Month: December 2023

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Without End

The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.

But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states. Mayer told this origin story so often – and the story has so often been told ­– that I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of a family myth. I see his in-betweenness differently.

I was introduced to Arno as an undergraduate at Princeton by my roommate, the son of the European intellectual historian Stuart Hughes. I don’t know if it was my personality or my connection to Hughes, but for whatever reason, Arno immediately made me feel like family. His writing gives the impression of an old-world Jewish sophisticate, but in his being and bearing, he reminded me of nothing so much as my very non-academic Jewish American family from the suburbs of New York. Arno always asked about parents, children, and grandparents first, before he talked politics or scholarship. He was affectionate, demonstrative, warm. His feelings were as strong as his opinions were sharp. He had passion and presence. He loved to gossip and plot, especially at academic conferences. He kvelled, he complained, he was stocky and short.

That was Arno. That was also his work. If it was in-between, it was not because he hewed to or hailed from the margins. It was because Arno, by disposition and temperament, was always trying to get inside, to get to the centre of things, to connect across the perimeter. Other diplomatic historians studied the relations between states. Arno looked inside of states, at the domestic relations and power struggles within. When he wrote about the French and Russian Revolutions, he turned not to Marx or Lenin but to The Oresteia and the Hebrew Bible, master texts of familial violence and personal vengeance. Where other Marxist historians of the twentieth century spoke of the transition to finance capital and the corporate form, Arno was more impressed by the staying power of the family firm.

His most daring and enduring ideas – that the First and Second World Wars were like the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; that the history of modern Europe is not one of a rising bourgeoisie but of a regnant aristocracy; that the Holocaust might be compared to the pogroms of the Crusades, a work of detoured ambition, in which a marauding army from the West, crazed and stymied in its quest for the lands of the East, acts out its zeal and frustration on the helpless Jews caught in the way – are not the creations of a contrarian. They are reflections of a spirit seeking to dispel the depersonalizing aura and bureaucratic myths of modernity in favour of more intimate, domestic, familial, and lineal, but no less tractable or terrible, examples from the past.

Those and other ideas once made Arno the most heterodox of Marxists, a practitioner of what he called social history from above. Today, they read like dispatches from the daily news. Take his most important work, The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981). From the moment of its publication, specialists challenged Mayer’s claim that the landed interests of the European nobility, including Britain’s, remained economically and politically hegemonic up through the First World War. Despite those challenges, the book, well, persists. It contains multiple provocations that have come to seem only more pertinent with time.

In his analysis of Europe’s states and empires, particularly their political structures and institutions, Mayer drew inspiration from Engels’s famous claim, in Anti-Dühring, that as early modern Europe came to be ‘more and more bourgeois…the political order remained feudal’. We might take similar instruction from Mayer (and Engels) today. The United States has one of the most archaic constitutional orders of the world, designed originally to protect the interests of the landed, monied, and enslaving classes, the white and the wealthy, from the majority. Not only does that constitutional order still, today, protect and enhance, through the state, older, whiter, more conservative, and more privileged sectors of society. It also is almost completely impervious to the forces and demands of demographic and social change, particularly young people, people of colour and newer immigrants. Of all the constitutions in the world, the American is the most difficult to amend. While scholars and journalists lavish attention on the social dysfunction of America – the racist and other pathologies of the white working class, the refusal of evangelicals to accept truth and facts, the toxic influence of television and social media – they pay less attention to what Schumpeter called the ‘steel frame’ of the political order. That was Mayer’s great theme: the archaic holdover of the social and economic past, how it takes shape and form in the state and its institutions, inviting reactionary, elite but declining, forces to find refuge, succour, position and space. It should be our own.

Nor can the family capitalism discussed in The Persistence of the Old Regime be treated as a European holdover of a feudal past. Thanks to the work of Thomas Piketty, Steve Fraser and Melinda Cooper, we now see family or dynastic capitalism as a fixture of our neoliberal present, a deliberate recreation of a form that was supposed to have been destroyed by two world wars and replaced by the multinational corporations and investment banks of the global economy. Imagined in different ways by Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter ­– scions of that fading central European imperium that Mayer continuously anatomized in his work – dynastic capitalism is the product of elite political moves and countermoves that Mayer thought were intrinsic to all forms of capitalism. Political capitalism, in his telling, is the only kind of capitalism.

Where we imagine today’s city as the home of the left, The Persistence of the Old Regime reminds us that the city can be the natural space of the right. At the turn of the last century, European cities, particularly imperial capitals, employed vast numbers in the tertiary sector of commerce, finance, real estate, government and the professions. Members of those sectors, which included much of what we today would call the PMC, often outnumbered the more traditionally recognized ranks of the urban proletariat. Far from generating a cosmopolitan or metropolitan left, they were a breeding ground of the radical right.

Until recently, Mayer’s political geography of the city might have seemed of historical interest only. With Israel’s war on Gaza, it bears re-reading. An alliance has emerged, or simply become visible, in metropolitan centres across America – of wealthy donors from tech, finance and real estate, and their underlings; government officials; university administrators and employees; philanthropists; cultural movers and shakers; local politicians from both parties; and pro-Israel politicos and campus groups – exercising increasing sway over urban spaces of culture and education. These are not the obvious forces of Trumpist reaction – the small business owners or independent car dealerships that leftists have emphasized or the white working class that liberals love to hate. Indeed, many of these individuals contribute to the Democrats and voted for Biden. But they are Mayer’s prototypical sources of reaction, claiming the mantle of victimhood as they enhance the imperial projects of some of the most powerful nations on earth. And they may help put Trump back into office.

Perhaps Mayer’s most proleptic ­– and, not coincidently, least discussed – idea is that of vengeance. It emerged late in Mayer’s career, I think, in his work The Furies (2000). Seeking to counter the revisionist consensus on the French and Russian Revolutions, which held that ideological utopianism fuelled their descent into violence and terror, Mayer claimed that each side of the struggle, the revolution and the counterrevolution, was inspired by a desire for vengeance, to retaliate against longstanding injuries and more recent acts of violence. While the revolutionary side sought to impose what Michelet called a ‘violence to end violence’, to create a new form of sovereignty that would stop the wilding in the streets and bloodshed in the countryside, it soon discovered what Clytemnestra and Orestes realize in The Oresteia: every attempt at one final act of violence only sets the stage for the next.

For years, I read Mayer’s account of vengeance as merely an attempt to salvage utopian thinking from the dead hand of the Cold War. More recently, I’ve come to think of it as an uncanny description of what was to come, of what solidarity and animosity look like after the Age of Ideology or the Age of Revolution or the Age of Utopia has come to an end. Every day, on the internet or in the streets, people are called upon to avenge an act taken against themselves or their team. Every day, a new litany of historical injuries is amassed to explain the previous day’s excess. Every day, a history of mutual loyalty or diffident trust is dissolved to make way for the next day’s excess. No conflict is resolved; no congress is achieved; no constitution is drawn. It is fury without end.

Arno dedicated his life to opposing that world, to finding coherence amid chaos, to extracting a story from sound, to identifying the path forward for the party of movement. That he failed, in the end, to do so, that he wound up reverting to the most ancient texts to explain our most modern predicaments, is a sad and sobering thought. Yet his example may still offer us a way forward. Sartre said that ‘a victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat’. It would be foolish to think that we could simply reverse the predicates and proceed to victory from there. Perhaps we might try a different tack. Might not a defeat described in detail offer the left something akin to what Rosh Hashanah offers the Jews? Not a chance to begin – Burckhardt (not to mention the rabbis) warned against that delusion – but a chance to begin again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, NLR I/61.

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Studio Trickery

Money can’t buy you love, but in 2023, what it can buy you is AI-assisted time travel. Now in his eighties, Paul McCartney increasingly resembles one of those lost characters in a 1960s Alain Resnais or Chris Marker film, repeatedly thrown back into the past to re-experience a traumatic event; or perhaps the protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, constantly re-enacting the assassinations of famous people so that they might ‘make sense’. As a piece of music, the ‘new’ ‘last’ ‘Beatles’ single, ‘Now and Then’, is of very little interest, but as a phenomenon, it is highly symptomatic. McCartney’s project of going back in time to the 1960s and 1970s and using advanced software to scrub the historical fact of the Beatles’ shabby, acrimonious end and replace it with a series of warm, friendly fakes is proof of another of Ballard’s claims – that the science-fictional future, when it arrives, will turn out to be boring.

The Beatles achieved something close to perfection from 1963 to 1969, gradually expanding out of entertainingly scrappy R&B into grand psychedelic vistas, then into strange, personal and oblique miniatures. They achieved this while maintaining a level of global popularity that is hard to imagine today. In a ridiculous American TV series from 1965 and a wonderful film, Yellow Submarine (1968), they appeared as cartoon characters, as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But in 1970, the year they split up, they spoiled the picture. Their final album, Let It Be, consisted mostly of bad songs, recorded for a ‘back to basics’ project which they had abandoned a year earlier, releasing the far superior Abbey Road (1969) instead. Let It Be’s defects were partially covered up by Phil Spector’s syrupy orchestrations; and its release was timed to coincide with a documentary of the same name in which the group showed their ‘real selves’: neither the hardscrabble British New Wave class warriors of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), nor the dreamy utopian wanderers of Yellow Submarine, but four morose rich men who had come to strongly dislike each other. The four then spent several years in court in an unseemly battle over the Beatles’ posthumous finances. The group’s fame endured, and their reputation grew – their status as ‘the greatest band of all time’ cemented by widespread imitation (especially in the Britpop movement of the mid-1990s). But that last moment of acrimony and litigation would always mar the fairytale. John Lennon and Paul McCartney agreed to stop insulting each other in public in the mid-1970s, but their friendship, let alone their collaboration, had not been resumed at the time of Lennon’s murder in 1980.

For years, McCartney appeared to have left all this behind and moved on; after all, it was he who had called time on the group in the first place, having tried gamely to keep it together in its last years when Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had all lost interest. McCartney personally announced the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, and launched the slinging of insults in song between the ex-members a year later. But in the mid-1990s, he told his side of the story in Many Years From Now, a book of bitter interviews with Barry Miles, in which he argued against the accepted history in which Lennon and Harrison were the ‘experimental’, ‘avant-garde’ Beatles, stressing his love for Stockhausen, Albert Ayler and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Lennon’s cultural conservatism, and his own authorship of some of the group’s more extreme work. Around the same time, he and the other two surviving Beatles accepted Yoko Ono’s offer that they record with Lennon from beyond the grave. She had handed McCartney a tape of three unreleased home demos – ‘Free As a Bird’, ‘Real Love’, and ‘Now and Then’. The songs were recorded, with the assistance of otherwise forgotten ELO frontman Jeff Lynne as producer (George Martin, wisely, refused to work on them) and digital editing technologies. Each was to be placed as the first track on one of the three volumes of Anthology (1995-6), a series of compiled outtakes and unreleased songs. The last song, ‘Now and Then’, was never completed, in McCartney’s account because Harrison declared it to be ‘fucking rubbish’.  

The two songs that were released sold well, though they are hardly remembered as classics. They are badly produced, but the main problem is that they are poor songs in the first place – dreary and predictable, of a piece with the forgettable songs of domestic contentment on Lennon and Ono’s 1980 joint album Double Fantasy. The group left these Frankensteinian tracks off their 2000 best-of collection and until recently it seemed that they had been quietly forgotten. McCartney focused his efforts on other means of making the story end happily. The sad denouement that was Let It Be was re-recorded on his insistence in 2003 as Let It Be…Naked, with Phil Spector’s kitsch embellishments removed, digital editing deployed and new passages inserted to hide how badly the songs were played, though none of this could salvage drivel like ‘Dig It’, or mitigate the solemn, religiose pomposity of the title song. Only McCartney’s ‘Two of Us’ ranks alongside the group’s best work, but at least now the album was less ostentatiously grotesque. The miserable Let It Be film, meanwhile, was taken out of circulation, and in 2021 was superseded by Peter Jackson’s vast Get Back, in which the moments when the group snipe at each other are swamped with over 400 minutes of footage of them behaving pleasantly, if seeming visibly bored (the most notable thing in this strange, challengingly uneventful film is its proof that George Harrison was by then writing by far the best songs, such as ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, rejected in favour of tossed-off dross like McCartney’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ or Lennon’s ‘Dig a Pony’, which the quartet would then have to work on for hours). Again, the film used new technologies including ‘MAL’, an AI devised by Jackson to isolate and amplify moments where the group’s conversations were inaudible on the original film strips.

AI was used extensively, and to impressive effect, on ‘Now and Then’, too, which was belatedly released last month. In the earlier two collages, especially the awful ‘Free as a Bird’, the joins were obvious, with Lennon’s vocal audibly coming from a different decade. Now, the joins have been smoothed over by machines with loving grace, and Lennon’s voice – or rather, the voice of Lennon and ‘Lennon’ the AI-avatar – comes through pure and clear. As a song, ‘Now and Then’ is generic late Lennon, one of many ponderous piano ballads. Its weary verses do have a certain poignancy, but the chorus was evidently an afterthought, now bloated into overemphasis by a pompous string arrangement. The result, despite a lovely, subtle backbeat from Starr, sounds a little like Coldplay, a terrible end for a group who once had the daring to try and emulate Little Richard, Ravi Shankar and Stockhausen all at once. The song is much more mediocre than most of what you’ll find in recent McCartney albums like New (2013) or McCartney III (2020). His grandiloquent attempt to time travel into Lennon’s late 70s apartment to erase the pain of their breakup perhaps involves a certain self-deprecation, preferring to rummage in his former partner’s depleted vaults rather than make use of his own songwriting talents. No ‘new’ Beatles song has been or, apparently, could be written by McCartney.

*

So what is McCartney trying to find in his cybernetic journeys into the past, and why is it that anyone might care? One answer could be found in the changes in the way music is consumed and understood in the 21st century. The last two decades have seen the near-total eclipse of what the more theoretically inclined British music press critics used to call ‘Rockism’ – that is, the belief in rock music as the bearer of authentic personal or political truth, best recorded in the raw, through guitar, bass, drums and the human voice, unmediated by studio trickery, synthesisers or artifice. By the late 1960s Lennon (and Harrison) were Rockists extraordinaire. Lennon especially was committed to a very ’68 combination of intense self-examination – one could call it, without too much unfairness, narcissism – and political agitation. His post-Beatles songs were all about something – about his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, about the British working class’s continued oppression under consumer capitalism, about war being unjustifiable, about imagining the anarcho-communist future, and about McCartney being a fraud. They were melodically predictable and musically unimaginative compared to McCartney’s solo work, but they were invigorating, and in tune with the zeitgeist.

McCartney, by contrast, was never a ‘Rockist’, and had no commitment to any particular genre, hopping cheerfully between retro Tin Pan Alley schmaltz, Motown, orchestral pop, and, on songs like ‘She’s a Woman’ or ‘Helter Skelter’, the Beatles’ most aggressive proto-punk (or rather, proto-‘No wave’) rock. All of these were pure sensation, with surprising melodies and unusual sounds. Even others’ songs, like Harrison’s one-note moan ‘Taxman’, were made strange and thrilling by McCartney’s bizarre basslines and splenetic guitar solos. He had little interest in self-expression – his most moving and apparently sincere ballad, ‘Yesterday’, was a melody that came to him in a dream, and its refrain was for a time ‘Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs’, until he came up with something more appropriate. This was true of his solo albums, too, especially McCartney (1970), Ram (1971), and McCartney II (1980), which were quiet, casual, inventive, stylistically promiscuous, often silly and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

Apart, the two former bandmembers obviously suffered from each other’s absence – Lennon no longer countering McCartney’s lapses into kitsch, McCartney unable to rein in Lennon’s tendency towards self-importance – but Lennon’s albums have aged far worse. After two decent albums in 1970-71 – one, Plastic Ono Band, raw and noisy, the other, Imagine, giving the same sentiments the full Spector treatment for entryist purposes – diminishing returns set in. Lennon’s solo albums could be dreadful and political (the patronising, musically sludgy agitprop of 1972’s Some Time in New York City) or dreadful and apolitical (the Elton John-level soft rock of Mind Games from 1973), and it’s hard in either case to imagine many people listening today. Even his life partner’s once-ridiculed music has endured better. By the unplanned end, Double Fantasy, his happy, honest but dull homilies about doing the washing up and changing nappies in the Dakota Building were outclassed by Ono’s snappy, curt and very New York pop-punk answer songs. The best of her records, like the Can-esque trance-rock of 1971’s Fly or the astonishing disco melodrama of ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, are far more interesting than most of what Lennon recorded in the last decade of his life. McCartney’s solo albums from the 70s and 80s, by contrast, though desperately unfashionable until the 1990s, are now accepted as classics.

The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’. In the last of the several editions of the standard book on the Beatles, Revolution in the Head – Ian McDonald’s unusual fusion of musicology and deep cultural pessimism – the question arises as to whether the vacuity of most Beatles lyrics would render them incomprehensible to future generations. The reverse has happened – nowadays who listens to music for the words?

What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier. 

One could easily make a New Spirit of Capitalism argument about these four working-class boys turned millionaires as proto-Thatcherites; take Harrison’s ‘Taxman’, the most exciting right-wing pop record ever made, for one piece of evidence. In Hunter Davies’s 1968 authorised group biography, written without the benefit of hindsight, everyone (except the notably more guarded McCartney) complains about the Labour governments’ taxation policies, which funded council houses, free tuition at art colleges and free healthcare, and without which three of the Beatles would probably have been queuing up to load timber at the docks and the other would have been dead. In one passage, Starr, after describing the amphitheatre he had built in his Surrey back-garden, objects to funding buses and calls for the privatisation of the railways. And yet, the group were usually identified with the left – ‘up the workers and all that’, as McCartney quips in A Hard Day’s Night – and were public opponents of the war on Vietnam as early as 1966. In the 70s, Lennon explicitly identified with Marxism for a time, with musically unimpressive results – perhaps except for the crunching ‘Power to the People’, which, as they say today, ‘slaps’, and was well used by Bernie Sanders as the theme song for his two presidential campaigns. Lennon later claimed he had only written it to impress Tariq Ali. 

*

The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors. The song is also bundled with ‘new’, remixed editions of two 1970s best-of compilations, the latest in the apparently interminable process by which existing songs are repackaged, remastered and reissued (though one of McCartney’s own claims to radicalism, the famously unheard-since-1967 AMM-inspired improvisational piece ‘Carnival of Light’, recorded by the Beatles for a ‘happening’ at the Camden Roundhouse, remains unreleased, against his repeated wishes, apparently blocked by Lennon and Harrison’s widows). Peter Jackson has promised – perhaps the word should be threatened – to use ‘MAL’ to uncover more ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs from Lennon’s discarded tape archive. Some of these could perhaps be created completely anew, without the need for the Dakota home demos hoarded by Ono. Indeed, ‘Now and Then’ already sounds like what the ‘stochastic parrots’ (in computer linguist Emily Bender’s phrase) of contemporary AI technology would create if asked to make a Beatles song – which would of course sound like ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Let it Be’ rather than, say, ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’. 

Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute.

McCartney once explained that ‘Too Many People’, the diss track aimed at Lennon – the opening shot in their public feud – was provoked not by the fact that his former partner’s solo songs were political as such, but by the fact they were hectoring, telling people what to do and what not to do. For McCartney, the Beatles’ songs were political because they were affirmative, outlining in microcosm a new world of love, togetherness, communality, possibility. In his self-justifying 1997 book with Barry Miles, McCartney described this genuinely utopian strain:

I always find it very fortunate that most of our songs were to do with peace and love, and encourage people to do better and have a better life. When you come to do these songs in places like the stadium in Santiago, where all the dissidents were rounded up, I’m very glad to have these songs because they’re such symbols of optimism and hopefulness.

As it becomes harder and harder to believe in this hope, or in the possibility that four working-class people in Britain could ever have been given the opportunity to evoke it so vividly, the elderly and unimaginably rich McCartney has had to create a series of counterfeits, now with the assistance of cybernetic lifeforms. 

Read on: Alan Beckett, ‘Stones’, NLR I/47.

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Broken Codes

There is an ironic term for a piece of cinema that combines weighty themes with an imposing style: un grand film. Several recent Palme d’Or winners merit the appellation: Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2019), Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2020), Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022). These are works that strive for ‘relevance’, often at the expense of psychological depth or aesthetic subtlety. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall – the latest film to be awarded the prize – adheres to the same criteria. Triet, however, is less interested in mounting a schematic critique of inequality than her confères. Her subject is the cosmopolitan European family, and beyond it, other institutions of bourgeois life.

The film unfolds as follows: Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a German writer, her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) live near Samuel’s hometown in the Alps. Returning from a walk with his guide dog, Daniel stumbles upon Samuel’s body outside their house. It is unclear whether Daniel has happened upon a murder, suicide or accident. Sandra is charged, and a courtroom drama begins. Evidence is sparse; attention turns to Sandra’s infidelities, Samuel’s jealousies. Her work is highly acclaimed, while he is struggling with his first novel. On the day he died, she was being interviewed in their living room; he was upstairs blasting music to disrupt the meeting. Samuel was additionally paralysed by guilt, blaming himself for the accident that blinded Daniel. Sandra, for her part, regretted leaving their life in London. These resentments erupted in a screaming match the day before Samuel’s death, later found to have been recorded on his phone.

The result is a two-hour-long exercise in haute vulgarisation, in which art-house tropes and trappings are combined with those more familiar from the made-for-TV movie. Triet has said she drew inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 – already the subject of a TV movie as well as a Netflix documentary. The conventions of the whodunnit – a bird’s-eye view of the corpse in the snow, the arrival of police, the painstaking reconstruction of the incident – are mobilized to full effect. In this regard, Anatomy of a Fall is only superficially distinct from the better products of the recent true-crime boom, where viewers are invited to pass judgement on real-life mysteries. Triet, though, has loftier conceptual ambitions. Samuel’s fall metonymizes the fall of the modern male; the court case probes the contemporary status of the family and the law, as well as – more obliquely – the novel and the cinema.

In the film’s diagnosis, these institutions have fallen into a state of disorder. Reconstruction of the truth is conspicuously absent from the trial; questions of legal guilt appear casually relative. The rise of trial-by-media and its pas de deux with the true crime format appear to have produced a qualitative change: the purpose of true crime, after all, is not to uncover what happened, but to relish in the process itself. Triet’s court has a purely mediatic function, presenting wife and husband as sleazy characters rather than legal subjects.

The nuclear family is afflicted by a parallel breakdown. The free-spirited middle class to which the protagonists belong has rejected conventional marital roles, yet this is not depicted as progress: the scrambling of domestic codes has instead resulted in turmoil. Samuel struggles to share his life with a successful woman, Sandra to tolerate her husband’s closer relationship with their son. And while the great bourgeois form, the novel, was once capable – in Hegel’s words – of neutralizing the ‘conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances’, Sandra’s experimental, interior, achronological novels do no such thing. The prosecution claims to find incriminating details in her work, at one point citing a character who expresses the desire to get rid of their spouse. A nucleus of ‘truth’ is sought in her slippery autofiction but proves stubbornly elusive. The novel is now a world unto itself, and can no longer shed light on our own.

Anatomy of a Fall thus depicts a society that claims to have moved beyond shared codes – generating new and unstable ones in the process. As viewer, we are placed in a position where we are expected to resolve such disorder ­– if only we could ascertain if Sandra did it. But all the while Triet conveys the impossibility of this task. For the authority of the cinema is also under threat, its engulfment by the streaming industry embodied in the film’s very form. At its conclusion, Daniel, like a blind Tiresias, tells the court that he has just remembered a conversation he had with his father some months earlier, in which Samuel seemed to confess that he was preparing to take his own life. This, we are led to assume, is an expedient fiction. Only such an act of symbolic patricide can bring the chaos of rival narratives to an end.

A gentrified television film, though, cannot easily transcend the bounds of its genre. If its true subject is bourgeois polycrisis, the film’s reliance on received ideas means this cannot be dealt with effectively. Ultimately, its depiction of gender relations is a tissue of conservative cliches – the sapphic feminist, the splenetic macho. An egalitarian marriage is apparently unworkable due to some ‘repressed’ male essence. Triet insists on raising social ‘issues’, but the result is still an upmarket family film.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

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A Communist Life

‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’

Drawing perhaps on the distant memory of his own youthful Catholic activism, Negri extracts the materialist and humanist kernel of the resurrection of the flesh against all the miserable cults of finitude and being-towards-death. Negri’s lifelong war on the palaces was founded on the conviction that power, potestas, is nourished by a hatred of bodies and fixed in the threefold fetish of patriarchy-property-sovereignty. Its apparatchiks and administrators love that empty syllogism ‘every man is mortal’, which, Negri contends, is at the root ‘of the hatred of humanity, of that hatred that every authority, every power produces in order to affirm and consolidate itself: power’s hatred for its subjects. Power is founded on the introduction of death as an everyday possibility into life – without the threat of death, the idea and practice of power could not obtain. … Power is the continual effort to make death present for life.’

For Negri, freedom was a collective struggle against this lethal power, a fight against the fear of death, against terror, power’s currency. As the communist poet Franco Fortini had it in his rendering of the Internationale, chi ha compagni non morirà: those who have comrades will not die. Beyond the scholarly mastery of the history and theory of philosophy, law and the state, beyond the interminable yet urgent search for the revolutionary subject, beyond the hugely influential phenomenologies of capital’s power – from planner-state to crisis-state to Empire – at the core of Negri’s life and work was the idea that philosophy is inseparable from a practice of collective liberation, or from communism understood as a ‘joyous ethical and political collective passion that fights against the trinity of property, borders and capital’. This passion was something that Toni radiated. If anything marked him out among both militants and scholars, it was a kind of boundless curiosity, a generous desire to learn, in detail, from anyone genuinely involved in a struggle for liberation, which he always saw in the most capacious terms. His was not the cliché of a pacified wisdom – he could be combative, convoluted, contrary. But an irrepressible enthusiasm for liberation granted him a rare unruly youthfulness, even in old age. If wisdom entailed a joyful scorn for the powerful, what Spinoza called indignation, ‘a Hate toward someone who has done evil to another’, then Toni was wise indeed. That joy and that indignation saw him through a decade of captivity and fourteen years of exile, caricature and calumny, as too many from his generation turned state’s witness, literally and figuratively.

Both in print and in person, Toni had a reputation for optimism verging on fancy, especially when it came to his vision of the multitude – forged with his close friend and co-author Michael Hardt in a quartet of books that marked a season in the global left’s intellectual life. Many devotees of the party-form neglected that for Hardt and Negri the multitude is a new name both for mass organisation and for the working class beyond the assembly line. Accusations of naivety also overlooked that Toni – unsurprisingly for someone who experienced the ravages of war as a child and the brutalities of prison as an adult – nursed a deep belief in the need to confront the realities of spiritual and bodily suffering. His essay on the Book of Job and his study of Giacomo Leopardi were both aimed at thinking through poetry’s materialist ability to confront tragedy, pain, nihilism, and to make worlds from the experience of meaninglessness, failure, defeat. While Toni’s Marx was above all the one of the Grundrisse – of ‘real subsumption’ and the ‘General Intellect’ – there is a line from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 that resonates with this materialist poetics of the body, when Marx writes that man is ‘a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being’.

This passion for a common freedom, lived through suffering but oriented towards a joy defying death, is the point where communism and philosophy, liberation, and ethics, met for Negri – in his writing as in his life. It is no accident that he devoted the very last pages of his autobiography, his parting words, to the fight against the far right that engulfed his own childhood and now threatens to return. The multitude’s weakness and fear, he tells us, is once again making room for a terror that wants the apotheosis of property, patriarchy and sovereignty, that wishes all expressions of joy prohibited. ‘Fascism’, Negri tells us, ‘rests on fear, produces fear, constitutes and constrains the people in fear’. Against fascism’s watchword, ‘long live death’, Toni built a life of thought, comradeship, love and struggle. I can’t think of a better way of honouring it than transcribing the final paragraph of his autobiography:

In the resistance to fascism, in the effort to break its domination, in the certainty of doing so, I have written this book. All that is left, my friends, is to leave you. With a smile, with tenderness, dedicating these pages to the virtuous men and women who preceded me in the art of subversion and liberation, and to those who will follow. We have said that they are ‘eternal’ – may eternity embrace us.

Read on: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, ‘Empire, Twenty Years On’, NLR 120.

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Master and Servant

The Israeli massacre in Gaza is a catastrophe, and not just for the city’s tortured inmates, languishing for decades under a merciless occupation. The United States in particular, but also Germany, will forever be closely associated with this unrelenting slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children, a slaughter that both countries continue to underwrite materially and diplomatically. Two-and-a-half months into the mass killing, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have restored some hope of survival to those Gazans still remaining after the hell of continual bombing and shelling. By that time, following the Hamas breakout and the murderous attack on kibbutzim close to the Gaza wall, more than 20,000 Gazans had been killed, 8,700 of them children and 4,400 women, and 50,000 wounded, compared to 121 dead Israeli soldiers, one fifth of them victims of friendly fire or traffic accidents. Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli air force claims to have bombed 22,000 ‘terrorist’ targets: more than 300 a day, every day, in an area the size of Munich.

As the year draws to an end, 90% of the roughly 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip have been made homeless, chased by the Israeli military from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip and back, told to shelter in allegedly safe zones which are subsequently bombed. There is hunger verging on starvation, scant medical care, no fuel, no regular electricity supply, and no indication that the slaughter will end any time soon. The reason given by the US for vetoing the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire was that this would be ‘unrealistic’. Meanwhile the German government, led by its feminist foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, demands ‘humanitarian pauses’ as an alternative to peace, after which the killings are to continue until ‘Hamas’, prepared for death by a free UNRWA meal, will finally be ‘rooted out’.

What is eerie is that in the unending stream of reports and commentary on the Gaza war it is hardly ever mentioned that Israel is a nuclear power, and by no means a minor one. For a small country Israel is heavily armed, and not just conventionally. All in all, Israel spends more than 4.5% of its GDP on its military (as of 2022), which probably doesn’t include a good deal of free military assistance provided by the US and Germany. Before the latest assault on Gaza, Israel was estimated to have at least 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material stockpiles of more than 200. Even more importantly, Israel has at its disposal the complete range of means of nuclear delivery, the so-called tripod: land-based, air-based, and sea-based. Israel’s land-based nuclear missiles are allegedly kept in silos deep enough to withstand a nuclear attack, making them suitable not just for a first but also for a second strike. For nuclear delivery by air, the IDF maintains a fleet of at least 36 out of a total of 224 fighter planes with an extensive capacity for refuelling. Israel also has six submarines – of the so-called Dolphin class – which, experts believe, can fire nuclear-armed cruise missiles. The missiles have an estimated reach of 1,500 kilometers, providing Israel with an almost invulnerable platform for nuclear defence, or as the case may be, attack. Generally, one can assume that Israel commands the full spectrum of nuclear capabilities, from tactical battlefield arms to the aerial bombardment of military staging areas, to the bombing of cities like Tehran.

It is not known exactly how Israel became a nuclear power, most likely little by little, small step by small step. Certainly, there is no lack of nuclear science in Israel. The US may have helped, some administrations more than others, along with American friends of Israel deep inside the US military-industrial complex. Like other out-of-the-closet nuclear powers, the US is dedicated to non-proliferation, and indeed has a strong national interest in it, as do Russia and China. Espionage may however have been a factor; remember Jonathan Pollard, a US defense analyst and Israeli spy who after his discovery in 1985 only narrowly escaped a death sentence? In spite of relentless Israeli efforts to get him extradited, Pollard had to serve 28 years in prison until he was pardoned by the outgoing Obama administration, against the wishes of the US military establishment.

There also seems to be a German component, and it has to do above all with those Israeli submarines. Merkel’s mysterious claim in 2008 that Israel’s security was Germany’s raison d’etat, enthusiastically received by the Israeli government and now parroted literally every day by the German government and its staatstreue media, might have to be read in this context. As mentioned, six submarines were delivered between 1999 and 2023. Of the first three, Germany paid for two of them while the cost of the third was shared, supposedly as penance for what the US alleged was the participation of German firms in the development of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – which, of course, turned out to have never existed. (For the next three submarines, Germany agreed to pay €600 million.)

If the German-built Israeli submarines are fitted for nuclear missiles, not just the manufacturer ThyssenKrupp but also the German government would know. This also holds for the US, which would have turned a blind eye to Germany breaching its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. From 2016 until a few months before the Gaza war, the prospect of three more German-built submarines, also to be subsidized by the German state, was discussed by the two governments. But this time there were doubts in Israel over whether they were in fact needed. There was also an unfolding corruption scandal on the Israeli side, which among other things involved ThyssenKrupp hiring a cousin of Netanyahu as a lawyer. As the matter was investigated by Israeli public prosecutors, it was drawn into the constitutional conflict between the Netanyahu government and the judiciary. In 2017, the German side found itself forced to postpone a final decision until the Israeli corruption charges were settled. Then, in January 2022, the contract for the three submarines was signed. Of the estimated price of €3 billion, Germany will be paying at least €540 million.

Israel has never officially admitted that is has nuclear arms; some of its leaders, however, often retired prime ministers, have occasionally dropped hints to this effect, and probably not by accident. Leaving it an open question means no inspections and no pressure from the IAEA. Keeping potential adversaries in the dark about the size and exact purpose, or indeed the very existence, of its nuclear capacity may also offer strategic advantages (nothing is known for certain about Israel’s nuclear doctrine, for example). What can be assumed is that Israel is determined to remain the only nuclear power in the region – as indicated by its occasional bombing of nuclear reactors in Syria and its overtures to the US to stop Iran acquiring nuclear bombs, not by treaty à la Obama but by military intervention. It can also be assumed that Israel, unlike other nuclear powers, does not preclude first use of its nuclear arms, given it is surrounded by several nations with which it finds itself in a state of enmity. This should hold especially in a situation where the Israeli government considers the survival of the Israeli state at risk, although what exactly survival means remains open, unless one adopts the definition of both the right-wing extremist government of Netanyahu and the government of Germany, for whom the right of Israel to exist includes the right of Israel to define its borders at will.

As the Gaza war continues, the uncertainty surrounding Israel’s nuclear force increasingly seems to govern events on both battlefields, diplomatic and military. Protected by its veil of unpredictability, the Israeli government seems to believe it can inflict on Gaza, and soon perhaps on the West Bank as well, whatever punishment it chooses, without having to fear external interference from anyone. In recent weeks, Netanyahu has acted as though he could tell Washington, in particular, that its support for Israel must be unconditional – since, if pressed, Israel could defend itself on its own, relying on its nuclear tripod. The Gaza massacre risks turning Israel into one of the most hated countries in the world, together with Germany – which unlike the US is solidly united behind the Netanyahu government; yet there seems to be an established view on the part of the Israeli high command that this doesn’t matter, since no government near nor far will dare give in to domestic pressure to come to Gaza’s support.

There is another angle to this, and one that is perhaps even more frightening. In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, what later became known as the Watergate tapes recorded a conversation between Richard Nixon, then still President, and his closest aide, Bob Haldeman. When Haldeman informed Nixon that the situation in the Middle East was becoming critical, Nixon ordered him to have American nuclear forces worldwide put on high alert. Haldeman, stunned: Mr. President, the Soviets will think you are mad. Nixon, in response: That is exactly what I want them to believe. In a nuclear strategic environment, credible madness can be an effective weapon, especially for a government led by someone like Netanyahu. As noted, Israel does not have an official nuclear doctrine, and cannot have one as it does not admit to being a nuclear power. But it seems likely that if the existence of Israel was threatened in the eyes of its government, it would not hesitate to make use of all of its arms, including nuclear ones. This makes it relevant that Israel’s present governing coalition includes people who consider the Bible to be a sort of land registry. For many of them, the myth of the Masada mass suicide in 73 CE, after the first Jewish-Roman war was lost, is a powerful source of political inspiration, a fact that cannot be unknown to whatever intelligence is still at the disposal of the US government.

In fact, there is an even more ancient model of Israeli heroism, the myth of Samson, which seems to be no less popular among at least some of the nuclear strategists in and around the IDF command. Samson was a ruler of Israel – a ‘judge’ – in biblical times, during the war between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 13th or 12th century BCE. Like Heracles, Samson was endowed with superhuman physical strength, enabling him to kill an entire army of Philistines, reportedly one thousand strong, by striking them dead with the jaw bone of a donkey. After being betrayed and falling into the hands of the enemy, he was kept prisoner in the main temple of the Philistines. When he could no longer hope to escape, he used his remaining strength to pull down the two mighty columns that supported the roof of the building. All the Philistines died, together with him.

Nuclear weapons are sometimes claimed by radical pro-Israeli commentators to have given the country a ‘Samson option’ – to ensure that if Israel has to go down, its enemies will go down with it. Again, when that option might be exercised depends on what the sitting Israeli government would consider a threat to Israel’s existence, which for some might include the imposition of a two-state solution by the UN Security Council. Myths can be a source of power; a credible threat of extended suicide can open a lot of strategic space – enough perhaps to allow Israel to cleanse the Gaza strip of its Hamas-infested population by making it forever uninhabitable. If it is believed to be mad enough to die for a strip of land, or for not having to make concessions to an enemy like Hamas, a country like Israel may, long in advance of actually exercising its nuclear option, manage to deter countries like Iran, or hostile armies like Hezbollah, from heeding popular calls for ending mass eradication by military means.

Has the US lost control over its protégé, servant turned into master, master into servant? It is not inconceivable that the public disagreements between the two hitherto inseparable brothers-in-arms are simply theatre, artfully concocted to protect the US from responsibility for the slaughter of Gaza. But this is far from certain, given that the divergence between the two countries’ public statements on the legitimate aims of the Gaza special military operation has deepened almost by the day. Is the US, blackmailed by the threat of a Middle Eastern Armageddon, now forced to allow Israel to pursue ‘victory’ at any price? Does Israel’s capacity for nuclear war bestow on the Israeli radical right a sense of invincibility, as well as a confidence that they can dictate the terms of peace with or without the Americans, and certainly without the Palestinians? The political costs incurred by the US for not ending the killing – either not wanting or not being able to do so – are likely to be gigantic, both morally, although there may not be much to lose in that regard, and strategically: the ‘indispensable nation’ paraded before the world, helpless in the face of brazen disobedience on the part of its closest international ally. For its place in the emerging new global order after the end of the end of history this cannot bode well for the United States.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Sovereign Virtues?

After eighteen years, Die Linke is no longer a presence in the German Bundestag. When Sahra Wagenknecht and nine other MPs quit the party last October, the remaining deputies lost their status as a parliamentary group. The defectors are now planning to contest the upcoming European elections along with three state elections in eastern Germany. Initial polls put support for their new outfit, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – for Reason and Justice (BSW), at an impressive 12%. For many commentators, including Joshua Rahtz in a recent article for Sidecar, this is a hopeful development. Wagenknecht, he writes, directly addresses the material concerns of the German public: the ruling-class attack on living standards, the retrenchment of the social state, and the subordination of the national interest to that of Washington. He views her programme, focused on redistribution and opposition to NATO, as a serious response to the Repräsentationslücke – or representation gap – in the electoral system, where nearly half of the population does not identify with any party. To assess whether Rahtz’s optimism is warranted, we need to take a closer look at the character of the BSW. How radical are its policies? And, beyond them, does it have an intellectual or philosophical orientation towards the left?

Back in the 1990s, Sarah Wagenknecht was still a colourful Stalinoid communist who defended the legacy of Walter Ulbricht and served on the National Committee of the Party of Democratic Socialism. Her political transformation began in the 2010s, when, as Die Linke’s vice president and economic spokesperson, she embraced the ordoliberal vision of a ‘social market economy’. Since then, she has talked a lot about Schumpeterian innovation and little about socialism. She now describes her politics as ‘left-conservative’, holding up the family entrepreneur as the model citizen. She speaks to a supposedly traditionalist section of the working class which has seen its social position decline in recent decades, but which has been insulated from the worst predations of the neoliberal era. For Wagenknecht, protecting such workers from further hardship is a zero-sum game in which migrants pose a potential threat. ‘Cultural issues’ such as gender are at best a distraction, and current climate mitigation efforts – such as carbon pricing or phasing out combustion engines – are untenable. Instead, the aim should be to create decent jobs and develop ‘future technologies’ by reviving Germany’s industrial base.

To its supporters, the Wagenknecht phenomenon combines social democracy, Peronist populism and working-class common sense (or ‘reason’). Rahtz appears to agree with her that the starting point for the twenty-first-century left is a resovereigntization of the nation, which seeks to reclaim the political system, the welfare state and international relations from elites. This approach correctly identifies the defects in contemporary European democracies: the cartelization of party politics, the erosion of the social settlement and the forcible imposition of austerity, along with Atlanticist foreign policies. It has provided a consistent opposition to the Zeitenwende and to the often paternalist lockdown and vaccination policies rolled out during the pandemic. Yet it also suffers from a number of incurable problems.

Most notably, by juxtaposing ‘globalist’ institutions to national ones, Wagenknecht’s counter-programme offers nothing more than an improbable return to capitalism’s Golden Age. Rahtz, to his credit, acknowledges the ‘difficulties of attempting to increase German manufacturing competitiveness . . . in the context of a chronically weakened global economy’. But for him, these difficulties are practical rather than ideological. He does not ask whether ‘sovereignty’ or ‘industrial competition’ should be priorities for socialists in the first place. Both concepts, which feature heavily in the work of sociologists like Wolfgang Streeck and Anthony Giddens, are dubious from a Marxist point of view, since they substitute internationalism with national-Keynesianism, cooperation with capitalist rivalry. Moreover, if reverting to an embedded national welfare state is difficult in a world where capital flows and productive relations have become transnational, the likelihood is that this project will simply end up producing a regressive form of politics.

Wagenknecht exemplifies this danger. Her singular focus on resovereigntization has supplanted a politics of class with one of the nation. It is not true that, as Rahtz claims, the significance of immigration to her platform is ‘often exaggerated’, and that ‘the issue is given minimal emphasis in her public addresses’. In fact, Wagenknecht is constantly scapegoating migrants – slamming Merkel’s ‘uncontrolled opening of borders’, demanding more deportations, crackdowns on smugglers, strict limits on new arrivals and welfare caps for asylum seekers. The launch of the BSW was one of the few moments when she refrained from placing this issue front and centre. When state and federal leaders held a summit on migration in Berlin last month, however, she attacked them forcefully from the right: ‘Today the message to the world should have been: Germany is overwhelmed, Germany has no more room, Germany is no longer prepared to be the number one destination.’

Wagenknecht’s supporters assume that this rhetoric will help the BSW to win back the constituency that defected from the left to the AfD. But this narrative is not supported by the data. Although Die Linke lost 400,000 voters to the AfD in 2017, that was the year in which it achieved its second-best electoral result in history (9.2%). Since then the situation has changed. In 2021, when Die Linke received only 4.8% of the vote, it lost only 90,000 voters to the AfD and more than a million to the Greens and SPD. Most authoritative studies show that, in the years ahead, Die Linke will be primarily in competition with the latter two parties, while the BSW is more likely to compete with the AfD and, to some extent, with the CDU and SPD.

Rather than drawing its strength from former leftists, the AfD has picked up most of its support from right-wing parties, as well as mobilizing large numbers of abstentionists. If Wagenknecht is encroaching on the AfD’s territory, this is not because she is winning them over to the left, but because she is recycling the talking points of the nationalist right. Although her approach appeals to a small segment of the electorate that favours redistribution but opposes diversity, it is more popular among the demographic that opposes both. As one study put it, Wagenknecht performs well among ‘those who tend to position themselves as more socio-culturally right-leaning and more market-oriented, and those who support a more restrictive migration policy, ceteris paribus’.

One of the most comprehensive recent surveys on the German class structure and public opinion, by Steffen Mau, Linus Westheuser and Thomas Lux, shows that manufacturing workers are on average more critical of migration than the rest of the population. Yet it also finds that this group is characterized by significant ‘intra-class dissent’, with more than a third having no xenophobic attitudes at all, and the others being more equivocal than Wagenknecht’s talk of a socially conservative working class would suggest. This applies particularly to questions of gender and sexuality, where there is a clear progressive majority. Wagenknecht neglects these simple facts. She rejects contemporary feminism, queer politics and anti-racism as the faddish preserves of a ‘lifestyle left’, whom she dismisses as ‘self-righteous’ – waging a culture war whose only beneficiary is the right.

On certain issues, such as militarism and Covid, Wagenknecht has indeed resisted elite groupthink and sounded a dissenting note. Yet her positions must be placed in the context of her general political outlook. Her refusal to toe the line on NATO is not motivated by a principled anti-imperialism. It is based on an assessment that a stronger orientation towards Russia would bolster Germany’s energy security and aid its reindustrialization. It is parochialist, not internationalist. This was evident in the anti-NATO rallies that Wagenknecht has helped to organize, where those close to her – particularly her husband, the former SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine – were unconcerned by the participation of AfD supporters.

Likewise, Wagenknecht’s opposition to the government’s pandemic policies is more than just a defence of ‘civil liberties’. It also reflects a sceptical attitude towards science itself, which often strays into conspiracism – talking up the risks of vaccine side-effects and so on. Her criticism of lockdowns, whether one agrees or not, relies on a reified middle-class concept of ‘freedom’ which frames it as an individual right rather than a social project. It employs the tropes of right-wing populism rather than the discourse of solidarity.

Finally, Wagenknecht not only lacks ‘an active social movement’, as Rahtz puts it. She has no allies whatsoever in the trade unions, including the most active left-wing ones. Other social-democratic leaders in the Euro-Atlantic sphere, from Corbyn to Sanders to Iglesias, all sought to forge ties with the labour movement, with varying degrees of success. But though she claims to care about workers’ pay and conditions, Wagenknecht has little interest in the institutions that are fighting to improve them – perhaps because forming alliances with such collective organizations would be at odds with her top-down personalist style. The unfortunate truth is that, shorn of these commitments, Wagenknechtism is simply a new form of Bonapartism, seeking to represent the passive and reactionary sections of the lower and middle classes.

Read on: Joachim Jachnow, ‘What’s Become of the German Greens?’, NLR 81.

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Selling Citizenship

Aux armes, citoyens! So begins the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, adopted as the French national anthem by the Revolutionary Convention of 1795. No longer serfs, nor subjects, nor vassals, but equals. Citizen: a political category that had vanished with the ancient world (cives romanus sum) re-emerged to encapsulate the rights won by the Revolution and bind together the imagined community of the nation-state. The rights of citizenship would be augmented over time (the right to education, right to health, right to work…) along with their corresponding duties (conscription, jury duty, tax impositions…). Herein lies a key distinction with contemporary human rights: the aim to give positive content to an equality that is otherwise formal and theoretical, as expressed in the principle of ‘one person, one vote’.

This conception of citizenship – and thus of the state – peaked in the 1960s, and then began to decline. It continues to be considered a form of belonging, one that can be conferred by birth (ius soli), by bloodline (ius sanguinis) or by an extended period of residence. Yet citizenship has ‘thinned’, as the expression goes. Rights were diminished (the demise of the welfare state) and duties shrank (easing the tax burden), when they were not abolished entirely (conscription). With the triumph of neoliberalism it was transformed into a commodity, that is, into something that can be bought and sold. There is now, as the American sociologist Kristin Surak writes in The Golden Passport, a ‘citizenship industry’ spanning the globe. The book contains a treasure trove of information, data, and first-hand accounts of the history of this industry’s first forty years.

Why would one need to buy citizenship? One covets another nationality because not all citizenships are equal. Our lives depend on a ‘birthright lottery’. As Surak reminds us, if you are born in Burundi you can hope to live an average of 57 years with $300 a year at your disposal; if you are born in Finland the figures are 80 years and $42,000. The great migrations we see today depend on this boundless geopolitical inequality. Borders (which I wrote about recently for Sidecar) serve to maintain this chasm: Turkey receives €6 billion a year from Brussels to keep Syrian, Afghan and other refugees from entering the EU; as of this year, Tunisia is receiving €1.1 billion euros to stem sub-Saharan migration. The tiny republic of Nauru (a 21-square-kilometre island with a population of 12,600) has earned half its gross domestic product over the past decade processing asylum seekers rejected by Australia.

Yet though citizenship is fiercely unequal, we are still routinely presented with the legal fiction that all states are equally sovereign – a notion stretching back to Emer de Vattel’s Le droit des gens (1758), which argues that if in the state of nature men are equal to each other, despite all their differences, then the same must apply to states. Of course, states are by no means equally sovereign. Nauru does not have sovereignty equal to a country like Germany, in spite of the fact that its vote has the same weighting at the UN, it can open embassies around the world, offer immunity to its diplomats and so on. It is in this respect that Surak quotes Stephen Krasner, from his book Sovereignty (1999): ‘What we find most often, when it comes to sovereignty, is organized hypocrisy’. The recasting of citizenship as a commodity is a result of this contradiction between formal equality and real inequality. As Thomas Humphrey Marshall put it in 1950, ‘Citizenship provides the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality can be built’.

Many naturally want to escape from this inequality; in the vast majority of cases this occurs through migration. But for the few who can afford it, there is an elevator rather than a ladder up the ranks of citizenship. Citizenship is typically bought by the privileged classes from underprivileged states – those on the peripheries of global trade, subject to imperial sanctions, marked by political unrest, war or authoritarianism. The citizenship market arises, Surak explains, ‘from the confluence of interstate and intrastate inequalities’. The price of citizenship for oneself and one’s family ranges from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million. Buyers tend to be multimillionaires, but they could be Palestinians seeking legal status, Iranian businessmen hit by sanctions, Chinese elites trying to protect themselves from expropriation by the party-state, or Russian oligarchs seeking refuge from Putin’s volatile rule and, now, the dangers of war. For a time, the biggest customers were Hong Kong residents nervous about Beijing’s encroachment. But they may also be high-level managers and executives – Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians – working in the Gulf states, who are not legally entitled to stay there when they retire and do not wish to return to their home countries.

Precisely because the citizenship of some states is an exorbitant privilege, its existing holders are keen to protect it by erecting insurmountable barriers. So even for the extraordinarily wealthy, it is not easy to buy citizenship of states at the top of the geopolitical pyramid (although, there are exceptions: France naturalized Snapchat billionaire Evan Spiegel, New Zealand did the same with billionaire Paypal founder Peter Thiel). Another route is to buy a lower ranking citizenship that allows you to enter and reside in the top states – the hierarchy of states corresponds to a hierarchy of international mobility. Those with EU or Japanese passports can freely enter 191 countries; US passports 180; Turkish 110. In essence, Surak writes, while immigrants must live in the state they hope to join, for those buying citizenship only their money need reside there.

The first to capitalize on the citizenship trade were the Caricom nations: the fifteen Caribbean microstates with a combined population of 18.5 million. St. Kitts & Nevis broke precedent by enacting a 1984 law that granted citizenship to those who invested a certain amount. This became known as ‘Citizenship by Investment’ (CBI). For centuries the islands had thrived on sugar – producing 20% of global output in the eighteenth century – but by the 1970s had entered an economic crisis, exacerbated by the growth of the cruise industry. The CBI programme ended up generating 35% of GDP. They had the advantage of being part of the British Commonwealth, where common law applies, that is, where the law is based on previous judicial rulings: common law defines only what is prohibited, while civil law defines what is lawful and is therefore much more restrictive. Not surprisingly, Caribbean Commonwealth states such as Antigua, Grenada and St. Lucia followed their example. Next came Dominica, whose economy had been entirely based on bananas, which it exported primarily to Europe until in the 1990s WTO regulations allowed Chiquita to mount a successful legal challenge. As the ensuing ‘banana war’ brought the island to the brink, the CBI programme became its main asset; in order to match the benefits of its Commonwealth neighbours it offered citizenship at lower rates and other benefits (such as making it easier to change names). Since 2009, the passports of St. Kitts and Antigua have given their holders free access to the Schengen Area; since 2015, Dominica, Grenada and St. Lucia have offered the same perk.

The desirability of a passport depends on the mobility it provides. In this sense, citizenship is different from residency. There are about fifty countries (Portugal, Spain, Australia and the US among them) that in exchange for investment offer residency but not citizenship. Mobility, though, depends not so much on the state that naturalizes you as the one that lets you in (in 2015, for example, St. Kitts lost free entry to Canada and its passport became devalued). That’s why as the citizenship industry has steadily moved out of its cottage phase, developing more rules and procedures, the big states have gained increasing influence over the granting of citizenship. To acquire citizenship of the Caribbean microstates now requires the United States (and, increasingly, the EU as well) to give their approval.

In the Mediterranean, the main sellers of citizenship have been Malta and Cyprus, for reasons related to their history. In Malta’s case, this is because of the English language, its location, and its membership of the European Union. The terms of its CBI programme were hotly contested by both the Maltese opposition parties and the European Parliament, which imposed a cap of 1,800 naturalizations; it was closed in 2020 but has since reopened with a cap of 400 naturalizations per year and 1,500 in total (at the modest price of a €700,000 investment, plus €50,000 per family member or employee). Cyprus also has the advantage of being in the EU, but it was additionally part of the nonaligned nations during the Cold War and had a strong Communist party. When the USSR collapsed, it still had a large population of Russian-speaking professionals, many in law and finance, with strong connections to Moscow. Before long it became a favourite destination for Russians because of its proximity, its sunshine, and its access to Europe. Its capital city was unofficially renamed ‘Limassolgrad,’ or ‘Sunny Moscow’, ‘with Russian schools, Russian stores, Russian clubs, Russian restaurants, Russian newspapers’, Surak informs us. With the 2013 Greek crisis however, the Troika imposed major levies (reaching up to 100%) on all uninsured bank deposits over €100,000, and several years later, Cyprus’s CBI programme was shut down, just as the pandemic increased demand for passports from those who wanted to escape draconian lockdowns imposed in China and elsewhere. Russians had to look for a new refuge.

They found it in Turkey, an unusual candidate among the sellers of citizenship. With a population of 80 million and a powerful military, it is one of the 20 strongest economies in the world. Yet today it welcomes more than half of the world’s citizenship buyers. It may not be an EU member, but it has other advantages. Unlike the Caribbean microstates or Vanuatu, or even Malta, Istanbul is a metropolis that is perfectly liveable for an affluent expat. At first, most applications came from Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Egypt. Then Dubai’s foreign residents got involved. With Covid-19, and then the war in Europe, Ukrainians and Pakistanis joined their ranks. For well-heeled Iranians, Turkey holds a special appeal – not only because it is a neighbouring country and one of the few that Iranians can enter without a visa, but also because the Turkish lira has undergone a sharp devaluation (in the last two years it has lost half its value against the dollar) due to high inflation (39% this year). Iranians are penalized less by their own devaluation and inflation buying real estate in Turkey than elsewhere: at present they are purchasing an average of 10,000 housing units per year. These are profitable assets, as housing prices are rising in Istanbul as all along the Mediterranean coast. As one agency for citizenship applications put it, ‘You can think of Turkey as a home, insurance and investment.’

Citizenship has in this way been financialized, transformed into a product akin to structured investment vehicles. Though compared to the worldwide flow of migrants (numbering around 200 million), naturalizations by investment are infinitesimal – about 50,000 a year – they reveal more about citizenship than we might suppose. For example, about how much citizenship affects out-of-state citizenship, since we always carry it on us and cannot divest ourselves of it. Visiting India, I was always amazed at the ability of locals to guess the nationality of European tourists. I realized that our nationality system is for them a kind of caste system, and that they are well trained in distinguishing among the many castes with which they have grown up (there are about 3,000 in total, with 25,000 sub-castes).

Perhaps the most curious phenomenon recounted by Surak is that of Americans seeking dual nationality. Many of them are foreign residents who do not want to continue paying taxes to the US (where the tax regime stipulates that you must cough up no matter wherever in the world you live or earn your income). Others seek a second nationality so they can travel. A great sociologist with dual nationality told me that since 9/11 she always travels with her European document. Others applied after Trump’s election. Who knows what they will do come November 5.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Geographies of Ignorance’, NLR 108.

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Conjuring Trick

Addressing the neoconservative Hudson Institute on 20 October, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed the importance of ‘sheltering democracy’ – a nod to Ronald Reagan – from those who seek to destroy it. The twin crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, she said, ‘call on Europe and America to take a stand and to stand together . . . Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map. Hamas, supported by Iran, wants to wipe Israel from the map’. The conflicts were, ‘in essence, the same’. Her remarks were in lockstep with Joe Biden’s speech the previous day, in which he claimed that Hamas and Putin ‘both want to annihilate a neighbouring democracy’. By tying together these two nemeses, von der Leyen and Biden hoped to conjure the same spirit of unity seen at the outset of the Ukraine war – when ‘Western values’ were supposedly engaged in an existential struggle with their opposite. As Oded Eran, the former Israeli ambassador to the EU, once put it, Europe is ‘the hinterland of Israel’, and Israel an outpost of Western Judeo-Christian civilization.

Yet recent weeks seem to have revealed a confounded disunity in Europe – one much remarked upon in the Western press. Each day brings a new round of conflicting official statements, briefings and counter-briefings. After von der Leyen’s visit to Israel on 13 October, during which she pledged Europe’s full support for Tel Aviv, she was criticized by EU colleagues who complained that she had failed to consult them about the trip and neglected to remind Netanyahu about the supposed salience of human rights. As Israel cut off water, food and fuel to Gaza, the Commission announced that it would freeze aid payments to Palestinians lest they fall into the hands of ‘terrorists’. Again, a chorus of EU foreign ministers objected, and the decision was reversed within a matter of hours. Similar tensions appeared to be on display on 27 October, when European delegates gathered for a UN vote on whether to call for ‘an urgent, durable, and permanent humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza’. Austria, Hungary, Czechia, and Croatia voted against; Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden abstained; and Belgium, Ireland, France, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain voted in favour.

Some European leaders have repeatedly contradicted their own positions on the war. In a thinly veiled attack on von der Leyen, EU foreign policy lead Josep Borrell asserted that ‘Israel has the right to defence, but this defence has to be developed in compliance with international law’. Shortly after, though, he appeared to give full backing to the Israeli war aims, insisting that Hamas must be eliminated ‘as a political and military force’ – heedless of the civilian cost. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Borrell was asked whether the Hamas attack was a war crime, and replied unambiguously ‘yes’. When asked whether the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza was one, he said ‘I’m not a lawyer’. 

Emmanuel Macron has also sent opposing signals since 7 October. He has wrung his hands over the mounting death toll and rejected the notion that ‘we want to fight terrorism by killing innocent people’. Speaking to the BBC, he lamented the growing number of children pulverized by Israeli air strikes and urged Netanyahu to halt the campaign – becoming the first G7 leader to call for a ceasefire. Yet after a furious response from Israeli officials he was forced to row back on his remarks. Alongside his pleas for peace, Macron has also proposed the creation of an international military coalition against Hamas – whom, he says, must be fought ‘without mercy’. His staffers rushed to clarify that this would not necessarily imply French boots on the ground. An anonymous French diplomat summarized Macron’s position as ‘one day pro-Israeli, the next pro-Palestinian’.

Among member states, Ireland has perhaps been most vocal in its criticism of Israel, with Leo Varadkar insisting that ‘Israel doesn’t have the right to do wrong’. In contrast to the Commission, his government has consistently advocated for a ceasefire and pledged to push for EU sanctions against West Bank settlers. But here the gap between rhetoric and policy is cavernous. When Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats introduced parliamentary motions calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, the imposition of sanctions and the referral of Israel to the ICC, Varadkar rejected each of them out of hand. Since then, evidence has emerged that the US may be using Dublin’s Shannon Airport to transfer arms to Israel. Records from the Department of Transport indicate that since October there has been an unusually high volume of civil munitions exemptions – the most since 2016, and an increase of 42% from the previous month. Yet the government refuses to address the issue, and it has voted down a motion to prohibit American troops from using the airport.

A similar dynamic is unfolding in Spain. Fresh from reelection, Prime Minister Sánchez has vowed to work towards the international recognition of a Palestinian state. He has cast doubt on Israel’s compliance with the laws of war and described its assault as ‘disproportionate’. In a speech to the European Parliament this week, he declared that ‘it is time to speak openly about what is happening in Israel and Palestine’. But when members of Sánchez’s cabinet ‘speak openly’, he takes a somewhat different approach. The Podemos leader Ione Belarra went further than any other Spanish politician in accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and calling for Netanyahu’s indictment on war crimes charges. Soon after, she was sacked from her role as Social Rights Minister. Beneath Sánchez’s soundbites about protecting civilians, his government fully backs the extirpation of Hamas and the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza – presumably, on the bayonets of the IDF.

Germany, of course, remains unwilling to countenance any meaningful criticism of Israel. It has imposed stringent censorship on Palestinians and those supportive of their cause – using blunt force to repress peaceful solidarity marches in its major cities. Some Bundesländer are considering making ‘recognition of Israel’s right to exist’ a requirement for citizenship. This is hardly a surprise, given the country’s enduring Holocaust guilt as well as its ultra-Atlanticist orientation since the Zeitenwende. Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock can be relied on to parrot the White House position on both Ukraine and Palestine: full-scale militarized opposition to one occupation; unflinching material support for the other. She maintains that a ceasefire is unconscionable as it would only help Hamas. Yet even she has moderated her line in recent weeks: first suggesting that a little more humanitarian aid should be allowed to enter Gaza, then urging Israel to adapt its military strategy to reduce the impact on civilians.

What explains the EU’s flip-flopping incoherence in response to the horrors in the Middle East? It would be easy to see the divergent rhetoric between, say, Dublin and Berlin as a sign of real dissensus: the anti-colonial impulses of the first versus the Zionist sympathies of the second. But though such domestic political differences are a factor, they may also obscure a more fundamental unity.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has given up on its fantasies of ‘strategic autonomy’ and embraced its role as US vassal. Its states are content to be the defanged guard dogs of the American imperium. One might assume that such unblinking loyalty would simplify EU foreign policy decisions – since they need only mimic those of Washington. But it is not so easy to line up behind the White House when the latter itself is in a deeply ambivalent position. In recent weeks, Washington has found it hard to stick to a consistent strategy. It has reaffirmed its ‘solidarity’ with Israel, circumvented Congress to furnish it with 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition, vetoed calls for a ceasefire at the UN and made every effort to shield its ally from accountability. At the same time, it has gradually ratcheted up criticism of Israeli military tactics, imposed sanctions on its settlers and signalled that the war may not be able to continue for much longer.

Clearly, the Biden administration is caught between reflexive support for Israel’s war and uncertainty about its implications, which may include sparking a wider regional conflict, unravelling the Abraham Accords and permanently damaging the US’s standing in the Arab world. Its confused rhetoric – green-lighting Netanyahu’s massacres and then complaining about them afterward – reflects this precarious position. Now, in trying to follow the US’s lead, the EU has merely replicated its confusion. European states may be willing to chastise Tel Aviv to varying degrees. But, together, they are each seeking to channel the instincts of the hegemon. Their fumbling attempts show that this is not an easy task.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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In Praise of Tati

1. Each of Tati’s films marks at once (a) a moment in Jacques Tati’s oeuvre, (b) a moment in the history of French cinema and society, and (c) a moment in the history of cinema. Since 1948, the six films he has directed are the ones that have best kept pace with our history. Tati is not only a rare filmmaker, the director of few films (which all happen to be good); he is a living point of reference. We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that extends from Mon Oncle (1958: one year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: one year before the events of May ’68). Since the beginning of sound film, only Chaplin has had the same privilege, that sovereignty of being present even when he wasn’t filming and, when he was filming, of being exactly on time, which is to say just a little early. Tati: a witness first and foremost.

2. A demanding witness, then an inconvenient one. Very quickly, Tati rejected the easy way. He doesn’t play on his public image, he doesn’t keep tight control of the characters he created: the postman in Jour de fête disappears and even Hulot winds up scattering himself – fake Hulots roam all over Playtime. Tati runs the ultimate risk for a comic: to lose his audience by taking them too far. But where? However admirable it may be, his artistic conscience would move us far less if it only consisted of aristocratic loftiness or the haughty retreat of a man angry with his era and with cinema. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. If one considers as a group the six films Tati has made since Jour de fête (1948), one notices that they form a line of flight that is the line of flight of all of postwar French cinema. Perhaps because a comic is given less of a right to separate himself from his era than anyone else, even and especially to criticize it, it’s in Tati that one best perceives, from one film to the next, French cinema’s characteristic oscillation between populism and modern art. Who today is able to pick up and imitate the most quotidian gestures (a waiter serving a beverage, a cop moving traffic) and at the same time incorporate these gestures in a construction as abstract as a Mondrian canvas? Tati, obviously, the last of the theorist-mimes. Each of his films is also a marker of ‘how it’s going’ in French cinema. And it’s been this way for thirty years. While Jour de fête bears witness to postwar euphoria and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle maintain the continued existence of a very French genre (social satire) in the context of a ‘quality’ cinema, Playtime, a great anticipatory film, builds the La Défense business district before La Défense exists, but already says that French cinema can no longer deal with the gigantism of French society, that it’s no longer ‘up to it’. It says that French cinema will deteriorate by opening itself up to internationalization – in other words, the Americanization that already threatened the postman in Jour de fête. Sure enough, Tati’s two subsequent films are no longer entirely French (Trafic is a coproduction, a very European film), or entirely cinema (Parade is a commission from Swedish television).

3. Tati is not only the exemplary and disconsolate witness to the decline of French cinema and the degradation of the trade, he takes cinema in the technological state that he finds it. And curiously, though he has so often been accused of being backward-looking, all he thinks about is innovation. People are starting to realize that Tati didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to reimagine the film soundtrack starting with Jour de fête. It’s less well known that thirty years later, Parade is an extraordinary probe into the world of video. In fact, the major theme of Tati’s films is what we now call ‘the media’. Not in the restrictive sense of the ‘main means of mass communication’, but in the sense McLuhan gave the term: ‘specialized extensions of human mental and psychic faculties’, extensions of all or part of the human body. Jour de fête was already the story of a postman who keeps refining the delivery of the message to the point that he loses it. It’s a child who inherits the message (a mere letter) but who, distracted by a traveling circus, doesn’t pass it on: a beautiful metaphor for the intransitivity of modern art. But at that point, the viewer has understood that the real message is the medium – it’s the postman, Tati. The media is also the premature and accidental setting off of fireworks at the end of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, transforming Hulot into a luminous scarecrow, prefiguring the brilliant culmination of Parade where everyone – meaning anyone at all – becomes the luminous trail of a colour in an electronic landscape. And in Mon Oncle the media was also that surprising decision for the time to resist making spectators laugh at the expense of the programmes on the television set bought by the ‘modern’ couple, but to reduce this television to the abstract, nearly experimental spectacle of the sudden changes in intensity of the pale light irradiating the ridiculous garden. The list is endless, one could mention a hundred other examples. The most important thing is that at every moment and for all and sundry (in a kind of democratization-generalization of comedy that is the big gamble of Tati’s last three films, and probably the acknowledgement that we’ve all become comical), there’s a possible media becoming [devenir-média]. From the doorman in Playtime who becomes the entire door when the window pane is broken to the maid terrified at the idea of going through the electronic beam that opens the garage door behind which her bosses have foolishly locked themselves in (Mon Oncle), there’s the (threatening or comical) possibility that the human body will also become a limit, a threshold (and no longer, as is the case in burlesque comedy, a scatological depth). Modern art if ever there was one.

4. Tati doesn’t condemn the modern world (botch-ups and waste) by proving that the old world (economy and human warmth) is better. Other than in Mon Oncle, his films don’t praise what is old: one can even say, without being too paradoxical, that he’s interested in only one thing, which is how the world is being modernized. And if there’s a logic in his films, from the country roads in Jour de fête to the highways in Trafic, it’s the one that continues to irreversibly lead humans from the country to the city. Tati shows, in a way that’s in keeping with the recent (schizo-analytic) descriptions of capitalism, that the human body’s media-becoming works very well insofar as it doesn’t function. There are no burlesque catastrophes in Tati (the kind one can still see in American films such as Blake Edwards’s The Party) but rather a fatality of success that evokes Keaton. Everything that is undertaken, planned, or scheduled works, and when there’s comedy, it’s precisely in the fact that it works. Watching Playtime, one has a tendency to forget that all the actions one sees undertaken are ultimately relatively successful: Hulot finally meets the man with the Band-Aid on his nose whom he had an appointment with, he fixes the street light, is reconciled with the manufacturer of silent doors, and at the last moment even manages to get an admittedly piddling gift to the young American woman. Similarly, the opening of the royal garden is a success: the vast majority of customers dance, dine, and pay. Nothing really goes wrong in Playtime, though nothing works.

5. Cinema has made us so accustomed to laugh at failure and get off on ridicule that we wind up believing that we’re also laughing against something when we watch Playtime, though that isn’t the case at all. For in Tati there are no pratfalls or punchlines [chute]. Or else it’s the opposite: there’s a punchline but we haven’t seen the gag get set up. This isn’t a crafty and elegant way of making people laugh by playing with ellipses, it’s something far deeper: we’re in a world where the less things work, the more they work, therefore in a world where a punchline wouldn’t have the demystifying, awakening effect it has where failure is still conceivable. The same is true with the other meaning of the French word chute – ‘fall’. We’re dealing with bodies that aren’t made comical by the fact that they can fall. This is the nonhumanist side of Tati’s cinema. The ‘human’ part of comedy has always been to laugh at the one who falls. Laughter is only proper to man (the spectator) if falling is proper to the human body (as a spectacle). Chaplin is the archetype of the one who falls, gets up, and makes someone else fall, the king of the trip. In Tati, people practically never fall because there’s nothing ‘proper to man’ anymore. For me, one of the most beautiful moments in Playtime is when a woman customer, thinking that a waiter has held out a chair for her, goes to sit down without looking back (she’s a snob) and collapses in slow motion. A very funny gag, a beautiful ‘pratfall’ [‘chute’] but what exactly are we laughing at? And what are we laughing at in Parade, during the number when spectators are asked to mount an obdurate mule? Or the one where the clowns are constantly falling over each other as they stumble over a pommel horse? Here, falling is just one body movement among others. As a nonhumanist filmmaker, Tati is quite logically captivated by the human species, that animal which Giraudoux described as standing up ‘to get less rain on himself and to pin more medals on his chest’. The source of comedy for him is that it stands up and that it walks/works [marche], that it can walk/work [marche]. Infinite surprise, inexhaustible spectacle.

Rather than a dialectic of high and low, of what is erected and what collapses (a carnivalesque tradition and a situation that Buñuel illustrated: from the camera at insect level to Simon of the Desert at the top of his column), Tati would introduce another kind of comedy where it’s the fact of standing up that is funny and the fact of being unsteady (Hulot’s gait) that is human.

‘In Praise of Tati’, translated by Nicolas Elliott, appears in Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-1982, published this month by Semiotext(e). The text was originally published in book form as ‘Éloge de Tati’ in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970-1982 published by Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard in 1983. 

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Persona Grata

So the old bastard finally died.

Consigliere to Jared Kushner, Theranos board member, Google CEO co-author, ad-man for gold and The Economist on American network television, mass-producer of self-flattering prose, executive headhunter for US occupations in the Middle East, glorified telephone switchboard operator between Washington and Beijing: the industry of Henry Kissinger’s interminable twilight was only matched by its tawdriness. In this, as in much else, he was an unremarkable product of his country. The idea that abetting massacres from East Pakistan to East Timor was a quantum leap in the annals of American atrocity makes him almost too convenient a figure for his apologists and detractors alike: it elevates him to the status (long sought by himself) of the decisive US foreign policy mind of the post-war, while giving his nimbler defenders almost too generous an edifice of infamy to chip away at. Was it so unexpected that the country that had fire-bombed Japanese civilians to get Tokyo to the table also fire-bombed Cambodians in an attempt to get Hanoi to one as well? Was backing the massacre of Timorese an unusual follow-up to backing the mass-killing of Indonesian ‘communists’? Was it so shocking that the political class that had installed the Shah would also ease the way for Pinochet? Was Dr. Kissinger’s record in the Middle East really worse than that of his old nemesis Dr. Brzezinski? For what set the man apart, one may have to look elsewhere.

The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism. (‘American idealism… had defeated itself with its own weapons’ is the sentiment repeated ad infinitum in his books and memoirs). The ironies here were multiple. The first was that a country led by hard-nosed statesmen running from Teddy Roosevelt to Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon was somehow beholden to pussy-footing idealists in need of a dose of German Realpolitik, as if America’s ruling class had never not been perfectly ruthless in pursuit of its interests. It was, in fact, widely admired for this in the alleged ‘realist’ heartland. ‘We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery’, the New Republic editor Walter Weyl recalled being told by a Berlin professor during the First World War. ‘You Americans understand it far too well to talk about it’. ‘As a German making remarks about American imperialism’, Carl Schmitt gushed, ‘I can only feel like a beggar in rags speaking about the riches and treasures of foreigners’. As Baudrillard once said of French Theory, German Realpolitik was like the Statue of Liberty: a gift from the Old Continent that the Americans neither wanted nor needed.

The second irony is that Kissinger himself was never really a ‘realist’ at all; at least not in the sense of a John Mearsheimer or a Hans Morgenthau. He believed from the very beginning that the US could only triumph with a maximal commitment to its own missionary ideology. ‘A capitalist society, or, what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than nineteenth-century socialism’, Kissinger said in 1958. ‘I think we should go on the spiritual offensive’. Even when he was operating in realist guise, many of his judgements seem to have been based on a drastic overestimation of communist power, neatly captured in his theory of ‘linkage’. The Vietnamese needed to be taught a lesson so that Castro didn’t get any ideas. Pinochet needed to be installed in order to drive fear into Italian Communists. It was a picture of the world in which every action was hot-wired to another one. Even his vaunted understanding of China was full of bizarre assessments, such as that it had been wholly worth China’s while for Deng Xiaoping to squander 40,000 troops in its adventure against Vietnam since, after all, it kept the Soviet Empire from extending down to Phnom Penh and Bangkok.

Kissinger discovered earlier than most of his peers that celebrity is the ultimate trump card in American life. His stature occasionally allowed him to speak with less euphemism than the rest of the establishment. Instead of simply denying the illegal bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger quite coolly laid out its rationale as a tit-for-tat for Hanoi’s use of the country for its supply routes, while claiming that it had accelerated the peace process. What Kissinger most admired in diplomacy was the unexpected lunge. Perhaps his favourite gambit in the history of European diplomacy was the marital negotiations of Bismarck – whom Kissinger admired far more than Metternich – for the hand of Johanna von Puttkamer. Dealing with a prospective Pietist father-in-law who looked unkindly on the rakish young man, Bismarck seized Johanna in front of her father and planted a kiss, making their nuptials a fait accompli.

Yet for all of the surprise moves that Kissinger would celebrate in his own career (the ‘castling’ of China and the Soviet Union was Nixon’s idea), he was more notable for his absolute conventionality on virtually all foreign policy questions. He never appeared at a jagged angle like Kennan. His trademark method was to find ulterior reasons for what the state was doing already: Bosnia; the Iraq War (on the basis of Saddam Hussein’s violation of the no-fly zone rather than weapons of mass destruction); earlier this year, in a typical reversal, he even endorsed Ukrainian entry into NATO. In return, he has been persona grata in every administration. ‘He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders, and sending me written reports on his travels’, Hillary Clinton noted of her time in his former position of Secretary of State. ‘I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anyone else’, Dick Cheney said at the height of the second invasion of Iraq. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time’, President Trump said, keeping to script. ‘He’s a man I have great, great respect for’. (In some rare contrast, Biden’s words of condolence to Kissinger’s family read like the Beltwayese for ‘fuck off’.)

In the gallery of Cold Warriors, one of the features that did set Kissinger apart was his attitude toward the Third World, which he came to rate as a greater threat than the Soviet Union. Kissinger was comfortably at home in the two-power rivalry – all those congenial lunches with Dobrynin – but the prospect of Southern nations using oil wealth to modernize and challenge the US-led order was intolerable. Hence so many photos of Kissinger powwowing with the likes of Suharto and Mobutu, and why he bothered keeping in touch with experts on decolonization like his old Harvard colleague Rupert Emerson. In the mid-1970s Kissinger started engaging in public ideological work to counter the rhetoric of the New International Economic Order, and private logistical work to re-channel OPEC oil revenues into Wall Street rather than development projects. This came to be seen as preferable to finding an excuse for military action against OPEC nations, which Nixon and Kissinger also mooted.

How did Kissinger become such a greedy historiographical blackhole, sucking the attention of historians, journalists and critics of US foreign policy away from all other corners, concentrating them in a single figure? One reason is that Kissinger was among the first products of the meritocratic post-war academy to ascend to such a height. The bitter sting that his academic peers felt about one of their own accruing such power made him the special negative object of their fascination, driven by unmistakable envy for a man whose most important decisions no longer included whether to grant a junior faculty member tenure. The result was mutual appreciation, with the academic historians elevating Kissinger, and Kissinger elevating them in return (common in the Nixon-Kissinger tapes is the slide from talking about Vietnamese bombing targets to complaining about ‘the professors’). In Niall Ferguson, Kissinger shrewdly selected a defender who will come to the net for him on every point (already in his first volume Ferguson has argued, not unjustly, that the substance of Kissinger’s reports back to the Nixon team from the Paris peace talks could have been gleaned by any attentive newspaper reader).

More important than the logic of the academy, though, was Kissinger’s grasp of the soft spots in the American press corps. A master at flattering journalists, or boring them when necessary, he was in his element where others were at their most flat-footed: in the impromptu interview, the barrage of questions at the podium. In one of the periodic windows when intellectuals were celebrities in America, and on the back of a Kennedy administration full of them, Kissinger projected a giant brain leavened by comic timing, Peter Sellars’s Strangelove come uncannily and delightedly to life. A quiver of self-deprecating sallies were at the ready. He was, as he liked to say, always trying to ‘organize an evasive reply’. In this domain he had learned more from Kennedy than from Nixon: never let the press forget that you are one of their own. You can hear the click of collusion in the background laughter to his jokes. Welcoming foreign diplomats, he would wheeze: ‘I have not faced such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles’. It may be a while before Kissinger is seen in proportion: an unusually good student of the moods, and faithful servant of the interests, of his country’s elite.

Read on: Anders Stephanson, ‘A Monument to Himself’, NLR 86.