v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Arguments convince nobody

1976 Interview with Borges:

Borges: But then, to my surprise — and I suppose you can explain this to me, since you are philosophers and I am not — what Schopenhauer says is that all those things have no existence except in the brain. And that the universe — I remember these words, I don’t think I’m inventing them now — “ist ein Gehirnphänomen,” that the world is a cerebral phenomenon. Now, when I read that I was baffled. Because, of course, if you think of the universe, I suppose the brain is as much a part of the external world as the stars or the moon. Because the brain after all is a system of — I don’t know — of visual, of tactile, perceptions. But he keeps on insisting on the brain.

MP-R: Yes.

Borges: But I don’t think, for example, that Bishop Berkeley insists on the brain, or Hume, who would have insisted on the mind, consciousness….

DD: People sometimes say that they see Berkeley in stories like “Orbis Tertius.”

Borges: Yes, I suppose they do. Well, of course. But in that story I was led by literary means also.

DD: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story? Could you explain that?

Borges: Oh, well, yes, I’ll explain very easily…. Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my life’s chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. Well, I used to go to the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires — and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, or a librarian, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Of course, afterwards, I had that book at home, by my hand. And then I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. And then one night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden, and the Druids — a treasure trove, no? — all in the same volume, of course, “Dr–.”

Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. Where, for example, you would have, let’s say, a language and then a literature that went with the language, and then a history with it, and so on. Then I thought, well, I’d write a story of the fancy encyclopedia. Then of course that would need many different people to write it, to get together and to discuss many things — the mathematicians, philosophers, men of letters, architects, engineers, then also novelists or historians. Then, as I needed a quite different world from ours — it wasn’t enough to invent fancy names — I said, why not a world based on, let’s say, Berkeleyan ideas?

DD: A world in which Berkeley is common sense instead of Descartes?

Borges: Yes, that’s it. Then I wrote that story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that day, which has attracted many readers. And of course, the whole thing was based on the theory of idealism, the idea of there being no things but only happenings, of there being no nouns but only verbs, of there being no things but only perceptions.…

Lawrence I. Berkove: “Tlön” is a good example of one of your stories where, however the story ends, the reader is encouraged to continue applying your ideas.

Borges: Well, I hope so. But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.

MP-R: You say you’re not a thinker…

Borges: No, what I mean to say is that I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters. In the same way, for example that — well, of course, I shouldn’t perhaps choose this as an example — in the same way that Dante used theology for the purpose of poetry, or Milton used theology for the purposes of his poetry, why shouldn’t I use philosophy, especially idealistic philosophy — philosophy to which I was attracted — for the purposes of writing a tale, of writing a story? I suppose that is allowable, no?

DD: You share one thing certainly with philosophers, and that is a fascination with perplexity, with paradox.

Borges: Oh yes, of course — well I suppose philosophy springs from our perplexity. If you’ve read what I may be allowed to call “my works” — if you’ve read my sketches, whatever they are — you’d find that there is a very obvious symbol of perplexity to be found all the time, and that is the maze. I find that a very obvious symbol of perplexity. A maze and amazement go together, no? A symbol of amazement would be the maze.

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A logical paradox

Zizek writes at Lacan.com:

How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to travel back in time? The solution was already proposed by Henri Bergson: of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past – when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/conditions. [2] A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined, “answer of the real.” My present love causes the past which gave birth to it. The same goes for legal power: here also, synchrony precedes diachrony. In the same way that, once I contingently fall in love, this love was my necessary Fate, once a legal order is here, its contingent origins are erased. Once it IS here, it was always-already here, every story of its origins is a myth, like the Swift story of the origin of language in Gulliver’s Travels: the result is already presupposed.

In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses objet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew already was Judy pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy is a fake (he knew that she is not the true Madeleine, since he recreated a copy of Madeleine out of her), but that, because she is NOT a fake – she IS Madeleine -, Madeleine herself was already a fake – objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, we get a “negation of negation.” His discovery changes the past, deprives the lost object of objet a.

Are, then, today’s ethico-legal neoconservatives not a little bit like Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo: in wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they will be sooner or later forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore to life Madeleine (the old traditional mores), but that Madeleine WAS already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in modern permissive, secular, egotist, etc. society was there from the beginning. It is like with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen, its reduction to a “relaxation technique,” as the betrayal of the authentic Japanese Zen, obliterate the fact that the features they deplore in the Westernized Zen were already there in Japanese “true” Zen: after WWII, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, during the WWII their majority supported Japanese militarism, etc.

In true love, after discovering the truth, Scottie would have accepted Judy as “more Madeleine than Madeleine herself” (he DOES that just before the rise of the mother superior…): here Dupuy should be corrected. Dupuy’s formula is that Scottie should left Madeleine to her past – true, but what should he have done upon discovering that Judy IS Madeleine? Past Madeleine was an imaginary lure, pretending to be what she was not (Judy played Madeleine). What Judy is doing now in playing Madeleine is TRUE LOVE. In Vertigo, Scottie does NOT love Madeleine – the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. This is why the idea to clone a child to parents who lost him (or her) is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied, their love was not true love – love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the je ne sais quoi, in the object.

mommy and I

from Signs and Wonder at flickr

Consigned to oblivion

From Chomsky's article in TomDispatch.com:

The leading academic specialist on Gaza, Harvard scholar Sara Roy, adds:

"Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. ... Gaza's subjection began long before Israel's recent war against it [December 2008]. The Israeli occupation Ñ now largely forgotten or denied by the international community Ñ has devastated Gaza's economy and people, especially since 2006 ... . After Israel's December [2008] assault, Gaza's already compromised conditions have become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes, and public infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israel Defense Forces admitted was indefensible.

"In Gaza today, there is no private sector to speak of and no industry. 80 percent of Gaza's agricultural crops were destroyed and Israel continues to snipe at farmers attempting to plant and tend fields near the well-fenced and patrolled border. Most productive activity has been extinguished. ... Today, 96 percent of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a March [22, 2009] decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need. Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006."

from Signs and Wonders at Flickr

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"What really comes before our mind when we understand a word? -- isn't it something like a picture? Can't it be a picture?

Well, suppose that a picture does come before your mind when you hear the word "cube", say the drawing of a cube. In what sense can this picture fit or fail to fit the use of the word "cube"? -- Perhaps you say: "It's quite simple; -- if that picture occurs to me and I point to a triangular prism for instance, and say it is a cube, then this use of the word doesn't fit the picture." -- But doesn't it fit? I have purposely so chosen the example that it is quit easy to imagine a method of projection according to which the picture does fit after all.

The picture of the cube did indeed suggest a certain use to us, but it was possible for me to use it differently."

Vision of a different world

Interview with Wendy Brown at Broken Power Lines :

CPS: In your work you describe today’s left as being disoriented, fragmented and melancholic about the possibility of achieving alternative political futures.  In this situation, is it possible or even desirable to revitalize old leftist concepts such as communism, people’s democracy, and the like?  Do these concepts have any remaining life in them, or do we need to experiment with new political forms?

Wendy Brown:  In the Euro-Atlantic world, what we call the West and the Global North, those terms have pretty much become counter-productive for describing a left vision.  I think the reason for that is obvious: in the 20^th century, for many people, communism as it was actually instated in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, in China, North Korea, a few other places – so much carries the signification of a heavily policed society, of strong and authoritarian states, of what gets called for better or worse totalitarian culture and society – that divesting what we might value in communism in its theoretical formulation and in our political attachments to it, divesting that value from that actual lived history is very difficult in the popular sense.  I certainly still teach The Communist Manifesto and try to get students to appreciate what it was that Marx was articulating and imagining.  I think it is worth teaching other texts, as well, that do the same thing, but I think it is very difficult at a popular level to make arguments on behalf of communism that don’t simply deposit your argument back with that history.  That said, it is probably a little different in the Global South where I think it is possible to speak about Marxism, about socialism and about communism without necessarily having that same recurrence to especially the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.  I think it is possible and probably essential there as well, though, to begin to use some other terms.

CPS:  Are there any terms you have in mind? Any new signifiers?

Wendy Brown: I don’t particularly have a good answer to that question.  In my own work, I have tended to use the language of democracy.  In using it I have had to first make a move that is similar to the one I just described with communism, only at another end of the spectrum, which is to separate democracy from its colonization by liberalism.  When I talk about a vision of a different world than the one that we have in contemporary market democracies, contemporary Western states neoliberalized and otherwise, unfree and inegalitarian, my first move is to separate democracy from the contemporary versions of it that are used both to legitimate Western states and to legitimate imperial exploits with democracy.  My move is always just to remind us of the etymology of the term, that it means very simply in its Greek formulation: the people rule or popular power.  There are lots of arguments about the demos; some argue such as Ranciere, that it really means the poor; others argue that it really means the people.  Those arguments are interesting but I think what is important in using it is to be able to seize a term that people think they do value, people who are not necessarily on the left, and seize it for left purposes.  That is one approach.  I am open to other possibilities as well, things that get a little closer to the political economic end of what we used to mean by communism than democracy necessarily does.  I am open to ideas that people have about what those terms ought to be.

CPS:  Thanks, so that leads to my next question.  Many democracies, especially in the Global South, are limited in the socioeconomic reforms and democratic policies they can pursue, by the demands of capital – such as IMF conditional loans and the fear of capital flight.  Do you perceive the relationship between late global capitalism and democracy as intrinsically incompatible?

Wendy Brown:  Yes, if by democracy we mean that rich sense of democracy. If what we mean is the elements of shared power, shared control over conditions of life that I take democracy to entail, then of course they are incompatible with what you just described.  That said, obviously there are other claims about what democracy means.  If you get the Von Hayek and Milton Friedman types in front of this microphone, they will explain why not only are those forms compatible with democracy, but that the world of neoliberalism is the world of democracy – it is all that democracy means.  It means that kind of freedom.

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Apartheid Rule

From CounterPunch:

First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.

A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?

Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.

This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.

That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.

There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained.

In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.

David Birkin

David Birkin

Proof

From Informed Comment:

An important recent policy announcement makes it possible for the Israelis to expel from the West Bank any Palestinians who do not have what the Israeli authorities consider the proper identification papers.

The Israeli law resembles the one recently enacted in Arizona in one respect. Recently-arrived European Jews are demanding that Palestinians, who have inhabited the West Bank for thousands of years, must be able to show their papers in order to stay. In the same way, some of the Latinos who will be hassled by police in Arizona with demands that they ‘show their papers’ will be Hispanics, i.e. the old pre-US elite from the days of the Spanish Empire and early Mexico. The Arizonan yahoos who made this racist law to harass Latinos are recent, uncultured immigrants from the point of view of proud old Hispanic families. Others so hassled will be of mixed Latino and Native American heritage, so that some of their ancestors were in Arizona perhaps 10,000 – 16,000 years ago, but ignorant Euro-Americans are now demanding proof that they belong there.