asserting oneself as number; when one wants to assert oneself as one, this is isolation; all the friends of associations will surely agree with me on that, without therefore being able or willing to see that it is altogether the same isolation when a hundred assert themselves simply and solely as a hundred. Number is always indifferent to itself, and it makes absolutely no difference whether it is 1 or 1,000, or all the inhabitants of the world defined merely numerically. In principle, then, this association-mentality is just as revolutionary as the mentality it wants to counteract. When David really wanted to feel his power and glory, he had his people counted; in our age, however, it may be said that the people, in order to feel their significance over against a superior power, count themselves. But all these associations bear the stamp of arbitrariness and most often are formed for some accidental purpose, whose lord and master, of course, is the association.
These numerous associations, therefore, demonstrate the disintegration of the age and themselves contribute to speeding it up; they are the infusiora in the organism of the state that indicate that it has disintegrated. When was it that the hetairias [Men’s clubs] became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed; do not our statesmen and clergymen have this in common, that they, like the augurs of old, cannot look at one another without smiling [a sign that they know how laughable their business is]?
A feature in which our age certaily excels that age in Greece is that our age is more depressed and therefore deeper in despair. Thus, our age is sufficiently depressed to know that there is something called responsibility and that this means something. Therefore, although everyone wants to rule, no one wants to have responsibility. It is still fresh in our memory that a French statesman, when offered a portfolio the second time, declared that he would accept it but on the condition that the secretary of state be made responsible. It is well known that the king in France is not responsible, but the prime minister is; the prime minister does not wish to be responsible but wants to be prime minister provided that the secretary of state will be responsible; ultimately it ends, of course, with the watchmen or street commissioners becoming responsible. Would not this inverted story of responsibility be an appropriate subject for Aristophanes! On the other hand, why are the government and governors so afraid of assuming responsibility, unless it is because they fear an opposition party that in turn continually pushes away responsibility on a similar scale. When one imagines these two powers face to face with each other but unable to catch hold of each other because the one is always disappearing and is replaced by the other, the one merely appearing in the role of the other– such a situation would certainly not be without comic power.
This indeed shows adequately that what really holds the state together has disintegrated, but the isolation resulting from this is naturally comic, and the comic consists in subjectivity’s wanting to assert itself as pure form. Every isolated person always becomes comic by wanting to assert his accidentality over against the necessity of the process. No doubt it would be profoundly comic to have an accidental individual hit upon the universal idea of wanting to be the world’s liberator…
Far too many questions left here. For instance: What revolutionary mentality does the equally revolutionary ‘association-mentality’ seek to counteract? What is the ’superior power’ against which the self-accounting people fight? What bond ‘in the political sense’ once held states together? How does one come to see isolation as comical, and is this vantage point an advantageous one? I myself like the passage’s last sentence, since it rather well describes the character I’ve been busy figuring out how to create.
Another little bit for Jed, from Nietzsche’s ‘The Anti-Christ’:
A law-book never tells of the utility of a law, of the reason for it, of the casuistry which preceded it: for in that way it would lose the imperative tone, the ‘thou shalt’, the precondition of being obeyed. The problem lies precisely in this. — At a certain point in the evolution of a people its most enlightened, that is to say most reflective and far-sighted, class declared the experience in accordance with which the people is to live — that is, can live — to be fixed and settled. Their objective is to bring home the richest and completest harvest from the ages of experimentation and bad experience. What, consequently, is prevented above all is the continuation of experimenting, the perpetuation in infinitum of the fluid condition of values, tests, choices, criticizing of values. A two-fold wall is erected against this: firstly revelation, that is the assertion that the reason for these laws is not of human origin, was not sought and found slowly and with many blunders, but, being of divine origin, is whole, perfect, without history, a gift, a miracle, merely communicated…. Then tradition, that is, the assertion that the law has already existed from time immemorial, that it is impious, a crime against the ancestors, to call it in question. The authority of the law is established by the thesis: God gave it, the ancestors lived it. — The higher rationale of such a procedure lies in the intention of gradually making the way of life recognized as correct (that is demonstrated by a tremendous amount of finely-sifted experience) unconscious: so that a complete automatism of instinct is achieved — the precondition for any kind of mastery, any kind of perfection in the art of living. To that end the law must be made unconscious: this is the purpose of every holy lie.
July 1st, 2007 | #
“be made unconscious.” This is the part that must be examined, because what N. is saying is that at some point the law leaves the realm of barbaric signification and enters us on an unconscious (prelinguistic?) level. I’d be interested if you know if Nietzsche talks about this anywhere else–it’s at the heart of D & G’s project, and therefore at the center of mine.
Just saw Sicko, the new Michael Moore movie, and it made me think about just this. In countries with universal health care, the population assumes or takes for granted that health care will be provided, almost to the point of unconciousness. And the opposite in America. But it’s in America that it defies the class interest of the people–why do people desire their own repression? It’s supposedly the main question that Deluze answers, but I haven’t gotten any answers yet, only more specific ways of envisioning the question.
July 4th, 2007 | #
That ‘unconscious’ line was what caught me too. The truth is, Deleuze (and Foucault) pick up on this sort of thing in Nietzsche, but I don’t think it’s something he talks about a lot, at least not in the way they do. I definitely don’t often see him using the word ‘unconscious.’ One thing that ought to be interesting to you is the whole idea of a herd mentality. It’s basically the same idea as ‘desiring the repression of one’s desires’ — one submits to the state, one wishes to be told what to do by everyone else. I’ll visit you in Prov sometime soon, and I’ll bring my Nietzsche books and we can look for good stuff. And you’re right, I don’t think Deleuze precisely answers the question. Nietzsche does, in his way, much more directly; but quoting him is working through an indirect medium, because his enemy is Christianity more than capitalism. Perhaps something you ought to think about is how liberalism has sublimated parts of Christianity into its unconscious ethos. Think about it, if you have a chance, before you read Nietzsche, because once you read him — he has very compelling arguments –, it’s difficult to remember how you thought about christianity before you’d read him.
July 5th, 2007 | #
I just found something interesting in anti-oedipus (pg 337) that adds something to this (this being the desire for the repression of desires). It’s the third time I’ve read over this section, and I missed it until now. Maybe this won’t make sense; i’ve been pretty immersed in deluze’s universe for weeks now
Capitalism works by decoding flows. Instead of a code, capitalism has an axiomatic that collapses large “objectivities” (maybe I’m wrong to connect that to imperialist or paranoiac codes, but I do) into a subjective essence: abstract labor alienated from property and abstract desire alienated in the family. But the interesting thing happens when Death (a large objectivity) undergoes this process: it ceases to be a Thing, an objective reality, and becomes an instinct (so Freud’s Death Instinct is now seen as a product of capitalism, which makes some sense because the death instinct was always the only politicized part of Freud). Now to quote:
The death instinct “lays hold of the repressive apparatus and begins to direct the circulation of the libido. A mortuary axiomatic. One might then believe in liberated desires, but ones that, like cadavers, feed on images. Death is not desired, but what is desired is dead: Images.”
I like this because it connects the desire for political repression with the much-studied aesthetic of the Image in capitalism. the advent of photography, then film, etc.
July 7th, 2007 | #
I don’t get it.
Wait, I read the paragraph in the book and I get it better now. But can you give me a bunch of examples of Images of death? Hasn’t there been death worship in every culture? Is it not much older than Capitalism? Is Deleuze talking about modern-day goths and metal fans? I’ve never understood Deleuze on the death instinct.
Take this for example, pp 62-3:
“It became evident that group fantasy was inseparable from the “symbolic” articulations that define a social field insofar as it is real, whereas the individual fantasy fitted the whole of this field over “imaginary” givens. If this first distinction is drawn out, we see that the individual fantasy is itself plugged into the existing social field, but apprehends it in the form of imaginary qualities that confer on it a kind of transcendence or immortality under the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo destiny: what does it matter if I die, says the general, since the Army is immortal? The imaginary dimension of the individual fantasy has a decisive importance over the death instinct, insofar as the immortality conferred on the existing social phenomena of identification, of “superegoization” and castration, all the resignation-desires (becoming a general; acquiring low, middle, or high rank), including the resignation to dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive itself is projected on to the outside and turned against the others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our own ranks!). The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion– at leas the formal criterion– that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States– which of all these dogs wants to die?”
July 7th, 2007 | #
It’s that section that I understood less–all the psychoanalysis and familialism stuff I sort of skimmed because it doesn’t have that much to do with my project (I hope). But in rereading it, it seems to me that he’s saying in your passage that a reactionary-type disposition is comforted about his own death in the knowledge that the instititution he exists in is immortal, whereas the revolutionary seeks the mortality of institutions. The reactionary group fantasy depends on a vision of group immortality, the revolutionary on mortality. I don’t know why he didn’t just say it simple.
The passage I cited is definatly breif enough to leave a lot of room for interpretation about what a death-image is. In the little construct I’ve built for myself, it is all images. All images are dead objects that replace some sort of living (flowing?) reality. They are segments broken off from flows by machines like cameras. The death instinct does not make us desire death, rather it superimposes death onto our desires so that we desire images. What think you?
July 9th, 2007 | #
But keep that stuff on the polticial uses of group fantasy in mind when you read about Pirate Prentice near the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m pretty excited for you to read it.
July 9th, 2007 | #
shit, I just had a post and lost it. that always happens. it was something to the effect of:
wow, that’s great. i understand this stuff a lot better now, and i see that deleuze has something different in mind when he says death drive; i like mortality, and i think people should be more morbid, but what he’s getting at is the human tendency towards staticisity, and how we should learn to think with more electricity, elasticity, hylean robust (hyle=flow in greek, from the philosophy of Heraclitus, who says you cannot stand in the same river twice, meaning that’s how reality is; he was Nietzsche’s hero, and Deleuze’s by default). my idea of the death drive is that people should have more of a will to death, and maybe that’s what is meant by the revolutionary fantasy of institutional mortality. the immortality/mortality problem is locked up with that of the One/Multiple(/multiplicities). How can we look at the world in such a way that we hold fewer illusions about our mortality and the mortality of that around us? This is what Heidegger calls ‘authentic being-towards-death’…
July 9th, 2007 | #
Sorry for too many posts and too many spoilers from GR, but here’s a passage from GR on death: (176)
“…but only the shell–with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government–a process by which livng souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence of Westernm magic as the Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead…It is alsow hat the present dispensation oftend oes to decent mena dn women entirely on this side of the grave. In neither process is there any mercy. Mothers and farterhs are conditionsed into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War–leaving their children alone in the forest. They’ll allways tell you fathers are ‘taken’ but fathers only leave, that’s all it is.”
this novel just nails it, every time.
by the by, it might be preferable to find a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow with 760 pages because then you’d have the standard pagination. The new edition from Random House has a cool cover and fancy pages, though, that might be good too.
July 9th, 2007 | #
Cool, I’m excited to get it.
July 9th, 2007 | #