Month: April 2024

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Resonances

In 2013, on the roof of the Fridericianum in Kassal, the Italian performance artist Chiara Fumai staged a ‘freak show’. Amidst fire-breathers and bearded ladies, Fumai was dressed as the nineteenth-century sideshow sensation Zalumma Agra, in a white gown and giant wig that haloed her face. ‘I discard ideology and I no longer know anything’, she boomed to the audience below. ‘Losing my way is my proof’. Her words however were those of another famous misfit, one who had wilfully pushed herself to the margins, and who saw no salvation in culture or civic life. The speech was an assemblage of two tracts by Carla Lonzi, ‘I, Say, I’ and ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, the second of which was rendered somewhat literally, as Fumai took periodic breaks from her monologue to spit.  

Lonzi was an Italian art critic and one of the founding members of the feminist group Rivolta Femminile – yet one hesitates to apply such labels to someone so insistent in eluding all forms of identification. ‘Twenty years ago I was a university student / Fifteen years ago I was an Art History graduate / Ten years ago I was a writer and had artist friends / Five years ago I was a feminist . . . Now I am nothing – absolutely nothing’, she wrote in 1973. Lonzi proposed a feminism where nothingness was the ideal, to be achieved through a radical withdrawal from the world of culture, politics and ideology where men had set the terms. This process, which she called ‘deculturizzazione’, was to be followed by one of ‘autocoscienza’, in which women would forge relationships outside of male-dominated structures. While other feminists wrestled with how best to articulate their condition in order to be understood, Lonzi sought the opposite: the right to be illegible.

Refusal was an impulse in Lonzi’s work long before her activism. This is made clear by Feminism In Revolt, a new anthology of her writing edited by Luisa Lorenza Corna and Jamila M. H. Mascat, much of it published in English for the first time. Beginning with Lonzi’s art criticism of the early sixties, the book allows us to track the progression of her thought from a position of sneering dismissal towards the outside world, to one of absolute denial, and onward to increasingly imaginative forms of literary experimentation. Up until her death from cancer in 1982, Lonzi strived for new modes of self-expression; for her, what defined true freedom was always in motion, always expanding. A word that recurs throughout the book is ‘adventure’, used not to conjure joyful heroism, but to evoke the sacrifice and alienation that lined the path to liberation. 

Lonzi’s style was consistent with this outlook. Rivolta Femminile’s manifestos were clipped and contemptuous in their advocacy of women’s withdrawal from male territory. Her personal writing was similarly uncompromising, anatomizing how her relationships and consciousness had been disfigured by patriarchal force. It can be painful to follow Lonzi as she seeks the dividing lines between societal impositions and untainted selfhood, and as she attempts the near-impossible task of eliminating such intrusions – a process she referred to as ‘undoing’. How many of our thoughts, her writing asks, are truly our own? And what might we be willing to surrender to find out?

Obstinate and introspective, Lonzi could not be easily absorbed into feminism’s second wave. This may explain the lag in translating her into English. But in recent years, she has begun to garner more attention. Feminism in Revolt follows Allison Grimaldi Donahue’s 2021 translation of Lonzi’s Self-Portrait, a playful and digressive work from 1969, in which Lonzi composed a polyphonic conversation drawn from fourteen tape-recorded interviews with artists (most of them male, including her then-partner Pietro Consagra). In it, Lonzi presents a damning image of the critic: a ‘bureaucrat, a little careerist, a busybody’ who gets off on his authority. Rather than establishing a dialogue with artists, the critic peers down from the towers of institutional knowledge and pronounces his judgments.

‘The work of art’, wrote Lonzi, ‘felt to me, at a certain point, like a possibility for meeting, like an invitation to participate, addressed by the artists to each of us. It seemed to be a gesture to which I could not respond in a professional manner.’ Self-Portrait was her response – her ‘self-portrait’ ultimately emerging not only through her own speech, but through the reassembled words of those she recorded. The artists she interviews discuss their art practices, mythology, erotics, emerging technologies, nature and politics. The form is loose and capacious: conversations drift and disappear off the page, photographs are inserted without captions. Cy Twomby, who refused to participate, has his silences recorded. Lonzi’s son Tita interrupts the conversation, calling out to his mother. The male artists babble on, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes idiotically. The recorder is also a rope with which Lonzi lets the artists hang themselves. All she has to do is listen.

Remade dialogues also form the basis of Catherine Lacey’s 2023 novel, The Biography of X, in which Lonzi is fictionalized. As in Fumai’s rooftop performance, Lonzi’s words are repurposed. Yet in Lacey’s hands, Lonzi becomes a feminist devoted to ‘writing essays and petitioning her government for equal rights’, when in fact Lonzi always saw equality as a losing game. She believed that attempting to rebalance patriarchal systems would merely result in the same old subjugations. ‘The oppression of woman . . . is not overcome in equality, for it persists in equality. Nor in revolution, for it persists in revolution’, she writes in ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, where she gives all male revolutionaries the boot. For Lonzi, fighting for inclusion was like adding fresh water to a poisoned well – it would still kill you in the end.

In imagining a form of feminism beyond equality, Lonzi could sometimes overlook material realities. The right to abortion, she maintained, could not save women from their ‘vaginal destiny’; it merely helped the patriarchy perpetuate itself. In a letter to Pier Paolo Pasolini, where she refers to him as a ‘brother’, but one who ‘still gains a hearing before his sister’, she clarified her position: ‘Our aim was not to deny the freedom to abort but to change its meaning in the consciousness to those who will continue to undergo it.’ It’s tempting to separate out Lonzi’s thought into incisive and misguided, relevant and irrelevant. Yet her ideas are tightly interwoven. They present a totalizing vision in which those forced into the position of ‘women’ are free to change its meaning.

‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’ features in Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel in her Neapolitan quartet, where Lenù reads the essay while watching over her two children. She is overcome by its vision of expunction, vacant and glowing:

Every sentence struck me, every word, and above all the bold freedom of thought […] How is it possible, I wondered, that a woman knows how to think like that. I worked so hard on books, but I endured them, I never actually used them, I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking. This is thinking against.

For Rivolta Femminile, maternity and child-rearing were not in opposition to women’s emancipation. ‘We are not to blame for giving birth to humanity from our slavery. The father, not the child, enslaved us’. If anything, caring for children was the only outlet for a kind of play and pleasure that had been otherwise exiled from women’s lives. In her diary Shut Up or Rather Speak, Lonzi appears to have wanted to claw back the lost passions and mysteries of infancy. She rummages through her earliest memories, excavating how she became privy to life’s hierarchies. She dwells in particular on the birth of her sister – ‘a big, fleshy doll that glared at me with a ferocious unwillingness to share’, whose presence demoted Lonzi in the eyes of her parents – as the moment when she learnt that love can be withheld, or doled out unevenly.

Lonzi’s parents were both orphans, and she describes them as desperate to compensate for this lack. ‘In photographs’, she writes, ‘my mother always has the air of a shy, melancholic virgin, while my father laughs like someone who has much to do before he can be satisfied with himself’. As a preteen boarder, she was obsessed with the mystical writings of the nuns Teresa of Avila and Therese Martin. She later began to seek spiritual sustenance in painting and studied under the tutelage of Roberto Longhi, one Italy’s most revered art historians and critics. She followed him into the profession until it became antithetical to her burgeoning politics; Self-Portrait was her final act before abandoning art criticism.

In 1980 Lonzi employed a tape recorder for another book project, Now You Can Go, a transcription of her marathon four-day break-up with Consagra, whom she had been with for fifteen years. The excerpt included in Feminism in Revolt shows the couple trapped in their own irreconcilable realities. Lonzi can’t stand that his creativity is compartmentalized, while hers seeps into all parts of her life. They bicker about how they’ve influenced one another’s work. When Lonzi claims that Consagra drew on her diaries for one of his books, he retorts: ‘You put flesh to the flame on every page. I didn’t do that. I burnt nothing.’ The pair come to represent the tipped scales that define many heterosexual relations: a woman who will put flesh to the flame, a man who will burn nothing. In the end, Lonzi can no longer accept the ‘cancellation of her consciousness’, so she asks him to leave.

Lonzi renounced almost everything, yet she always came back to the nuns that taught her as an adolescent. ‘I have kept them in mind especially in moments of crisis, whenever I needed to admit that I had been deluded and to find the inner peace from which to start over’, she writes in ‘Itinerary of Reflections’. Lonzi found a template in the lives of ascetics: women who lived without the shackles of materiality or marriage, in places of ‘deprivation not destruction’. In such conditions, she observed, pain and ecstasy were entangled, and new forms of communication bloomed. The nuns had been on an ‘unseen, unquestionable adventure that was as abstract as love, concrete as suffering’. They proved Lonzi’s concept of ‘resonance’ – that women living in different times and contexts can nonetheless share a strange affinity, one that only becomes possible in refusing the forward motion of male history.

Read on: Bianca Beccalli, ‘The Modern Women’s Movement in Italy’, NLR I/204.

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Europe’s Core

In May 2023, Olaf Scholz proclaimed that a great ‘reindustrialization’ was taking place in Germany. Speaking at the launch of a new $5 billion Infineon semiconductor fabrication plant, the Chancellor boasted that one in three European microchips would now be ‘Made in Saxony’. A month later, Intel confirmed that it would invest $33 billion in two new factories in Magdeburg: the single largest foreign direct investment in the history of the Federal Republic. This was followed by an announcement that the Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC would assume a 70% ownership stake in a new €11 billion fabrication plant in Dresden. The so-called free market didn’t draw these companies into ‘Silicon Saxony’: an eye-watering €20 billion in subsidies from the German government did. The Eurozone’s High Priest of budgetary discipline has cast aside its holy writs, responding to the decline of its export-led growth model by going on a subsidy binge.

The immediate cause of the volte-face was the inflationary aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. In October 2021, as Europe began to unwind lockdown restrictions, the Director General of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), Eric-Mark Huitema, issued a warning. Europe’s automotive sector – the bulk of which is concentrated in Germany and its hinterlands – had suffered €100 billion of production losses during 2020, and the global supply of semiconductors was collapsing. In light of these shortages, Huitema called for a pan-European ‘strategic plan to increase the production of semiconductors in the EU’, with the aim of minimizing Europe’s dependency on overseas markets.

Across the Rue de Loi from ACEA’s headquarters, the European Commission was busy developing its plans to shore-up ailing European industry. Ursula von der Leyen stressed the need to bolster the EU’s chipmaking capacities in order to restore its ‘technological sovereignty’ amid rising geopolitical tensions. This culminated in a €43 billion package – the 2023 EU Chips Act – which sought to reduce Europe’s external dependencies while reshoring semiconductor production to the Single Market. The most important feature of the Act isn’t its headline price tag or lofty ambition to ‘double Europe’s share of the global semiconductor market by 2030’. Its real significance is at the level of the member states. The Commission has relaxed state aid restrictions, allowing national governments to inject public funds into their domestic semiconductor sectors. The Directorate General for Competition – traditionally the enforcer-in-chief of the EU’s strict anti-subsidy regime – has rubberstamped the new arrangements. Rather than zealously policing ‘anti-competitive’ practices, Brussels will now be giving active support to a mass subsidy regime.

This marks a decisive break from the recent past. In the 1990s and 2000s, Washington and Brussels viewed the development of the semiconductor industry as an example of globalization working as intended. The semiconductor supply chain is notoriously complex, incorporating multiple firms across numerous national borders. Producers in the UK specialise in the software that underpins modern chip manufacture; Silicon Valley dominates high value-added chip design; Taiwan exercises an effective monopoly over the fabrication of high-end chips; back-end manufacturing is outsourced to countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam. Western elites wagered that the eastwards expansion of the supply chains would consolidate the primacy of US and European companies, reducing prohibitive start-up costs, allowing them to focus on R&D, and ensuring a continuous supply of low-cost components.

But the business-school boosterism that underpinned this vision of globalization has unravelled. Rather than a sphere of seamless market exchange, the semiconductor supply chain has become a zone of economic rivalry and geopolitical conflict. China, determined to reduce its dependence on the West for high-end technologies, rapidly built-up its domestic fabrication capacities. In 2000, the year before its accession to the WTO, China launched the Shanghai Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a state-backed fabrication plant which aims to challenge its rival across the Taiwan Strait. In 2014, under the auspices of the ‘Made in China 2025’ programme, Beijing set aside $170 billion to support the development of Chinese ‘national champions’ – with SMIC one of the major recipients. By 2019, China accounted for 20% of global semiconductor exports, a figure that was projected to continue to rise over the following decades.

The Obama administration was initially relaxed about this rapid ascent, but some within the national security establishment soon began to voice concern. Semiconductors are a ‘dual use’ technology, capable of both civilian and military deployment, and China’s drive to secure technological independence also threatened to undermine one of the critical ‘chokepoints’ that Washington held over Beijing. With the 2018 Export Control Reform Act, the US authorities began to systematically frustrate China’s technological advance. Trump placed Huawei on the US ‘entity list’, and Biden expanded the restrictions, compelling US allies – including the Dutch firm ASML – to limit the export of critical machine tools and intellectual property to high-tech Chinese firms. At the same time, the Biden administration ramped-up support for domestic chipmakers, channelling $280 billion via the CHIPS Act to US industry.

The escalating chip war between the US and China sent shockwaves through Europe’s industrial core. Export controls, chip shortages and fierce competition over subsidies threatened to undermine the technological primacy of European industry. The primary casualty was Germany. In the boom years of the 2000s and 2010s, Germany consolidated its position as a globalized production platform. But the triumphs of yesterday cast a shadow over its ailing export-led economy today: dependence on Russian energy, persistent inflation above the Eurozone average, weak consumer spending power compounded by high borrowing costs, and a collapse in demand for German exports. ‘The risk of deglobalization is particularly acute for Germany’s growth outlook’, observed Joachim Nagel, President of the Bundesbank. ‘Its economy is far more open to trade than that of many other countries.’

For this reason, the pieties that dominated Europe’s political economy throughout the neoliberal era – multilateralism, competition policy, supply-side reform – will no longer do. A world of ‘weaponized interdependence’, as the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman put it, places a premium on strategic capacity, state power and scale. For European capital, what’s needed is a new framework for EU integration, capable of underwriting the trading bloc’s position at the core of the world economy. As a 2019 joint statement by the French and German governments put it, the choice is either to ‘unite our forces or allow our industrial base and capacity to gradually disappear’.

The EU Chips Act, with its ambition to create a pan-European framework capable of competing with the US and China, is an expression of this ‘unify or die’ logic. But it aspires to a peculiar kind of unification. The EU, of course, is still highly fragmented. Its budget remains a paltry 1% of the bloc’s overall GDP, which means there are insufficient resources at the supranational scale to support an expansive continent-wide industrial policy. Pooling resources, in effect, means creating the conditions for already existing industrial clusters and states with fiscal firepower to further consolidate their dominant positions. Convergence around a common EU industrial policy threatens to accelerate divergence between member states. Since the EU relaxed its restrictions, Germany has accounted for a staggering 53% of the total €672 billion issued in state aid. Germany has also benefited from new pan-European frameworks designed to support strategic sectors, gobbling up half of the state aid attached to the ‘Important Projects of Common European Interest’ in microelectronics.

In the wake of the Eurozone crisis, a cleavage emerged between Europe’s export-led northern core and its debt-led southern periphery. Elites had promised that European integration would support upwards convergence in economic performance amongst member states. But under the euro, with its strict debt and deficit rules and lack of fiscal transfer mechanisms, it became clear that integration was delivering the precise opposite. German industry boomed while the Eurozone’s southern debtor states suffered the penury of permanent austerity. Today, the conditions that enabled this bout of export-led dynamism are unravelling, with deleterious implications for German capitalism. But the EU’s response – a new pan-European industrial policy, enabling more muscular state interventionism – represents an attempt to reinforce Europe’s industrial core.

The myths that drove neoliberal globalization have now been shattered by the battle over semiconductors and other strategic sectors. Rules that were once rigidly applied are being bypassed to enable new waves of state interventionism; the ‘level playing field’ of the Single Market is being circumvented to shore-up dominant fractions of European capital. Meanwhile, new myths are being forged: an ever-more integrated and autonomous union, bound together by the challenge posed by China and Russia. As EU policymakers mobilize against their external rivals, the bloc’s internal rifts – between industrial core and underdeveloped periphery – continue to widen.

Read on: Christopher Bickerton, ‘Thinking Like a Member State’, NLR 138.

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Rules of the Game

On 17 February 1979, a mere six days after the Iranian Revolution, Yasser Arafat made an unscheduled visit to Tehran, where he addressed a jubilant and admiring audience. ‘In the name of revolutionaries and Palestinian fighters, I pledge myself that under the leadership of the great Imam Khomeini, we will liberate the Palestinian homeland together . . . We are fighting the same struggle, the same revolution . . . We are all Muslims, we are all Islamic revolutionaries’. With the news cameras trained on him, Arafat entered the ransacked Israeli embassy and flew the Palestinian flag from the balcony before a huge crowd, which chanted ‘Arafat, Khomeini!’ and ‘Viva Palestine!’. The footage reverberated around the Arab world. For a moment, Iran seemed to be inaugurating a new era of anti-colonial revolution, in which the liberation of Palestine would be front-and-centre. Today, it is difficult to understand the Islamic Republic’s approach to the Israeli state and its murderous campaign in Gaza without first rewinding to this period.

The ties binding Palestinian and Iranian militants can be traced as far back as the early 1950s. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that revolutionaries associated with what would eventually become the Marxist-Leninist People’s Fada’i Guerrillas and the People’s Mojahedin, as well as future officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, began to travel to Palestinian camps in Lebanon to acquire training in the art of guerrilla warfare. In 1970 another band of young Iranian idealists, which later became known as the Palestine Group, set out on their own pilgrimage to the camps with the aim of eventually launching a national war of liberation in their homeland. They were captured by the SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded security apparatus, and placed before a military tribunal, where their case brought them international fame – making its way into the pages of Les Temps modernes and inspiring the generation of activists that finally toppled the regime at the end of the decade.

The cause of Palestinian liberation was a constitutive part of the political and intellectual movements – from Marxist-Leninists to Islamists and religious populists – that shaped Iran’s revolutionary process during the long 1970s. The Palestinian and Iranian masses saw themselves as having a shared enemy. Not only were both the Shah and Israel backed by the imperial might of the United States; Mossad was also widely seen as having supported and trained the SAVAK, making it indirectly responsible for the deaths of countless Iranian revolutionaries. Four decades later, the signs of this legacy are still visible. Iran continues to celebrate Quds Day – an annual occasion ‘for the weak and oppressed to confront the arrogant powers’ – and many of Tehran’s streets, squares and cinemas bear the name of Palestine, standing as monuments to this period of Third Worldist and pan-Islamic solidarity. ‘Death to Israel’ is chanted at officially sanctioned Friday prayer sermons, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still dons the keffiyeh around his neck during public appearances. Yet much has changed since February 1979. The days of revolutionary fervour and possibility have passed, and this historic lifeworld has become a shadow of its former self.

It was not until the war with Iraq, from 1980 to 1988, that Iran’s transnational anti-colonial resistance movement appeared to morph – gradually and unevenly – into an Islamist state project shorn of the ideological pluralism that defined the preceding decades. There were a number of reasons for this shift: the expansion of the American naval presence in the Persian Gulf, which began under Carter and intensified under Reagan; US-imposed sanctions and arms embargoes; the West’s economic, diplomatic, military and intelligence support for Saddam Hussein; plus the Islamic Republic’s attempts to establish an internal monopoly on violence, entailing heavy repression against domestic opposition. All this created a state that was internationally isolated and genuinely embattled, as well as being prone to bouts of extreme paranoia and authoritarianism in the name of national security. The Iran–Iraq war inflicted immense damage on both parties and reached its ignoble denouement when triumphalist proclamations such as ‘the liberation of Jerusalem passes through Karbala’ gave way to the begrudging acceptance of Security Council Resolution 598.

The conflict taught the Iranian leadership that trying to export revolution under their own aegis would cause their many enemies to join forces against them, and that the state could not guarantee its security through conventional military means alone. It would perforce need to pursue an asymmetric strategy – a process that had already begun during the 1980s. Since the Islamic Republic was now heavily sanctioned and embargoed, and had neither the desire nor the ability to purchase F-14 Tomcat fighter jets from its erstwhile imperial patron, it began to plough resources into its ballistic missile programme and other asymmetric capabilities. An even more consequential part this strategy, which emerged out of the dialectic of revolution, war, regime consolidation and imperial encirclement, was the cultivation of deep organic relationships with political groups and popular elements which sought to resist US and Israeli domination.

Among them was Hezbollah, now the most powerful non-state paramilitary force in the world, which emerged out of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as the Islamic Republic and its Revolutionary Guards responded to calls for support from activist clerics and militants on the ground. Two decades later, the US-led invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein allowed Iran to insinuate itself in the country, forging ties with politically aligned groups that wished to see Western military forces driven out. This process was consolidated in 2014 when Islamic State vanquished the Iraqi army in Mosul, prompting the formation of Popular Mobilization Units at the behest of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which drew support from Iran in fighting back against the insurgents. It was thus that the ‘Axis of Resistance’ took shape: through a series of contingent alliances, often enabled by imperial overreach and the opposition it inevitably elicited. Iran’s state apparatuses have proven remarkably adept at exploiting political and security vacuums to work with actors who share a broad set of objectives, as illustrated by the Intercept’s ‘Iran Cables’.

Iran – or, more specifically, the IRGC’s Quds Force – does not simply ‘control’ these foreign actors, despite what Western media outlets say. The extent of its influence varies depending on the context and the organization in question. Its relationship to Hezbollah is profoundly different from its relationship to Yemen’s Ansarullah or Iraq’s Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, and its ties with Hamas are even more complex (the two took opposite sides on the Syrian Civil War, putting an intense strain on their relations). Such groups have their own motives for resisting US imperial penetration, Israeli occupation or Saudi domination. They are a far cry from being mere ‘proxies’ for Tehran.

The Supreme Leader’s vision for the Middle East, which the IRGC is tasked with realizing, involves ending the US military presence and dismantling the settler colonial garrison state in Israel. Iran’s financial and military support for its allies is an essential part of this strategy. Yet the Islamic Republic must walk a fine line between pursuing these political objectives and avoiding an all-consuming regional war in which the US would almost certainly take a leading role. This requires a rational and pragmatic approach. It means maintaining ‘strategic depth’ with Iranian allies abroad while also avoiding blowback at home. This course of action is welcomed by some constituencies in these foreign countries and bitterly resented by others.

By now the so-called ‘shadow war’ between Iran and Israel has been running for decades, waged mostly by indirect means. Before the 1979 Revolution, the two countries had a long history of intelligence, military and economic cooperation. In its wake, Israel still hoped that it could mend fences with its onetime ally as part of Ben-Gurion’s feted ‘periphery doctrine’, which aimed to establish strategic ties with non-Arab nations including Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia. Yet after the Oslo Accords, Israeli politicians from Shimon Peres to Benjamin Netanyahu increasingly adopted the discourse of ‘Iranophobia’ amid a moral panic about the country’s growing influence. From then on, Israel did its best to fuel hysteria about Iran so as to justify its ongoing project of military occupation and colonial settlement. One might say that if Iran did not exist, Israel would have had to invent it as a politically useful bête noire. This is not to deny that the Islamic Republic posed a genuine problem for an expansionist Israeli regime seeking regional hegemony. It did. But cynical Israeli politicians, among whom Netanyahu remains unmatched, have routinely exploited and exaggerated that problem to advance their objectives at home and in the occupied territories.  

The Iran–Israel relationship is one in which both sides have a firm grasp of the unwritten ‘rules of the game’. Israel’s modus operandi has been to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, IRGC and allied military personnel, sabotage nuclear facilities and other industrial targets, mount drone attacks on assorted military sites and launch sorties against alleged IRGC targets in Syria. Iran, for its part, has continued to support its allies along Israel’s borders, hoping to deter it from lashing out against neighbouring states and erode its resolve to pursue its colonial enterprise in Palestine. 

In the six months since Al-Aqsa Flood, Iran’s actions have been largely consistent with this security doctrine. Immediately after the attack, Khamenei stressed that Iran had no foreknowledge of it nor any hand in planning it: ‘Of course, we defend Palestine and its struggle . . . but those who say the work of Palestinians stems from non-Palestinians don’t know the Palestinian nation and underestimate it . . . This is where their error lies and where they miscalculate’. This rare public intervention reflected his desire to head-off an attempt by the Israeli state to pin the responsibility on Iran and thereby spark a wider war. Both the Iranian leadership and Hezbollah have been wary of falling into this trap, which could distract from the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza and draw them into a confrontation with the US. Instead, they are playing a much longer game: maintaining a balance of deterrence with Israel, yet stopping short of any action that could cause a regional conflagration.

Iran’s restraint is partly determined by its domestic political situation, which remains fragile and fraught with contradictions. A widespread feeling of malaise has set in, amid declining living standards, corruption scandals and bouts of brutal repression against social unrest – on dramatic display during the women-led uprisings of autumn 2022. The nation has been gripped by political inertia, with uncertainty over Khamenei’s successor fuelling elite infighting and jockeying for position. For many Iranians, it seems that the most serious ‘security threat’ comes from the social and political tumult within the country’s borders, not beyond them. Given such instability, there has been intense public debate over the costs of entering into conflict with the imperial powers and whether the country can bear them. Additionally, while the Iranian people are horrified by Israel’s crimes, the state’s attempts to turn anti-Zionism into a component of its own Islamist identity has generated considerable resentment in some quarters. This is perhaps most evident among a younger generation chafing against the government’s restrictive cultural and political policies and invasive surveillance apparatus.

Nonetheless, Israel has been testing the limits of Iran’s reluctance to engage in direct hostilities. Its recent aerial assault on Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing several high-ranking Quds Force officers and violating basic diplomatic norms, was the kind of escalation that Tehran could not ignore. Just as it was forced to respond to the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, it was bound to do the same this month, if only to re-establish the basic parameters of its deterrence doctrine. The leadership launched Operation True Promise on 14 April, marking the first Iranian military strike on Israel from its own territory: a complex, multi-layered swarm attack including over three hundred domestically produced drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, which Iranian state media showed flying over Karbala in Iraq and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Iran gave advance warning of the operation to its neighbours and the Americans. With support from the US, UK, France and Jordan, Israeli authorities claimed to have shot down 99% of all incoming projectiles, although that figure was later revised downwards.

Fortunately, this unprecedented confrontation had an ‘offramp’ for all parties involved. Not a single Israeli citizen was killed, reducing the need for a major retaliation from Tel Aviv, yet the Islamic Republic was still able to claim that it had reasserted its red lines and restored deterrence. Before the operation had even finished, Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations declared that ‘the matter can be deemed concluded’. The head of the Iranian armed forces, Major-General Mohammad Baqeri, stated that ‘operations are over and we have no intention to continue them’. Yet he also insisted that if Israel decided to retaliate then Iran would launch a much larger attack without giving prior warning.

While the Iranian attack was primarily intended to reassert the previous lines of engagement, the fact that about nine out of the thirty ballistic missiles (the exact figures remain contested) were able to penetrate Israel’s Iron Dome defences and achieve direct hits on two military bases, including the Nevatim airbase – the same one from which the attack on the Damascus consulate was launched – will surely affect the Israeli leadership’s calculus going forward. The extent of Israel’s counter-strike on 19 April, near a major airbase in the city of Isfahan, remains unclear, but it was obviously calculated to avoid provoking further retaliation from Iran. Although the recent exchange of fire is unlikely to lead to all-out war, it has nonetheless highlighted Israel’s vulnerability at a decisive political moment.

Just as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood demonstrated the foolishness of ignoring the ongoing plight of millions of Palestinians living under blockade, occupation and apartheid, Operation True Promise has set a new precedent that Israel and its allies will ignore at their peril. Already sanctioned to the hilt by Western powers, Iran has shown that it is ready to retaliate from its territory if Israel should decide to recklessly escalate the fighting and upend the established rules of engagement. The question is whether the Israeli state will learn its lesson and walk back from the brink. Though on this occasion Biden refused to support a forceful Israeli response, this may not be the case in future – or indeed, under a future administration. As long as Israel continues its total war on the Palestinians, the spectre of a wider regional conflict will remain an all-too-real possibility.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty’, NLR 54.

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Gaining Ground

On 10 April, South Korea went to the polls to elect a new National Assembly. President Yoon Suk Yeol and his conservative People’s Power Party (PPP) suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of the progressive Lee Jae-myung and his Democratic Party (DP). With a turnout of 67%, the DP’s coalition captured 176 out of 300 possible seats, while the PPP took only 108. Yoon is now a lame duck, with little power to pass bills through the DP-controlled legislature. He is promising a complete cabinet reshuffle and a new political approach to restore credibility. Lee is basking in his victory, yet he is also under increasing pressure to live up to his campaign pledges.

Lee was born into a poverty-stricken family in Andong, eastern Korea, in 1964. At age thirteen his family moved to a planned industrial city outside Seoul and he worked as a child laborer in a rubber factory, where an industrial press crushed his wrist and left him permanently disabled. This incident, he says, inspired his decision to become a labour lawyer and engage in left-wing politics. Having worked as a DP spokesman after the 2008 election, he served as mayor of Seongnam from 2010 to 2018 and then as governor of Gyeonggi Province (the most populous region in the country). His election campaign touted the popular social-democratic reforms he implemented in both places, as well as his close relationship with the trade union movement. Lee foregrounded the cost-of-living crisis and workers’ rights, promising to reduce the working week by half a day while expanding welfare for women, children and the elderly. He argued in favour of geopolitical neutrality and diplomatic engagement with North Korea and China.

Yoon, a famed prosecutor who led the corruption investigation that toppled the former president Park Geun-hye in 2017, struck a different note. He described Korea as an underdog nation which has prospered through hard work, giving rise to world-class conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai. He stressed the importance of unfettering the private sector and accused his opponent of being a corrupt crypto-communist with sympathies for North Korea. While Lee called for state intervention to curb inflation, Yoon organized a council of businessmen and banking representatives to deal with rising prices. In the run up to the vote, Yoon made a televised trip to a grocery store where he let slip that he did not know the price of green onions – a staple of the Korean diet. After the clip went viral, Lee began to don a crown made of green onions at his campaign stops. In the end, both parties cruised to victory in their respective strongholds. The richest neighborhood in Korea, Gangnam district, remained dominated by the PPP, while the DP took left-wing constituencies like Gwangju, the birthplace of Korea’s Democratization Movement. Yet the opposition triumphed overall by winning the swing voters in key urban districts.

Lee’s candidacy was dogged by scandal, amid accusations that he had given favours to land developers in exchange for bribes during his mayoral tenure. To his supporters, this was a politically-motivated investigation driven by Yoon and his allies in the judiciary (at one point the president said that he would personally prosecute his opponent if he had the chance). Even so, the charges created an opportunity for Lee’s opponents on the right of the DP to try to oust him as leader, albeit unsuccessfully. They also prompted Lee’s former chief of staff to take his own life, citing the pressure of the case in his suicide note. As the controversy raged, Lee was subject to a lone-wolf assassination attempt, stabbed in the neck during a public meeting earlier this year.  

Lawfare has a long history in South Korea. Since 1987, when the dictatorship collapsed following a massive protest movement led by students and workers, the country’s democratic system has been volatile. Six former presidents and prime ministers have spent time in jail. Some of these arrests were widely supported by the public – as with President Park – while others, such as the impeachment of President Roh in 2004, caused widespread outrage. In many cases, litigation has been used to repress the left. Given the legacy of the Korean War and the effects of military conscription, it is difficult to declare oneself a socialist in South Korea without facing immense scrutiny and possible imprisonment. To give just one example, in 2014 a newly formed left-wing party, the Unified Progressives, performed surprisingly well in the Assembly elections, whereupon its leaders were immediately accused of helping North Korea to plan an invasion and jailed for treason. The party was subsequently banned.

A loophole for progressive politics, however, can be found in South Korea’s unusually militant trade unions, which have a high level of popular and institutional legitimacy. The largest union grouping, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), wields significant power. And the more radical Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) has become a model for labour organizing throughout Asia, drawing on its experience of the Democratization Movement and training its members in a variety of protest tactics. Throughout his presidency, Yoon has tried his best to crush this movement. He made international headlines in 2023 for his failed attempt to extend the working week from 52 hours to 69 hours, provoking a standoff with the FKTU and the KCTU, and he has taken a hard line on the ongoing doctor’s strike, threatening to fire those who walked out in protest against the government’s plan to expand medical school acceptance rates.

Yet the most decisive confrontation between Yoon and organized labour came at the end of 2022, when he broke a truckers strike led by the KCTU, sending 2,5000 of them back to work and prosecuting some of the organizers. Yoon, who likened the picket to a nuclear attack by North Korea, saw his approval ratings rise in the wake of the incident, as many people feared the economic damage that the strike would inflict. This emboldened him to launch another anti-union crusade the following spring, targeting the construction unions under the KCTU umbrella. Alleging that ‘illegal bribes’ and other forms of corruption were damaging productivity, Yoon proceeded to go after union members with legislation typically reserved for organized criminals. A total of 2,863 union members were labelled offenders; 102 were arrested and prosecuted.

The following May Day, Yang Hoe-dong, a KCTU member who was facing prosecution, set himself on fire outside the courthouse right before his trial. In a widely circulated letter written shortly before his death, Yang described the humiliation he felt at being compared to a criminal, and suggested that the Yoon government was no better than Korea’s past dictatorships. This sparked a summer of union activism and public demonstrations of a kind that had not been seen since the mobilizations against Park in 2016. The Yoon administration faced off against the KCTU and its allies in other social movements. Mass protests, walkouts and clashes with police were common.

Yang’s suicide evoked the memory of Jeon Tae-Il, the 22-year-old labourer who self-immolated in 1970 to protest the cruel working conditions imposed by the dictatorship. Although the government tried to cover up his death, Tae-Il became a martyr who inspired a wave of clandestine labour organizing led mostly by female garment workers. This episode is implicated in two competing narratives of Korea’s twentieth-century history. The first holds that Tae-Il’s protest was a wake-up call for activists across the country which eventually led to the collapse of the military regime, opening the way for social progress and democratization. The second claims that Korea’s economic success and global prestige were underpinned by the dictatorship’s industrialization policies, which the labour movement opposed on self-interested grounds. Today, Lee represents the former position, Yoon the latter.

The recent election results indicate that Lee’s narrative is in the ascent. The president’s strike-breaking has undermined his popular mandate, while his opponent has benefitted from partnering with the unions. Now, the question for the Korean left is how to consolidate the gains of the strike wave and use the DP’s control of the National Assembly to its advantage. Lee’s attitude towards the unions over the coming months will say much about his political outlook. Will he be receptive to the labour movement, or will he adopt a more top-down bureaucratic approach? So far, Lee has walked a tightrope between the populist rhetoric of a Sanders or a Corbyn and the liberalism of his DP predecessor Moon Jae-in. Which of these tendencies will win out remains to be seen. In recent years there has been a leftward turn in Korean culture, with directors from the generation of pro-democracy activists such as Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-Wook dramatizing issues like inequality, working conditions and state repression. Progressive currents are gaining ground. Might they soon find their way into the halls of power?

Read on: Kevin Gray, ‘Political Cultures of South Korea’, NLR 79.

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In the Basement

In 2002, shortly before his death, Roberto Bolaño – always sentimental – surveyed the three central tendencies of Argentine literature after Borges. One was commercial and frankly bad: this was the ‘fiefdom of Osvaldo Soriano’ who wrote nostalgic, high sales pabulum about men in bars discussing football. Another current began with Roberto Arlt, self-taught and ambitious, but paranoid and dark: ‘the literature of doom has to exist, but if nothing else exists, it’s the end of literature’. Then there was a ‘secret current’. In the great house of Argentine literature, Bolaño insisted, there was ‘a little box on a shelf in the basement. A little cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you find inside is hell.’ The high priest of this infernal tradition was Osvaldo Lamborghini, who was born in Necochea, near Buenos Aires, in 1940, and died of a heart attack in exile aged 45.

Who was Lamborghini to fill Bolaño, hardly one to shrink from darkness, with sufficient fear that he could barely stand to read him? For the novelist Alan Pauls, Lamborghini was a ‘damned myth’ even in life. His most famous pronouncement – ‘publish first, write later’ – indicated his antipathy to the book, which trapped writing between tombstone covers and required the approval of that most loathsome creature: an editor. Lamborghini’s three slim books were for a long time near unobtainable, circulating as xeroxes of xeroxes; his magazine work, consisting of poems and essays, even more scarce. In the 90s, a Spanish house (of all places) published a collection of his fiction in editions assembled by César Aira, his literary executor and most dedicated reader. Pauls – among Lamborghini’s sharpest readers – was not alone in expressing a certain discomfort: ‘was it right to pull the cursed from his hideout and sandwich him between two sumptuous slices of carboard, officializing with the Book’s bourgeois dignity the insults, the violence, the deformed phantoms that his congregation had learned to enjoy in zine-like subedits?’

The taciturn Lamborghini first became legend in the Argentine literary world with a short story titled ‘El fiord’. It was published by a half-invented publisher in 1969, in a booklet with an accompanying essay by psychoanalyst-writer Germán García. The story evokes a dizzying succession of brutalities and obscenities – rapes, incest, mutilations, beatings, whippings, murders and cannibalism, for starters – all taking place somewhere overlooking a picturesque fiord. Written in a mix of plebeian street talk, immigrant creole, Freudian lingo and movement-speech, the story was, in part, a harsh satire of Peronism, the governing movement of the working class, proscribed and persecuted after a 1955 coup yet still Argentina’s largest political organization. Lamborghini’s older brother, the poet Leónidas Lamborghini, showed the manuscript to the eminent Peronist writer Leopoldo Marechal, who famously remarked: ‘It’s perfect, like a sphere. A pity that it’s a sphere of shit’.

Characters in ‘El fiord’ include winking evocations of Perón, of collaborationist Peronist union leader Augusto Vandor, of the CGT (the main Argentine labour federation); refrains from the movement and allusions to its subcommittees and factions, including those with a fascist bent, abound. Yet confining ‘El fiord’ to allegory or critique would be short-changing Lamborghini’s genius. As critic Graciela Montaldo suggests, Lamborghini’s story captured the violent spirit of the Argentine sixties rather than its historical facts: a military dictatorship, Peronism persecuted and splitting into right and left, collaborationists and separatists, doctrinarians and innovators. It was a story of the ‘revolutionary threshold’. Hence its beginning, with childbirth, and its ending, in a demonstration:

And why, if at the end of the day the child turned out so miserable – with regards to size, understand – did she proffer such shrieks, rip her hair out by the handful and fling her ass against the tiger-striped mattress?

. . .

And, with that, we went out in demonstration.

The story had two critical antecedents. One was ‘The Slaughter Yard’, written by Esteban Echeverría in 1837 and considered a foundational story of Argentine literature. As César Aira would have it, Lamborghini’s entire oeuvre consisted of rewritings of ‘The Slaughter Yard’. In that story, a handsome bourgeois man travels through a Buenos Aires slum where butchers and other racialized proletarians are working. It is Lent; he is a Unitarian, a Buenos Aires resident disinterested in distributing the port’s income to the entire country. Noticing him, the barbarous poor – federalists, in favour of distribution – attack and ultimately rape him. Argentine literature, as David Viñas remarked a few years before ‘El fiord’ was published, began with a homosexual gang rape.

The other antecedent, contemporaneous with Echeverría, was Hilario Ascasubi’s poem, ‘La refalosa’. Named after a popular dance of the time – described by Echeverría as ‘the dance of throat-slitting’ – the poem describes the torture of a Unitarian gaucho by federalist forces in the language and rhythm of dance. Torture and rape have since been literary symbols in Argentina of political and socio-economic conflict. Lamborghini ­– influenced by psychoanalysis and part of Literal, a magazine that inaugurated a psychoanalytic literary left in Argentina and translated Lacan – took this to a new extremity. Pauls describes him, paradoxically, as a ‘literal’ writer: in his work, premises, archetypes, ideas accelerate into their own obscene impossibility.

No Lamborghini juvenilia exists, except for a poem found scribbled in a notebook. Lamborghini appeared ex nihilo. In 1973, he published Sebregondi retrocede, a poetry collection that his editor suggested he turn into prose, and was thus termed a ‘novel’. Poetry was the backbone of his writing, hence a famous pronouncement contained in that book: ‘Whereby poet, zap! Novelist’. According to Aira, the character of Sebregondi was based on an Italian uncle – who visited in Lamborghini’s youth and stepped back (hence the ‘retreat’) to take a family photograph – combined with Witold Gombrowicz and longtime editor of Sur magazine, José Bianco. Sebregondi was also Lamborghini’s attempt to engage with the canonical Martín Fierro, after whose second part (‘The Return’) Sebregondi’s fourth and final section is named.

Infamously, the book’s third section is an independent short story titled ‘El niño proletario’, which inverts the basic premise of ‘The Slaughter Yard’. Unusually conventional for Lamborghini, it focuses on Stroppani, a malnourished working-class boy who has suffered a traumatic upbringing. One day, three bourgeois classmates run into him outside school, and begin beating him. They slice his face and body with shards of broken glass and take turns raping and otherwise destroying him. Unlike Echeverría’s gallant bourgeois, who resisted the barbarous horde bravely until the end, Stroppani suffers in pathetic, submissive silence:

We towed the proletarian boy’s lax body towards the chosen location. We availed ourselves of a wire. Gustavo strangled him under the gem-like moonlight, pulling from the ends of the wire. The tongue was left drooping from the mouth as in all cases of strangulation.

The prose is crystalline and simple, but with an intensity that conveys the sheer pleasure of the torturers. Lamborghini’s inversion of Echeverría turned out to be prophetic as political violence escalated and a genocidal dictatorship seized power in 1976. Lamborghini fled to Barcelona from its programme of clandestine assassination, kidnapping and disappearance of leftists, students and workers. As he later wrote: ‘On March 24th, 1976, I, a crazy, homosexual, Marxist, drug addict and alcoholic became a crazy, homosexual, Marxist, drug addict and alcoholic.’

Lamborghini spent much of his exile writing poetry, and published a third and final book, Poemas, in 1980. It included his two most famous poems: ‘Die Verneinung’ – first published in the New York-based Cuban exile journal Escandalar – was a thousand-verse, four-part examination of Argentine literary history, Lamborghini’s own life, and his conception of poetry. The other, ‘Los Tadeys’, introduced a creature that would be the protagonist of Lamborghini’s literary opus, Tadeys, a novel which he wrote in three months in 1983. In his final years, Lamborghini wrote pornographic stories and began a sprawling multimedia project, Teatro proletario de cámara, in which pornography of every variety was juxtaposed with poetry and images of everyday life.

What are Tadeys? In the poem, the creatures appear indirectly. Yet in the novel the Tadey, also known as a tadeo, is a humanoid animal discovered in a cave system in the fictional Eastern European nation of La Comarca during the medieval era. They are distinguished from humans by their inferior intelligence, inability to speak, hairlessness and ugliness. They are also sex-obsessed – sodomites by day, heterosexual by night – and quickly become enraptured with humans. The Tadey also has delicious meat and high-quality leather, while their tears are distilled into the most potent alcoholic beverage in the world. Because of this, they are the bedrock of La Comarca’s economy, as well as central to its cultural imagination, rather like cows in nineteenth-century Argentina.

Aira found three folders of Tadeys material and published it in their idiosyncratic, non-chronological order. The first is a family narrative of rural-urban immigration of the humble Cab clan to the capital, Goms Lomes. It culminates with Lamborghini’s most famous set piece – the ‘barco de amujeramiento’ – where in a kind of biopolitical machine on steroids, male prisoners are subjected to a grotesque programme of force-feminization. The second and third sections of the novel deal with the contemporary governance of La Comarca and the history of the medieval discovery of Tadeys and their society. Throughout, sex and violence – which blur together with sometimes cartoonish excess – are a means of examining social power and domination. As Paul Preciado said of Lamborghini – whom he connects with the Marquis de Sade – in his pornography, sex is revealed as the ‘hidden grammar’ of politics. A footnote in Tadeys asks: ‘The state . . . was it a man [hombre] or a woman? By those days, the symbiotic and unambiguous answer was “it’s hunger [hambre] for all, an egalitarian mania that tempted the devil and had fallen into absolute dis-credit (indifference)”’.

In contrast to the rest of Lamborghini’s work – perfect and lazy, mysterious, almost brutally concise – Tadeys’ steampunk unfurling of the infinite myth of a faraway-land reads like some unfinished draft of a total novel; it is also a crude but inscrutable depiction of the violence that had consumed his homeland and forced him into exile. For Bolaño, Lamborghini’s masterpiece was ‘excruciating’. ‘Few books can be said to smell of blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts’, the Chilean wrote. Yet what Bolaño recoiled from, he was also drawn to recreate – the influence of Tadeys on 2666 is undeniable. So much for perfection – the real rarity is true perversion.

Read on: David Rock, ‘Racking Argentina’, NLR 17.

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First Priorities

The French left is at a crossroads. Having failed to win the presidency or assemble a parliamentary majority in 2022, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is now attempting to chart a way forward for La France insoumise. The party faces a hostile media, voter apathy and an increasingly authoritarian government. NUPES, the electoral alliance over which it presides, has fractured. The only way for LFI to prevail in this unfavourable conjuncture and preserve its fragile hegemony over the other progressive parties is to expand its electoral base ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. But there are competing theories of how to achieve this, and deep uncertainties over the most viable strategic direction.

At present, LFI’s only strongholds are Paris, its surrounding banlieues, the peripheries of major cities such as Marseille, Toulouse and Lyon, and the French overseas territories. The party has struggled to attract support in the peri-urban areas that produced the gilets jaunes. For many activists, this signals a problem with its organizational culture. Since LFI was established in 2016, it has been dominated by a small group of parliamentarians and staffers close to Mélenchon. Stefano Palombarini has described it as a ‘pirate ship’ where all major decisions are taken by the captain. This nimble, centralized structure was partly what enabled its rapid ascent. Yet, today, some members have become convinced that the party will not break out of its Paris bubble unless it is thoroughly democratized. Clementine Autain, the deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, argues that it is time to ‘throw open the doors’ and ‘become a mass movement’. The leadership and its supporters, however, believe that this cannot occur until robust internal mechanisms for mediating political disagreement have been developed. Since the membership has now expanded beyond the core of loyal Mélenchonistes, they warn, ‘throwing open the doors’ could mean abandoning political discipline and watering down their left-internationalist programme.

This dispute relates to the vexed question of who will lead LFI into the next election. One contender outside the circle of Mélenchonistes is the filmmaker-turned-parliamentarian Francois Ruffin. Born in Calais in 1975 and raised in Amiens, the constituency that he now represents, Ruffin is a self-described ‘petit-bourgeois intellectual’ – his father a manager at the Bonduelle vegetable company, his mother a housewife – who attended the same high school as Macron. In 1999 he founded Fakir, a left-wing satirical journal, and in 2003 published a searing critique of France’s media landscape, Les petits soldats du journalisme. Throughout the 2010s he directed documentaries on life in peripheral France, the dynamics of deindustrialization and the gilets jaunes. His 2016 film Merci patron!, a blistering takedown of France’s wealthiest citizen, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, so enraged its subject that he bribed the French security apparatus to spy on the director. Ruffin was elected in 2017 as a candidate for the micro-party Picardie Debout, before joining the LFI parliamentary group later that year.

Ruffin is in favour of throwing open the doors of LFI. For him, the path to the Élysée runs through the rural areas and deindustrialized small towns once dominated by the Socialist and Communist parties, where much of the population are manual labourers, low-waged service workers or retirees. The only way to win back such voters from the RN, he argues, is to speak to their material concerns: ‘the discourse of real life’, as he calls it. In practice, this means promoting protectionist economic policies and a strong welfare state. He lambasts the government for unleashing an ‘epidemic of bad work’ and calls for limited forms of workplace democracy, with a third of the seats on company boards to be given to employees. This focus on employment conditions is an attempt to connect LFI’s current base to more peripheral constituencies. As Ruffin observes, there are clear commonalities in the working lives of urban racialized populations and those of white people in small towns. As part of this strategy, the politician typically avoids domestic issues deemed too sensitive, such as migration, and moderates his line on international ones. When he speaks at Palestine rallies, he demands an immediate ceasefire and denounces Israel’s war crimes, but he also insists, against LFI’s official position, that Hamas is a terrorist organization. When riots broke out over the death of Nahel Merzouk, a teenage boy shot by police in the Parisian suburbs, the Mélenchonistes denounced the killers as bloodthirsty racists, while Ruffin called for institutional reform.

Ruffin’s approach can be compared to that of Sumar in Spain. He argues that a populist strategy – maintaining a permanent war footing and provoking perpetual conflict with the establishment – will simply exhaust the party’s activist base and alienate large swathes of the electorate. He claims that LFI has already won the battle for hegemony on the left, and that it must now convince voters outside the fold. While many of his LFI colleagues have split with their erstwhile NUPES partners, Ruffin continues to collaborate with figures such as the Ecologists’ Marine Tondelier. Privately, those on the left of the Ecologists say that they would prefer to work with Ruffin than with a Mélenchoniste, and that a NUPES revival in 2027 would be more likely under his candidacy.

The Mélenchonistes have a different outlook. For them, the high rates of abstention in both the banlieues and peripheral France suggest that scores of voters remain disenchanted with the present political system. The party must therefore advocate a rupture with that system: its foreign policy, its economic orthodoxies, its security services and its social ethos. The aim should be to sharpen each political antagonism so as to achieve a state of what Mélenchon calls ‘permanent insubordination’. In a recent debate with Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé, Mélenchon accepted that the left needs to win back rural France – ‘who could argue otherwise?’ – but insisted that a focus on the urban quartiers populaire is even more essential. These areas tend to vote for LFI at a rate of 80%, but with a turnout of only 30%. The left should therefore strive to activate these abstentionist populations rather than gambling on the possibility of winning back Le Pen voters.

One Mélenchoniste who has been mooted as a future leader is Mathilde Panot. The 34-year-old deputy, who represents Val-de-Marne just south of Paris, is the daughter of a mathematician and an agricultural scientist. She studied international relations at Science Po and worked as a community organizer for a nonprofit operating in the banlieues before becoming an LFI staffer. Elected to the Assembly in 2017, she now serves as the party’s parliamentary leader. The optimum strategy, as she sees it, is to construct cleavages in which the left is polarized against the RN and Macronists – revealing the latter to be two sides of the same coin. She has been particularly vocal in her support for Palestine, aware that this issue plays well in banlieues.

Yet Panot is consistently upstaged by Mélenchon himself, who remains a major national presence despite claiming that he is willing to hand over to a new leader. Since October he has been more forceful in denouncing the siege of Gaza than any other national politician. He has attended the ICJ hearing and organized protests against France’s arms shipments to Israel while attacking Macron’s sabre-rattling on Ukraine. Mélenchon seems to be aware that Panot lacks the national profile to have a plausible shot at victory; and he is keen to kibosh the ascent of Raphaël Glucksmann, the ultra-hawkish PS candidate who is currently riding high in the European election polls. This, along with his desire to keep LFI aligned with his vision, may well motivate him to run again in 2027. Mélenchon’s supporters note that each of his previous campaigns has brought him closer to the second round (his longtime friend Lula, who was elected president of Brazil on his fourth attempt, is cited as proof that persistence can pay off). His detractors, meanwhile, claim that he is unable to unite the broad left and point to polling which shows that he would have been beaten had he made it to the run-offs in 2022.

There is plenty of common ground between Ruffin and Mélenchon, both of whom have indicated that their positions could be reconciled. The LFI leadership has established several working groups dedicated to winning over rural areas. They have also deployed a number of so-called ‘popular caravans’: cadres who are dispatched to strategic constituencies to engage with the population and then relay their views to the central party apparatus. For the Mélenchonistes, LFI could yet become a parti de masse by stepping up such campaigns and providing local services such as food distribution to deprived communities. Yet when it comes to the party’s overall priorities, the divergence remains stark. Ruffin emphasizes the need to alter the current distribution of voters, while Mélenchon aims to enlarge the total electorate. The first approach implies moving beyond populism, while the second means refining and intensifying it. The two sides disagree over the extent to which the official polling underestimates Mélenchon and whether there are enough potential voters in the banlieues to propel him to power.  

Whoever leads LFI into 2027 will have to appeal to the parts of French society which are disenchanted, but which currently have no affiliation with the left. This problem is exemplified by the ongoing farmers’ protests. As with previous bouts of unrest, the government is trying to halt the demonstrations while the parties to its left and right are competing to capitalize politically. Here, LFI should be in an advantageous position, since its manifesto calls for radical agricultural reform – repudiating the free-trade agreements passed in the European parliament – and one of its allies, the Confédération Paysanne, is among the organizers of the movement. Yet the party has struggled to gain a foothold, partly because of the media’s emphasis on the reactionary elements of the protests and their rejection of environmentalism.  In an attempt to shift the tide, Ruffin has been rubbing shoulders with farmers at the annual Salon International de l’Agriculture, which Mélenchon has boycotted for the last decade, hosting his own counter-salon that promotes peasant farming over agribusiness. Yet neither has managed to cast their party as a vehicle for farmers’ interests.

Over the coming years, the two factions will have to answer a number of difficult questions. Is it possible to shift the allegiances of Le Pen voters? Can this be achieved without alienating LFI’s current electoral base? And does the alliance with the centre-left risk corrupting the project? Conversely, is the strategy of constant conflict capable of reaching a broader constituency? Can the radical left win without the centre-left? Is there a sufficient number of abstentionists who could be activated? Whatever course the party takes, it will have to operate in a turbulent political climate which is increasingly hostile to the left. The institutions of the Fifth Republic – the state, the media, the mainstream parties, big business, the police – are determined to crush the rebellion that LFI represents. Reversing France’s reactionary drift will be a Herculean task.

Read on: Serge Halimi, ‘Condition of France’, NLR 144.

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Possibilities

I first heard about the work of the American writer Susan Taubes on a date. I mentioned that I wanted to write a novel that resisted fragmentation – one that would sustain a scene or an idea or a thought over several pages, several thousand words, in the flow of unbroken narrative. My date wasn’t impressed. The novel is such an expansive form, he replied, why would you want to write in such a conventional way? Because I admire it, I said. This proved persuasive and laid the matter to rest. We saw each other only once more after that, and then (to my dismay) never again. A few weeks later, I bought a copy of Divorcing, which he had said exemplified the possibilities of the form.

Possibility, indeed. Divorcing was the only novel Taubes published in her lifetime, and was recently reissued to great acclaim. This was followed by a previously unpublished novella, Lament of Julia, collected with nine short stories. The word, of course, has two connotations. There’s the possibility of shimmering potential, and the possibility of a set of prospective options, which remains suppositional until one is realised. Taubes’s life story lends itself to the first. Born in Budapest in 1928, she emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of war, completed a doctorate on Simone Weil, taught religion at Columbia, married and had children. Shortly after Divorcing appeared in 1969, she drowned herself off the coast of East Hampton, at the age of 41. The novel had been dismissed a few days earlier in the New York Times by Hugh Kenner; Susan Sontag expressed a belief that her friend’s suicide had been linked to the review.

It is the second sense of possibility that better characterises her fiction. ‘Her life cannot be told’, says the narrator of Lament for Julia. It is a remark that could serve as an axiom of Taubes’s work. The novella begins with the disappearance of Julia, conveyed in lyrical soliloquy. Time and setting are unspecified, though the work shifts from a fable-like account of her childhood to a more realist adultery plot. The only daughter of Mother and Father Klopps, as a child Julia sucks her thumb, wets the bed and daydreams. In adulthood, she marries and has children. She appears to lead a generally contented life but the narrator intimates that only a sense of propriety is keeping Julia in the marriage. Eventually, she falls passionately for a younger man and begins an affair. By the end, Julia has absconded – where to, we do not know. The narrator is bereft: ‘She must’ve slipped away; while I was talking, I didn’t notice; I went on talking to myself. And now it is too late. I have lost her. Lost Julia’s beauty in the water’.

But Lament for Julia is not as straightforward as a synopsis might suggest. We never discover who – or what – the narrator is. ‘If she were simply a body and I simply a mind. If only it were as simple as that. But we are a jumble of odd bits and between us we do not even make up a person’. Is it Julia’s conscience, or a demented guardian angel? The narrator – and we as readers – spend the novel struggling to grasp the nature of their relationship. ‘How did I come by her? What had we to do with each other?’ Despite apparent sorrow at losing Julia in the end, the narrator is deeply ambivalent about her, and their ontological dependency: ‘She was my constant nagging pain. My shame and despair. I wanted to get rid of Julia. But what was I without her?’

The account offered of Julia’s life is equally plagued by indeterminacy. Attempting to describe the Klopps home, for instance, the narrator wonders how it should do so, finding its memory comprised of ‘impressions with as little logical connection as in a dream’, ‘the various facets and angles’ of the house ultimately failing to ‘make up a consistent object’. Julia remains similarly elusive: ‘My sense of her is less of a person than of things, places and seasons’, the narrator confesses. The details, it seems, are unfixed: ‘Shall I not give her a better girlhood? . . . When Julia was still with me I could revise her life at a moment’s notice’. There are said to be many possible and apparently conflicting ways to portray her – child, wife, adultress and so on – though the narrator admits that there ‘could only be one canvas’. ‘Painted by several hands’, it concedes, ‘But which was the true one? Were they all true?’ Lament for Julia is ultimately less an account of Julia’s life than of the narrator’s struggle – and ultimate failure ­– to narrate it.

If Lament for Julia is an exercise in absence, Divorcing is an experiment in abundance. It narrates the life of Sophie Blind, whose biography overlaps with Taubes’s own. The novel opens with her death – she is run over by a taxi in Paris – and then turns back to her life: her divorce from her belittling and pompous husband Ezra; her relationship with a lover named Ivan; her life as a child in Hungary, with a philandering mother who remarries a younger man and a psychoanalyst father who takes her away to live in the United States. We follow these different threads of a life through fragments composed in a multitude of different styles, tenses and perspectives. The first of four sections alone flits from narrating Sophie’s life in the third person to assuming her own voice in the first once she realises that she is dead, before moving into a letter possibly addressed to her lover, from the present to the past.

Running through these shifts, implicitly and explicitly, is Sophie’s own inability to explain herself, to make sense of her life. Attempting to end her marriage, she notes that she cannot explain to Ezra why it is over. ‘Must it be explained?’ she wonders. ‘Even if her own position is groundless, the fact is she has no position, has no plans, she is nowhere.’ At times, Sophie seems less unable to explain herself than unwilling to, resistant to sense-making: ‘Thinking about the sense of one’s life, trying to make sense of it, was an idle and useless preoccupation, Sophie had always believed. Worse than useless, it was positively unhealthy. In short, a bad habit.’ The novel itself is devoid of order and sense in the conventional meanings of those words, caught as it is between life and dreams and death.

Near its end, the narrative returns to Sophie’s childhood: ‘The double loss of a world and of the person who belonged to that world was experienced by an anonymous schoolgirl in a sailor-blouse uniform and high brown laced shoes. Sophie Landsmann, the name on the trolley pass, who was she?’ By this point the reader has spent over two hundred pages considering Sophie’s life, too many for her to be referred to with an indefinite article or her full name. The passage is disorienting, even disconcerting, and reads like a possible beginning. It may well be the case that Taubes intends to disorient the reader; it is also possible that the effect arises from artistic indecision. Why choose how to begin a story, when all the possible beginnings could be included?  

But then, why choose to begin a story at all? Sophie herself is apparently writing a book, but when asked by her father to explain what kind of book it is, she refuses to answer. Writing for her, unlike psychoanalysis for her father, is not about ‘coming into consciousness’. The purpose of writing, for Sophie, is the certainty of the final product:

A book is simply and always a book . . . With a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake. The question does not pose itself. Writing a book appealed to Sophie on all these grounds. In a book she knew where she was. Because, however baffling and blundering and ambiguous, a book was a book.

These lines seem to justify a ‘baffling and blundering’ book, absolving the writer of responsibility and acceding to the failure Taubes depicts. Her narratives are less accounts of their protagonists’ lives than of their failures – failures that begin with an inability to express who they are, how they feel and what they want. Sophie appears incapable of articulating her feelings: ‘There was something she had to tell him . . . She could not tell him . . . she could not speak at all.’ Her only act of self-assertion is a negative one: her refusal to answer her father’s question about what kind of book it is, perhaps because she herself doesn’t know, or can’t say. Divorcing mirrors this inability to speak in its refusal to cohere, to assert or resolve itself aesthetically. Taubes’s novels feel as if they break off mid-sentence, still seeking a form for failure that wouldn’t itself succumb to it. Formally and thematically, they are works of unrealised possibilities, and ultimately of limitation.

Assessing her work in the London Review of Books, Jordan Kisner writes that to ‘know where you are, to be able to name things and feel that you belong among them, to come home to oneself in language – this is what Taubes strives towards but can’t fully achieve. Her writing never moves in a single direction, never resolves itself. This isn’t an aesthetic failure, but it is existentially painful.’ This is perhaps the closest any contemporary writer on Taubes comes to acknowledging the failure of her work. That no one has, and that Kisner stops short, speaks to a collective inability (perhaps refusal) to recognise the deep tragedy of her work – and her death, too.

Read on: Claudio Magris, ‘The Novel as Cryptogram’, NLR 95.

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End of Innocence

We are sometimes blessed with unexpected moments of truth. ‘The fish rots from the head’, declared French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal as he pounced on the latest fabrication of the unconditional support camp – he was lambasting the alleged moral corruption of student activism against the war in Gaza at ‘elite’ Institut d’études politiques de Paris. A miraculously accurate statement from a mouth typically full of untruths. That the fish rots from the head is even doubly true. For the head can be understood in a metaphorical sense: as representing the rulers and, more generally, the dominators. In this sense, yes, the rot is now everywhere. And it can also be understood in a metonymic sense: as the operations of thought, and in the case at hand, the decay of those operations. More than that even: the collapse of the norms supposed to govern them.

Such collapse is not attributable to mere stupidity (which rarely makes a good hypothesis), but rather to self-interested stupidity. For even if via extensive mediation, material interests are ultimately determining of the inclination to think one way, and to prohibit thinking another way. This is where the rotten head of the fish articulates its dual meaning: the violence of the bourgeois bloc (metaphor) unleashed in the imposition of its forms of thought (metonymy).

Why has it been unleashed with a ferocity that it would not, say, on matters of taxation or working hours? What is it about this international event that has such a powerful resonance in national class conjunctures? One answer is that the Western bourgeoisies consider Israel’s situation as intimately linked to their own. This is an imaginary, semi-conscious connection which – far more than simple sociological affinities – is driven by a subterranean affinity which cannot but be denied. Sympathy for domination, sympathy for racism, perhaps the purest form of domination, and therefore most exciting for the dominators. This affinity is heightened when domination enters a crisis: an organic crisis in capitalism, a colonial crisis in Palestine, as when those dominated revolt against all odds, and their antagonists are ready to crush them in order to reassert domination.

But there is also a deeper fascination for the Western bourgeoisie. It was Sandra Lucbert who saw this with penetrating insight, positing a word that I believe to be decisive: innocence. The fascination is with the image of Israel as a figure of domination in innocence. To dominate without bearing the stain of evil: this is perhaps the ultimate fantasy of the dominant. During his trial, the left militant Pierre Goldman yells at the judge: ‘I am innocent, I am ontologically innocent and there is nothing you can do about it’. As different as the circumstances are, his words resonate: after the Holocaust, Israel established itself in ontological innocence. And indeed, the Jews were first victims, victims at the summit of the history of human violence. But victim, even on this scale, does not mean ‘innocent forever’. The only way to move from one to the other is by means of a fraudulent deduction.

The Western bourgeoisie retains of all this only what suits it. It would so much like to indulge in domination in innocence itself. This is obviously more difficult, but the example is right in front of their eyes, and they are hypnotised by it, and immediately caught up in reflexive solidarity.

Humans have various ways of not facing the violence they perpetrate. The first consists in degrading the oppressed: they are not truly human. Consequently, the harm done to them is not really evil and innocence is preserved. Undoubtedly the most powerful and most common is denial. This is what the term ‘terrorism’ is used for. It is a category designed to prevent thought, in particular the thought that ex nihilo nihil: that nothing comes from nothing. That events do not fall from the sky. That there is an economy of violence, which functions on the basis of a negative reciprocity. And that it could be summed-up by a paraphrase of Lavoisier’s principle: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything returns. The countless acts of violence inflicted on the Palestinian people were bound to return. Only those whose sole intellectual operation is condemnation were guaranteed not to see anything coming beforehand or understand anything afterwards. Sometimes incomprehension is not a weakness of the intellect but a trick of the psyche: its categorical imperative. You have to fail to understand to fail to see: to fail to see a causality you are part of – and therefore not so innocent.

To claim it all began on 7 October is a vicious and characteristic intellectual corruption of this kind, one that only an ontologically innocent nation could subscribe to, along with all those who envy them, and who love to believe with them in effects without cause. We shouldn’t even be surprised that some of them, as is the case in France, continue to use the word ‘terrorism’ against climate activists – labelling them ‘ecoterrorists’ – without batting an eyelid when they should be in hiding, consumed by shame. They do not even respect the dead, whose memory they pretend to honour and whose cause they support. But ‘terrorism’ is the shield of Western innocence.

The misuse of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ can be analysed in similar terms. In its present deviations (which obviously does not exhaust all cases, since there is plenty of genuine anti-Semitism) the accusation is intended to delegitimise all those who wish to recognise causality, and therefore call into question innocence.

Rotting of the head is first and foremost this: the self-interested corruption of the categories and operations of thought, because what there is to protect is too precious. The consequence is the lowering – one might even say the debasement – of public debate. It is no coincidence that the rotten fish spoke through Attal’s mouth, since this debasement is typical of the process of fascisation in which Macronism, supported by the radicalised bourgeoisie, has embroiled the country. A process that we can recognise by the growing empire of lies, systematic misrepresentation, even outright fabrication. With – as is only right and proper, and always the case – the collaboration of the bourgeois media.

Yet all the denials and symbolic compromises, all the intimidation and censorship, will do nothing to stem the relentless surge of reality from Gaza. What the camp of unconditional support for Israel is supporting, and at what cost, is something that it is evidently no longer capable of seeing. For everyone who has not completely lost their senses, and looks on in horror, the ideological perdition – between biological racialism and messianic eschatology – into which the Israel government is sinking is bottomless. What we can see, and what we knew already, is that eschatological political projects are necessarily mass-murdering ones.

As Ilan Pappé has argued, the hallmark of colonisation when it is settlement-based is the wish to eliminate the presence of the occupied – in the case of the Palestinians either by expulsion-deportation or, as we now see, by genocide. Here, as on other such occasions recorded by history, dehumanisation is once again the justifying trope par excellence. There are now countless examples of it, both from official Israeli mouthpieces and in the muddy stream of social networks, staggering in their gleeful monstrosity and sadistic exultation. This is what happens when the veil of innocence is lifted, and as always, it’s not a pretty sight.

One feature in this landscape of annihilation that catches our attention is the destruction of cemeteries. This is how we recognise projects of eradication: domination carried to the point of symbolic annihilation which, if it’s a paradox, is reminiscent of the terms of Spinoza’s herem: ‘May his name be erased from this world and forever’. In this case, it was no great success. Nor will it be here.

What we are witnessing is moral suicide. Never before has there been such a colossal squandering of symbolic capital that was thought to be unassailable, which had been built up in the wake of the Holocaust. It turns out that the time for symbolic reckoning is coming for everyone, especially for this colonial project which calls itself the West and claims a monopoly on civilisation, yet wages violence in the name of its principles. If indeed they ever floated, its moral credentials are now sunk. It takes the arrogance of the soon-to-be-fallen rulers, who don’t yet know it, to believe that they can pursue this course without cost. Those who remain passive, who participate as accomplices, even acting as deniers of such an enormous crime being committed before their eyes and before the eyes of everyone else – people of this kind can no longer lay claim to anything. The whole world is watching Gaza die, and the whole world is watching the West watching Gaza. And nothing escapes them.

At this point, we inevitably think of Germany, whose unconditional support has reached astonishing levels of delirium, and of which one darkly humorous Internet user was able to say: ‘When it comes to genocide, they are always on the wrong side of History’. It’s not certain that ‘we’ – France – are much better off, but it is certain that History is waiting for everyone around the corner. History: this is what the West meets in Gaza. If, as there is reason to believe, this is a rendezvous with decline and fall, then the time will come when we will be able to say that the world was upturned in Gaza.

Read on: Alberto Toscano, ‘A Structuralism of Feeling?’, NLR 97.

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Hand and Mind

Mark Rothko’s interest in light and space is evident in any encounter with his work. But he was also the author of a theoretical treatise on artistic practice, never published in his lifetime, posthumously titled The Artist’s Reality (2004). Likely written in 1942-43 as the painter drifted away from the figuration of his earliest works, the book treats a wide range of concepts and problems: the use of archaic forms and ancient myth as sources; psychology and the physics of perception; the social-historical changes compelling painters to adjust their practice from demands of lordly benefactors to the vagaries of the market. It is organized according to a central hypothesis, that painting can be divided into two fundamental categories: the ‘illusory’, or ‘visual’, and the ‘tactile’. Like the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach, Rothko dwells on sense-perception – this-sidedness (Diesseitigkeit) as the means by which painting discovered the truth, producing a ‘generalization’ of reality capable of reconciling subject and object.

Among the senses, it was not vision – as might be expected – but touch that Rothko considered to be elemental. Touch organized reality and confirmed the veracity of an object. Painting interested in truth therefore addressed depth perception as it might be experienced by touch, rather than proceeding according to the linear perspective of an imagined or idealized eye. Rothko designated this approach, whereby a painting took itself as its own object, as ‘plastic’. Rather than ‘conveying the illusion of appearance’, plastic artists – he gives the example of Egyptian wall painters – paid no heed to conventions of representation. For the plastic artist, ‘the subject of painting is the painting itself, which is a corporeal manifestation of the artist’s notion of reality’. The visual form, Rothko contended, had been dominant in Western art since the Renaissance in response to Platonism’s denigration of the world of appearance. Tactile plasticity, by contrast, staged the sensuous discovery of generic features of appearance.

Rothko’s opposing terms then were not appearance versus essence, but rather appearance versus the essence of appearance: Plato ‘could not foresee the development of the twentieth-century method for the representation of the essence of appearances through the abstraction of both shapes and senses’. Such representation held the promise of restoring a unity between subject and object which had prevailed in antiquity, much as Lukács looked to the ‘happy’ age of the Homeric epic which knew no division between inner and outer life. It is unlikely that Rothko would have read Lukács, but his theories bear a striking resemblance to those of Christopher Caudwell, who in Illusion and Reality developed a theory of the plastic arts in which ‘the visual sense…is eked out by tactile corrections’, and where ‘the affects do not inhere in the association of the things, but in the lines and forms and colours that compose them’. Caudwell’s principle is not unlike Rothko’s stated aim of raising painting to the level of poetry and music: ‘the philosophers of antiquity were her poets, who symbolized the ultimate unity of all that was considered reality in the created myths’. Ut pictura poesis.

Installation view: Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ADAGP, Paris, 2023

At the recent retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, curated by the artist’s son Christopher Rothko and Suzanne Pagé, two early figurative paintings already indicate something of this suspicion of the illusory and the visual. Movie Palace (1934-35), a dim, angled panorama of a cinema audience, depicts those attending with blacked-out eyes (also a feature of the contemporary self-portrait exhibited in the same room) or even nodding off, as is the case for the most recognizable feminine subject, who has propped up her head in her hands, eyelids shut. Contemplation (1937-38), meanwhile, depicts an elderly man, blonde with yellow skin, turned and looking away from a small globe towards a miniature window or rectangular image on the opposite wall; horizontally, the painting is divided by a cash register, with its red light on. A schematic rendering of a windowsill is beige, but the overwhelming backdrop is composed of two shades of black. This is not the only place where the ‘classical’ rectangular forms of the mature Rothko are already hidden in the background of the early work, but it is the most remarkable (though Rothko denied any correspondence).

Having dropped out of Yale to devote himself to painting, by the turn of the 1940s Rothko had abandoned figurative portraits and street scenes, including his well-known subway series, turning to a style he called ‘surrealist’. Such works, which set geometric or biomorphic forms against flat backdrops and relied on cubist rendering of multiple perspectives, carried titles indexing archaic myths, including those of Greece and Mesopotamia: Antigone (1939-40), Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942), Tiresias (1944) and so on. The Greek gods were a lifelong, enduring symbol of the ‘limitations of human expression’. Rothko’s friendship with Clyfford Still and association with other abstract painters in New York informed a further movement away from figuration. Whether this was to be understood as concrete or abstract was an open question. In a 1946 catalogue essay, Rothko wrote that Still ‘expresses the tragic-religious drama which is generic to all Myths at all times . . . He is creating new counterparts to replace the old mythological hybrids who have lost their pertinence in the intervening centuries’. It was a matter, as he put it to Barnett Newman, of ‘further concretizing my symbols’. (A self-described ‘materialist’, Rothko would some years later contrast his work with that of the surrealists, who translated the real world into dream – he was rather insisting that ‘symbols were real’).

What followed was a period of the so-called multiforms: modular, abstract canvases, exhibited without frames, which abandoned line altogether and therefore the conventions of illusory perspective, even in heightened or self-reflexive cubist form. In works such as No.17/No.15 and No.14 (Golden Composition) Rothko developed the blurred rectangular structures common to the classical period, though in their earlier stages they are often vertically arranged and placed in a jigsaw pattern, without the discrete planes of the work of the 1950s. No.1 (1949) reintroduces some line, but only as outline, and incorporates the smoothed-over quadrangles in the stacked tripartite form of background, covered by a pseudo-foreground through the application of layers of thin paint above and below the viewer’s line of sight (Rothko insisted, famously, that his canvases be hung frameless close to the floor). These were the first of what are most recognizably Rothko in presentation. Untitled (1949) inaugurates the fully classical period. It is a large canvas. For Rothko, small pictures placed the viewer outside of the experience of viewing – one ‘looks upon an experience as a stereopticon’; but with a larger picture, ‘you are in it’.

Installation view: Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ADAGP, Paris, 2023

One remarkable painting, No.9/No.5/No. 18 (1952) – held by a private collection and hardly ever exhibited – suggests a small but significant concession to illusion. A navy-blue backdrop is all but blocked out by the brilliant red rectangle occupying nearly half of the canvas, and the corresponding ochre of the bottom third. What is notable is a narrower yellow rectangular band overlayed in the transition between the two. It is flanked by two lighter layers of the same yellow, extending nearly to the edge of the canvas, where the blue backdrop re-emerges. They are set at a slight angle, suggesting the imposition of perspective, albeit in a spectral way, and achieved without line itself. The presence of minimal illusion among its other elements makes this one of the most stirring compositions of the retrospective.

Elsewhere, among the classical Rothkos of the 1950s, one encounters other means by which depth, space and light are rendered without illusion: as in the rounded corners of quadrangles, their frayed edges giving the appearance of light while actually dispersing it. They evoke organic substances – contracting muscles or membranes – but these forms are generic and cannot be felt to refer to any specific physical body. They do, however, communicate the presence of the hand and its relation to the concept, as a pragmatics of seeing and perceiving. The Blackforms series of the mid-1960s make even greater demands on the viewer. Here, the little light which is not absorbed by these mammoth black canvases reflects back the reality of the mechanics of seeing – conjuring a monument to the effort expended by the viewer and the painter together in forging an image out of what at first appears to be monochromatic black.

Rothko was fastidious about the placement of his works. On various occasions – for the Phillips Collection, the Seagram Murals, the Rothko Chapel – he supervised the design of the room and not just the sequence of canvases. The first of these, dating to 1954-60, was recreated at the retrospective: three canvases surround a bench, their orientation insisted upon by the artist. The organization was undertaken with the aim of recruiting the viewer to better experience the physical process of perception – a process Rothko himself understood, in his own idiosyncratic definition, as psychological (psychology deals with ‘the mechanics of the sensual apparatus’). Although they are meant to be encountered by individual observers, Rothko argued that his paintings were part of ‘social action’. Politics was never absent in this process. A self-described liberal – and a committed anti-Communist who resigned in 1953, along with Adolph Gottlieb, from the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors he’d help found because it was insufficiently vigilant in the Cold War – Rothko was nevertheless highly suspicious of the ruling class which sponsored him, albeit belatedly, and of the art market itself.

This was partly what inspired his use of pre-capitalist antiquity as a model for his early 1940s theories. Not mediated by the market, the artist of antiquity was under no illusions about the nature of his relation to his benefactor, and for this reason those artists understood a social reality not easily accessible to artists of the capitalist (or ‘modern’) epoch. Rothko saw that ‘the market through its denial or affording of the means of sustenance, exerts the same compulsion’ as the direct compulsion of non-market societies, but with a ‘vital difference’. Ancient civilizations ‘had the temporal and spiritual power to summarily enforce their demands’; without this ‘dogmatic unity’, ‘instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority’.

Installation view: Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ADAGP, Paris, 2023

The Seagram Murals indicate something of Rothko’s conflict. Commissioned in 1958 by Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building on Park Avenue, Rothko undertook their construction with ‘strictly malicious intentions’. He said that he’d hoped ‘to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room’ and that he intended to make ‘viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall’. Over the course of a decade, a plainly anguished Rothko refused to deliver the work, and became convinced that the wealthy diners were too indifferent to be intimidated by his murals. He had anticipated – or maybe even orchestrated – this dispute, and had included a clause in his agreement, later exercised, allowing him to repossess the works should the room not meet his expectations. By 1969, he had arranged for the murals to be donated to the Tate. He was found dead in his kitchen of an evident suicide the day they were delivered to London in late February 1970.

The Seagram Murals are enormous wine-red and dark–brown tapestry-like canvases. Heavily layered, their forms – the outlines of columns and trapezoidal shapes – are conveyed more by texture and placement than by colour contrast. The gigantic Red on Maroon (1959) is actually a diptych, one portion hung atop the other, mimicking the quadrangular planes of his classical work; here, the small bit of gallery wall in between them is analogous to the layered background in the classical single canvases.

Installation view: Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ADAGP, Paris, 2023

The exhibition concludes with the Black and Gray series, here shown with Giacometti sculptures as planned for an unrealized UNESCO commission. The curators attempt to rebut a common interpretation that these works evince symptoms of depression (by the end of his life, Rothko was being treated with the antidepressant Sinequan and suffering from numerous ailments, including an aneurism and high blood pressure). Contemporary with them, they point out, are some of the most vibrantly coloured works Rothko ever produced. Yet, if not morose, the Black and Gray works do appear to be anhedonic, or even anodyne. The effect is accentuated by two distinguishing features: the use of non-reflective acrylic imparts a shallower surface than those produced by Rothko’s typical mixture of oil and acrylic. Secondly, all but one of these works employ a border, achieved by half-inch tape applied during painting and leaving blank canvas exposed. Though abstract, they look more like representations, and share none of the immersive quality of other Rothkos.

Perhaps what they most resemble are minimalist mock photographs – the ironic staging of an illusory technique to represent a stereotype of the then-famous classic Rothkos. Rothko here appears to pursue the objectification of painting through illusory representation of his own work. ‘It is the camera that is chasing the artist’, he remarked in the Artist’s Reality, ‘chiaroscuro is the heart of photography’. These late works suggest by the last years of the sixties, the camera had begun to encroach on Rothko’s project. In this reading, the Black and Gray works are Rothko’s Parthian shot at illusion, one of the last in a lifelong effort to safeguard reality from it.

Read on: Hal Foster, ‘Art Agonistes’, NLR 8.

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Republican Resurgence?

In Turkey’s local elections, held on 31 March, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) achieved its strongest showing in fifty years, winning 38% of the overall vote. As well as landslide wins in the country’s largest cities – Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Antalya – the CHP also claimed several conservative strongholds in Anatolia, where it is traditionally weak and has not governed for decades. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) meanwhile received 35%, its worst results to date. This was a remarkable turnaround. Less than a year ago, Erdoğan and the AKP-led ruling alliance triumphed in the presidential and parliamentary elections with relative ease, seeing off the opposition despite a failing economy and the country having suffered the worst earthquake in its modern history. How might this upset be explained?

First, the economy. The promises of the nationalist-Islamist coalition, made during the May 2023 election campaign, went unfulfilled. The AKP implemented a not entirely consistent return to neoliberal austerity and deflationary policies, a so-called ‘hybrid’ economic regime that has led to contradictory results such as resurgent inflation without a parallel increase in domestic demand. This compounded the dissatisfaction with the AKP that had already been rising since 2018, and was reflected in a large number of abstentions and invalid votes. While voter turnout was 84% in the 2019 local elections, and 88% in last year’s general elections, this year it fell to just under 79%, with the AKP and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) losing the most votes proportionately. So far, dissatisfied voters have mostly turned to other parties within the ruling bloc; the Islamist splinter party YRP jumped from around 2% to over 6%; in Anatolia and Kurdistan in particular, it contested the AKP’s leading position in strongholds and even won two provinces.

This accounts for the erosion of the AKP vote. What of the CHP’s success? The party’s strong presence in local politics was the key factor. Its administration of Ankara and Istanbul has shown that not everything goes down the drain when the AKP is out of power. On the contrary, public services have improved and populist redistributive policies have been passed, as more resources were available without the favouritism afforded to AKP-affiliated Islamist organisations and entrepreneurs. This was viewed favourably in the wider context of the AKP’s economic mismanagement. The party’s internal overhaul – with long-time leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu replaced by Ozgur Ozel, who is close to Istanbul’s prominent mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu – also appears to have had a salutary effect. In the major cities, CHP victories were huge: they won not only the mayoralties but also swept the city parliaments and most of the neighbourhoods. Crucially, here they were able to win votes from the government bloc and thus – at least at local level – partially reverse the process of electoral polarization.

A further explanation is that, although the main opposition alliance collapsed following a series of internal power struggles prompted by last year’s defeat, the electorate continued to view its candidates as a de facto unified slate and voted accordingly, along tactical lines. This informal alliance gained some support from the left, although the pro-Kurdish DEM (formerly HDP) decided to run its own candidates across the country. This was based on legitimate grievances about how Kurdish support was taken for granted in the last election. Still, supporters of the former opposition alliance voted almost universally for the CHP and punished the opportunism of other parties. The Kurds supported the CHP in the west and their own party in the east. In Kurdistan, the DEM achieved strong results and won back many provinces – results which the politicized judiciary is already trying to repress.

What lessons can be drawn? The electoral disappearance of smaller far-right and Islamist opposition parties shows that opposition is possible without them, disproving liberal theses that you must please everyone if you want to defeat the AKP. Instead, the results suggest that, in principle, a convincing alternative to Erdoğanism can emerge given a favourable conjuncture. Opposition voters have signalled a strong desire for change. In places where leftists worked together to heed this demand, they achieved some notable successes.

Yet it is also important to note that the CHP is still contributing to the rightward drift in Turkish politics that began in 1980, even if it is currently opposed to the AKP’s authoritarian excesses. Its economic programme simply calls for a definitive return to orthodox fiscal and monetary policy. This means that the party could squander its support if the AKP and MHP are able to improve the material situation for the mass of the population. At present, the CHP can also oscillate between promising democratization to the Kurds and making nationalist-conservative overtures to traditionalists. Yet as it makes gains at the national level, it will have to back up its words with deeds, and this balancing act will be much harder to sustain. It will then fall to the left to articulate a counter-hegemonic vision for the country.

Read on: Cengiz Gunes, ‘Turkey’s New Left’, NLR 107.