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Despite Plato: A Question of "Rewriting"

“Despite” - a reading of Plato by Adriana Cavarero, notably In Spite of Plato: A Feminist rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, Polity Press, 1995 (1990). I am perhaps not the first to notice, but interestingly the Italian original title does not inform anything of the “rewriting” ascribed in the English translation. The original reads Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofia antica, which, as I understand it, simply promises to treat “feminine figures in antique philosophy” – those eventually “despite” (nonostante) Plato. The emphasis of the English transliteration on “rewriting” almost suggests a project similar to and intolerable as the Stalinist rewriting of history. (Cf. Amy Knight, ‘Beria and the Cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian Party History’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, 1991, pp. 749-763.) As Derrida writes, Western philosophy is phallogocentric (Cf. Derrida, La dissemination). The Socratic dilemma of philosophy’s written or spoken for example in the Pheadrus 274a-276b implies, in my view, that “rewriting”, feminist or any other, is still a phallogocentric activity. "Rewriting" reassures the writing it opposes since any writing is phallogocentric. I doubt however that the nonostante of Cavarero entangles any “rewriting” but certainly a feminist reading of ancient philosophy. 

On the Writer

The written as a source of  thinking is mistaken to represent the writer who is known only as a figure of a writer. Do we really know Plato or Derrida, indeed any writer? With all the footnotes and (anti)theses philosophers engage in “dialogue“ with the writer, the person of the writer becomes repressed by the text – there is no-one outside the text, we may say with Derrida (il n’y a pas de hors-texte, “there is nothing outside text”; Cf. Derrida, On Grammatology) Simultaneously, the writer is represented as a spirit or a spectre, or psychoanalytically speaking as an imago of the real person. Albeit the real person of the writer is there, outside the text, but as the writer the person of the writer is repressed by the metonymy of language which structures (and dictates) the text; repressed in the literal sense of being reissued and repressed in psychoanalytical sense of being “forgotten”. Hence the writer whom we suppose to know as we read the text basically underlies the text as a writing subject who is supposed to know. As we are now embarking on Lacan’s concept of the “subject supposed to know” (sujet supposé savoir), that is, the unconscious subject, we may perhaps consider the real person of the writer as the unconscious subject of the text –– a real person who as any other is unconscious and writes his or her desire. (On reading/writing and desire cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against Historicists) Unnoticed in the writing of the other the writer is also an unconscious sub-text of that other, drifting metonymically aloft the meaning. Unceasingly, or to say with Lacan: it will never stop being written. Perhaps as there is nothing outside the text it needs to be filled with the text, which often outlives the writer. Therefore the writer is a tool of writing.  

On the Figure of the Father in We Love Africa (and Africa loves us), a performance by Markus Öhrn, Institutet and Nya Rampen

The beginning. Nothing. Nothing is happening. The discomfort of nothing happening. Das Unbehagen. A consequence of the family life domesticated by conformism and consumerism. Idiotic home-masks gaze at us, masks unlike those unhomely ones brought from Africa we hang on the walls as a promise of discovery of magical Africa. However, we recognize the mother and three sons seated in the sofa gaping at us from the screen as we gaze at them. Indeed a gaze turned back, the primal state of things, of the audience seated waiting for the thing to happen on the stage whereas nothing is happening but a projection of nothing happening. We hope for something, for love perhaps, as we deny the Unbehagen starring at us. Yet, we are here for We Love Africa. Fortunately, the Chance is there for the Father to engage in the humanitarian restoration of Africa. We want to help. We Love Africa. We want Africa to love us. So this is a story of love, as “every story is a love story”. The idea is explored previously by the trio Öhrn, Institutet and Nya Rampen in internationally acclaimed Conte d'amour, a love story inspired by the loving father, Josef Fritzl. Is then the story of Africa not a love story too? A story of love, as any other. And of the post-colonial condition of the West. Or is it a demand, that Africa “loves us” just because we love Africa?

The story unfurls on the staged projection in front of us. Then, reawakened and engaged in dread and ecstasy of destruction and cruel deaths, the stupid tranquility of the family boredom is suddenly confronted by orgasmic blood streams pouring over dead decomposing bodies of Africa. In the basement. Orchestrated by the Father. We (who love Africa) are equally involved in the orgies of merciless scene, as we watch in tele-vision, here as well as real. The conformism of discomfort, the exposition of returned gaze in a circle of tired life, lobotomy and authentic life.

The invention of family is perhaps overlapping with the emergence of the unconscious instantiated in human existence indeed as an “eccentric place“ as Jacques Lacan calls it. This was the case, perhaps by the event of the emergence of consciousness, to be obscured at the dawn by language; an event possibly emerged when the ape hit the Other-Ape with a bone. We have it pictured in the unforgettable and ridiculously sublime intro of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or to put it with Hegel: the Self-consciousness of the Spirit is a bone, and/or not a bone but the Self-conscious Spirit.... Nevertheless, it was Sigmund Freud who famously scandalized the good old idea of family supposed to stand firm on the ultimate ground of bourgeois values. No, family was founded on aggressivity, from Totem and Taboo to Civilisation and Its Discontents. More precisely, the family institution was built upon the murder of the primordial Ape which subsequently became the Father. And we learned to talk. Every utterance therefore conceals the truth which eventually becomes unspeakable, or as Lacan points out, the truth can only be half-said. This is why we say “so to say”. There is a fundamental displacement between the truth and the speech. The truth is the event, perishing in time before and after, to paraphrase Alan Badiou. Hence, speech is a symptom of the primal repression of the real and the forever repressed truth. Or, more precisely, of the mythical beginning (un)known to us as the cause of the prohibition of incest.

Not that we became conscious of incest as we know today that it is wrong. But, as the Freudian myth goes, because every single one of the horde belonged to the Ape who eventually became the Father. What once was owned by the Ape is now forever the function of the Father: to guard the Ape's natural right. The institution of the prohibition is then build upon the murder of the primordial Ape who is to be sublated to the function of the Father, whereas also the structure of family relations and kinship are established, on repression as it were. The Ape's was thus natural right to exercise his power in capacity of his unconditional will, animated by aggression and sex drive. The family constitution build upon the murder of the Father is of course a Freudian myth. And the myth, we learn from Claude Levi-Strauss, is precisely something which gives an idea of underlying structure although the structure itself is repressed and unconscious. Impossible to know, the myth of the primordial dead Father however animates the family on the deepest and therefore precisely repressed truth-level of its function: as a discomfort in the culture (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur). And this is what the Father of the We Love Africa learn: to revive the strength of his muscles and erection. Like the Hippies who now and then travel to India or Tibet for spiritual or sexual arousal. The Father of We Love Africa learn over-there, in Africa of his perverse fantasy, how to identify with the primordial strength of the Ape. He, as a  Father, is merely a castrated Ape. What then the Father does not know (or he knows, to put it with Octave Mannoni, but still he pretend as if not...), there is no return other than the unconscious return of the repressed: Africa as an image of Father's failure and impotence to sustain his status as a head of the family and as a white male master of the Dark Continent (women and Africans). 

According to a popular scientific idea, the Ape, who is to be the Father of civilisation and culture, originates in Africa. This is not important as the very projection of Africa in We Love Africa signifies the castrated post-colonial Father, although it may be a racist assumption to instance the Ape in Africa as the “real” progress supposedly begins with the ancient Greece.... Nevertheless, in WLA, there is a dialectics of exploitation and loving care. The West demands humanitarianism as the Father's demand breeds the terror upon his own family. For example, the Father-figure of Josef Fritzl, explored in Conte d'amour of which the Father of We Love Africa is a conceptual continuation, is not an exceptionally pathetic figure as he signifies a post-colonial condition of Western culture and civilisation today, of which the attempts to conceal the impotence are not only pathetic but frustrated, as we may conclude watching the war on terrorism. (The West has lost the battle without fighting even and the real question is what do we do now. Lying in the dust of the ruins of the past world dominion with the face in the sand we perhaps indeed become illuminated alas with our pants down, by the wisdom of love....)

As the internationally acclaimed production of Conte d'amour before, now also We Love Africa of Öhrn, Institutet and Nya Rampen successfully fails to represent the subject of Fritzl and Africa, as it effectively unearths the more important underlying truth: of the function of the Father. The Conte d'amour does not tell the actual story of Fritzl and his debased family. But the performance exposes the discomfort which reminds us, unpleasantly of course, of the very repressed of the family structure: of the family's aggressive foundation of society, as the Oedipal conflicts and Father's violent demand for love indicates. With We Love Africa love is at stake again. The story of impossible love. Ultimately, “Africa loves us” is about love on demand. In media, Africa is pictured as a body in need of Western love and care. We Love Africa initiates an exploration of Western universalism (which is closely related to Christianity if we read Badiou on Paul); the universalism disguised in humanitarian initiatives. But we know also that the West is in no position to play wolves in sheep clothing.... We Love Africa thus illuminates consequences of love and care for Africa, as Western humanitarian universalism basically declares numerous countries and nations of Africa univocally incapable of any progressive action.

Finally, the hunch: the Father must acknowledge his castration: that he is not in position to demand love. The Lacanian formula of love is to give what one does not have. In We Love Africa, as in Conte d'amour, the Father believes precisely the opposite, that love is to give and demand in return. This ultimately puts family relations in discomfort of reproduction of a père-version of love. Love on demand of the Father, or: pure terror.

www.institutet.eu

www.nyarampen.fi

www.markusohrn.org

Breivik med Levinas genom Derrida: om narcissism, våld och metafysik

Vore det långsökt att tolka Breiviks first shooter Weltanschauung som ett uttryck av narcissism? Hans våldshandling är sannerligen ett manifest mer än hans kompendium av avskrifter på mer än tusen sidor från olika nationalistiska och fundamentalistiska historietolkningar. Texter längre än en sida eller tio till tolv teser är inte manifest men tomma tal. Breivik betecknar ändå ett kulturellt tillstånd idag: en identitetspolitik grundad i narcissismens frustrerade förintelse av alteritet, differens och pluralism. Detta delar han kanske vid närmare efterblick och kanske föga förvånande med Solanas Scummanifestet som föredrar ett våldsgrepp om hatobjektet (mannen), liksom muslimen är det för Breivik. Är inte därför ett nyvunnet vurm för Scummanifestet i linje med den cynism och legitim ignorans som konformismen bjuder på: att konsumera våldsfantasier mot den andre (muslimen, kvinnan, mannen) men att fördöma våld som handling. Alternativet är att ta till våld. Och ännu ett alternativ: att inte ta till våld.

Narcissismen handlar om att spegla sig. Breivik speglar sig i en personlig myt. Hans pseudoariska självporträtt frodas genom uppmärksamhet i medier och ger näring åt denna spegling. Att den psykiatriska undersökningen inte fann Breivik mentalt instabil är inte konstigt. I facebooksamhället hör narcissismen till vardagslivets psykopatologi. Vi kan tala om kommunikationens reducering till ett ”utbyte av nyheter” idag, vilket redan Heidegger anmärker i Till tänkandets sak/Zur sache des denkens. Eller, ”nyheter” i form av statusuppdateringar och gillaträffar och motsvarande, som inte syftar till kommunikation men upprätthåller en självändamålsenlig, alltså narcissistisk, dynamik och ekonomi i form av konkurrens mellan ”vänner” om graden av synlighet i medier. Har inte Breivik förskjutit det virtuella rummet för representation och extension av identiteter till den fundamentala synligheten i det mest reala, har inte han verkligen skjutit sin väg ut i verkligheten?

Narcissismen är ändå ingenting som bör ”botas”. Men samhällsinteraktionen bör definitivt inte grundas i narcissismen, som i en minimal mening är en själviskhet, vilket i sin tur inte heller skall förväxlas med egoismen. Analyser av nya kommunikationsstrategier i vardagen och hur dessa påverkar individen kognitivt och psykosocialt vore högst önskvärda. Utmaningen ligger i att utforska vem var och en av oss är inför en annan, hur nära eller långt ifrån jag vill eller inte vill vara, till och med, och ifrån den andre. Ett steg ditåt är att beakta Levinas etiksyn i Totality and Infinity/Totalité et infini tillsammans med Derridas kritik av denna etik i termer av våld och metafysik i Writing and Difference/L'écriture et la différence.

Det kanske kan sägas att Breiviks handlingar är totalitära. Och att hans perspektiv också kan tolkas som ett oändlighetsperspektiv vari han installerar sig själv som en storhet: den Andre. Oändlighetens tillrop driver Breivik mot en självets metafysisk som genomförs med våld. Det rör sig kanske om en metafysik-etik av det narcissistiska, absoluta och omöjliga jaget i motsats till en etik som värnar om den andres bräcklighet, grundad i Lagen som lyder ”Du skall icke döda”.

Fly or Buy: Critique of Ideology in the Age of Technological Reason

The crisis of thinking announced by Husserl and Heidegger is seriously now enclosing into a technological determination of being. Nobody cares about critique of ideology as conformism actually manage to enhance our lives by way of technology. It may be stupid to desire an iphone or to engage in a campaign to make people “like” one's facebook profile. However, nobody considers this as a problem. Even "revolutions" are coordinated via facebook today. The conformism offered by technology may be stupid. But it is also advanced. Of course flying a spaceship or spending your money on flashy apps suggests that there are still two sides of the coin. And the throw of dice possibly still does not abolish the chance....

Artscenetrondheim on WOMAN

WOMAN of Institutet at Bastardfestival, Reactions from Artscenetrondheim:

http://www.trondheimkunsthall.com/news/Gender_Tales