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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 This was followed by a previously unpublished novella, Lament of Julia, collected with nine short stories.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.

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Sea and Earth

The far right wants to decolonize. In France, far-right intellectuals routinely cast Europe as indigenous victim of an ‘immigrant colonization’ orchestrated by globalist elites. Renaud Camus, theorist of the Great Replacement, has praised the anticolonial canon – ‘all the major texts in the fight against decolonization apply admirably to France, especially those of Frantz Fanon’ – and claimed that indigenous Europe needs its own FLN. A similar style of reasoning is evident among Hindu supremacists, who employ the ideas of Latin American decolonial theorists to present ethnonationalism as a form of radical indigenous critique; the lawyer and writer Sai Deepak did this so successfully that he managed to persuade decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo to write an endorsement. Meanwhile in Russia, Putin proclaims Russia’s leading role in an ‘anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony’, with his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov promising to stand ‘in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonization’.

The phenomenon goes beyond the kinds of reversal common to reactionary discourse. A decolonial perspective is championed by the two foremost intellectuals of the European New Right: Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin. In the case of de Benoist, this involved a major departure from his earlier colonialist allegiances. Coming to political consciousness during the Algerian War, he found his calling among white nationalist youth organizations seeking to prevent the collapse of the French empire. He praised the OAS for its bravery and dedicated two early two books to the implementation of white nationalism in South Africa and Rhodesia, describing South Africa under apartheid as ‘the last stronghold of the West from which we came’. Yet by the 1980s, de Benoist had shifted course. Having adopted a pagan imaginary and dropped explicit references to white nationalism, he began to orient his thought around a defence of cultural diversity.

Against the onslaught of liberal multiculturalism and mass consumerism, de Benoist now argued that the Nouvelle Droite should struggle to uphold the ‘right to difference’. From here, it was a short distance to claiming a belated kinship with the plight of Third World nations. ‘Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness’, he wrote with Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012). The authors insisted that the Nouvelle Droite ‘upholds equally ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures under the threat of extinction’ and ‘supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism’. Today, the preservation of anthropological difference and a sense of indigenous fragility are common tropes on the European far right. ‘We refuse to become the Indians of Europe’, proclaims the manifesto of the neo-fascist youth group Génération Identitaire.

Dugin, a close associate of de Benoist, has integrated this decolonial spirit into his worldview even more deeply. His system of thought ­– what he calls neo-Eurasianism or The Fourth Political Theory – is underpinned by a critique of Eurocentrism derived from anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss. Russia, he claims, shares much with the postcolonial world: it, too, is a victim of the assimilating drive inherent to Western liberalism, which forces a world of ontological diversity into a flat, homogeneous, de-particularized mass (we can think of Renaud Camus’s ‘Undifferentiated Human Matter’ or what Marine le Pen called ‘the flavourless mush’ of globalism). Contra this universalizing agenda, Dugin asserts, we live in a ‘pluriverse’ of distinct civilizations, each moving according to its own rhythm. ‘There is no unified historical process. Every people has its own historical model that moves in a different rhythm and sometimes in different directions.’ The parallels with the decolonial school of Mignolo and Anibal Quijano are hard to miss. Each civilization blossoms out of a unique epistemological framework, but such efflorescence has been stunted by the ‘unitary episteme of Modernity’ (Dugin’s words, but they could be Mignolo’s).

Modernization, Westernization and colonization are ‘a synonymous series’: each involves imposing an exogenous developmental model upon plural civilizations. That the ethnonational identities Dugin defends are artefacts of the colonial production of difference – the racial regimes through which it differentiates, categorises, and organizes exploitation and extraction – is not considered. Nor, for that matter, is the quintessentially modern character of many anticolonial movements, which sought not to return to a traditional culture but rather to remake the world system. As Fanon put it, decolonization could neither renounce ‘the present and the future in favour of a mystical past’ nor base itself on ‘sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry’ of a debased Europe that was, at the time he was writing, ‘swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.’ 

Dugin and de Benoist are unfazed by such contradictions. ‘The Fourth Political Theory has become a slogan for the decolonization of political consciousness’, Dugin claims, whose first practical expression is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is understood as a long-awaited struggle in the reunification of Eurasia, an ancient pan-Slavic civilization dismembered by Western designs, but also the first stage in what he calls the Great Awakening, a millenarian battle to overturn the liberal world order and usher in a multipolar world. Dugin envisages a coalition of movements across the world participating in this battle: ‘American protestors will be one wing and European populists will be the other wing. Russia in general will be the third; it will be an angelic entity with many wings – a Chinese wing, an Islamic wing, a Pakistani wing, a Shia wing, an African wing and a Latin American wing’. But isn’t the war in Ukraine an imperial war, or a war of ‘competing imperialisms’, as Liz Fekete put it? Dugin would agree. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a key step in its ‘imperial renaissance’.

How is it possible to speak the language of imperial renaissance and decolonization in the same breath? Here, Dugin and de Benoist draw their principal resources from Carl Schmitt. In his writings on geopolitics, Schmitt identifies in the ‘sea power’ of the Anglo-American maritime empires a particular kind of imperial domination – one that is dispersed, deterritorial, floating, financial, liquid. Sea power breeds a scattered empire lacking in territorial coherence and generates a spatial-juridical framework that reads the surface of the earth as merely a series of traffic routes. This imperialism also generates its own epistemology: ‘The juridical way of thinking that pertains to a geographically incoherent world empire scattered across the earth tends by its own nature towards universalistic argumentation’, Schmitt writes. Under the guise of abstract universals such as human rights, this imperium ‘interferes in everything’. It’s ‘a pan-interventionist ideology’, he writes, ‘all under the cover of humanitarianism.’

Against the deterritorial imperium, Schmitt opposes what he considers to be a legitimate, territorial imperialism. This is based around his concepts of the Grossraum and the Reich: a Grossraum can be understood as a civilizational bloc, while the Reich is its spiritual, logistical and moral centre. As Schmitt writes, ‘every Reich has a Grossraum into which its political idea radiates and which is not to be confronted with foreign interventions’. If the imperium corresponds to an ‘empty, neutral, mathematical-natural scientific conception of space’, the Grossraum involves a ‘concrete’ conception inseparable from the particular people that occupies it. This territorial notion of space, Schmitt writes, ‘is incomprehensible to the spirit of the Jew.’ As de Benoist proclaims: ‘The fundamental distinction between the earth and the sea, the land and sea powers, which define the distinction between politics and trade, solid and liquid, area and network, border and river, will become more important again. Europe must stop being dependent on US sea power and be in solidarity with the continental logic of the earth.’ Land is being colonized by water, the heartlands by the port cities, sovereign authority by flows of transnational capital.

With this opposition between the imperium and the Grossraum, Schmitt’s thought provides an impressive realignment: territorial empire-building becomes compatible with a certain anticolonial sentiment. In Dugin and de Benoist’s recent writings, ‘colonization’ is a despised deterritorial affair, while ‘imperialism’ is reserved for a more noble, territorial form of expansion. Colonialism thus comes to mean less a phenomenon of political or military domination than ‘a state of intellectual enslavement’, in Dugin’s words, less a matter of territorial annexation than a form of subjection to ‘colonial ways of thinking’. It is the ‘sovereignty’ of minds, words and categories that is violated. Colonialism dominates the world by stripping away identities: no more women, only Gender X (to use Giorgia Meloni’s terminology). It is ‘ethnocidal’ at its core; cultural erasure and demographic replacement are its principal tools. ‘Military, administrative, political and imperialist colonizations are certainly painful for the colonized,’ Renaud Camus tells us, ‘but they are nothing compared to demographic colonizations, which touch the very being of the conquered territories, transforming their souls and bodies.’

With the meaning of colonization transformed to refer to shifting migration patterns (wrought by nothing other than the colonial structure of the global economy), changing gender norms and a homogenizing liberal culture, the far right can present themselves as champions of popular sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples. They can also stage an imaginary struggle against the ravages of transnational capital. To decolonize, for these thinkers, is to split off one kind of capitalism from another, a procedure well established within far-right thought. A globalist, rootless, parasitic, financial capitalism (imagined now as colonial) is separated from a racial, national, industrial capitalism (imagined as self-determining, or even decolonial). It goes without saying that such a separation is illusory: global systems of capital accumulation, with their entwined processes of immaterial speculation and earthly extraction, cannot be decoupled in this way. But separating the inseparable does not seem to pose a problem for reactionary thought. Indeed, it may be crucial to it. For once an imaginary antinomy has been constructed, one can disavow the hated side of it, and in this way seem to gain mastery over one’s own riven interior.

Read on: Jacob Collins, ‘An Anthropological Turn?’, NLR 78.

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In Pieces

The fictions of the Croatian novelist Daša Drndić are catalogues of a shattered humanity. Families, communities, countries. Broken social orders beget broken lives. In her greatest work – among them, Trieste (2007), Belladonna (2012) and EEG (2016) ­­­­– fragmentation is everywhere. Personal episodes convolve with historical interpolations and primary documents – lists, epitaphs, inventories, recipes, instructions, ledgers, receipts; syntactic fragments are presented as standalone sentences; lines begin in the lower-case, as if severed from larger notions. Layout, as well, is wrenched to the theme: the splintered stories of young Printz in Doppelgänger are divided by the cutting lines found on paper worksheets, or the body awaiting the scalpel. In EEG, the final novel Drndić published before she died in 2018, a character describes the human body as no longer having borders: ‘it is dismembered, scattered, wild, but again, preserved in pieces’.

Is this state of fragmentation a hallmark of existence, or product of a particular social order? Drndić believed that the ‘boring linear construction’ of bourgeois literature merely sustained an illusion that lives are ‘coherent, seamless, with the stitching not showing and everything appearing to be smooth and logically constructed’, as a character in Belladonna (2012) puts it. Yet, Drndić’s work is at the same time inseparable from the Balkans and its history. In her most recently translated novel, Battle Songs, originally published in 1998, the protagonist, Tea Radan, flees Yugoslavia during the internecine wars of the 1990s, along with her precocious young daughter Sara, to find refuge in Toronto. Differing circumstances might allow them to mend what was broken elsewhere – if nothing else, Battle Songs disabuses the reader of this expectation.

Tea’s hardships in Toronto are sadly predictable. Western bigotry misses its target: mandated to visit a tuberculosis clinic, Tea reads ‘ARABS GO BACK TO BOSNIA!’ tagged on its walls. She spends her days working bad, temporary jobs while worrying about the welfare of her daughter. Tea joins the ranks of other disillusioned refugees underwhelmed by the offerings of liberal capitalism: a Bosnian, formerly a professional violinist, solicits business door-to-door with a sack of cheap toys; an ‘economist by training’ who once allocated social security payments in Yugoslavia, now collects them; a Croatian professional in ‘marketing and tourism’ abandons his search for work, bitterly concluding that the reason Canada accepts so many immigrants is that ‘they need cheap manpower’.

The deeper inadequacy of Tea’s new existence is spiritual. It’s a theme common to the literature of the refugee, where gaps in present experience are filled by the miseries and banalities of the past. Working at an illegal envelope-stuffing operation on the wintry fringes of the city, Tea, overwhelmed by unbidden memories, asks her boss for a distraction:

Couldn’t we have a bit of music? I asked at half past three, hoping that would help drive out the thoughts that were thumping in heavy, leaden lumps into the depths of my skull in crazy succession and at speed. I felt an unpleasant, almost painfully rhythmic drumming in my temples. For a long time, there was a rumour that Hitler was a vegetarian, because he was sometimes overcome by an insatiable desire for vegetarian dishes.

The reader learns to interpret these non sequiturs as reflexive masochism. Tea’s frequent flights into Croato-Serbian history similarly demonstrate that she can escape her present only through delving into the past.

The Serbian statesman Mihailo Crnobrnja once described Yugoslavia as a country of ‘seven neighbours, six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two scripts, and one goal: to live in brotherhood and unity’. Tea’s recollections of her time in Yugoslavia present a confounding social portrait. By landmarks and language alone, the reader might locate her in a different country entirely. As a child in Rovinj, Croatia, she noticed that the main street was called ‘Belgrade Street’, its only cinema ‘Belgrade Cinema’. Eventually they move to Belgrade, where Sara’s school workbooks used ‘Serbian terms for chemistry and history, the seal was half in the Latin script, half in Cyrillic, and the language being learned was called Serbo-Croato-Slovene’. Tea reports that the experience of returning from Belgrade to Croatia ‘did not differ fundamentally’ from their later journey to Toronto. In some respects, the culture shock was harder to weather. Tea was warned to ‘tone down that Serbian accent’ and found it necessary to relearn ‘a language that would make my presence in my own country legitimate’.

Whereas Tea describes Sara and herself as ‘adaptable’ to such social volatility, her father is not. A passionate communist in his youth, when Tea would return from Belgrade to visit she found him ‘reduced’, rendered passive and nostalgic:

Before every parting, my father lays out on the kitchen table old letters, photos, newspaper clippings, political tracts. He brings them out and shows me what I have seen innumerable times, what I remember clearly, because what my father lays out in front are in fact mementos of a past life that has marked our whole family…Photographs of my mother. My letters to him. Printed articles, reviews, stories…

A sorrowful image that ritually emerges in Drndić’s writing. The word ‘reduced’ is translated from the Croat smanjen (literally, diminished) which Tea also uses to describe her cremated mother, held in a ‘small, cheap black urn made of tin’. Whether a citizen of a failing socialist federation, or a stranger in a capitalist state, Tea finds that death is not always an immediate affair, that our finer traits can perish long before the body does, reducing us to an animal existence. Hence the characteristic analogy to animals in Drndić’s fiction: the rats of Belladonna; the rhinos of Doppelgänger; and, in Battle Songs, the Vietnamese potbellied pig, whose cultivation as a ‘Western family pet’ is juxtaposed with the experience of the novel’s refugees.

Drndić finds nimbler symbols in the figurines, dolls and game pieces her characters encounter. Waiting for the subway one day, Tea meets a woman selling miniatures: ‘little violins, little guitars, little newspapers, little books, little people, little teapots, little trumpets, little houses, little railways, little tables, little plates, little pianos’. Rather than prompting lamentation for the tragic diminishment of her life, she instead imagines ‘how nice it would be if we all got together and in a shrunken state lived on that woman’s shelf’.

The longing to live in a ‘shrunken state’ finds an affinity with Drndić’s treatment of ultranationalism and fascism. More than once, Tea declares confidence in the ‘purity of my Croatian blood’, which benefited her during the craze for ‘counting blood cells’ in the Balkans. Tea seems both bemused and faintly proud of this asset. Still, Tea has no serious affinities for the far right. The history of her Partisan family was marred by the violence of the Ustasha, the militia of the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), the Croatian puppet state of the Axis powers. Drndić frames their ‘call for blood and soil’ as a petulant appeal for narrowing social concerns. Tea recalls an instructive example in a student magazine published in Zagreb, 1942.

Croats may only be Croatophiles. Any other allegiance that crosses the boundaries of our shared commitments, is not only completely nonsensical but also absolutely harmful. So all contradictions can be manifested only within the borders of our national and state benefits. It is better that those borders should be narrower rather than wider, it is better that in establishing those borders we should be narrow-minded, rather than allow ourselves greater liberties.

The fascist’s demands for ethnic purity and national fealty betray his vulnerability. Tea’s passing daydream of life in miniature – to live simply amongst the ‘little people’ and ‘little houses’ – becomes the fascist’s consuming political ambition: to produce an uncomplicated, uncontaminated society by externalizing the forces of reduction he feels within himself. The emotional antecedents of fascism are widely felt in Drndić’s characters, and her presentation of them is often seeded with acknowledgements of their humanity. Battle Songs reminds its reader that the Ustasha, too, had parents and lovers and sang ‘ditties’ to their children. Monsters are made, not born, she insists; the structure that Drndić implicates in their making is the turmoil of the Balkan nation-states.

Nationalism, likewise, is the subject of Drndić’s most direct parodies. Battle Songs shares a late-90s fracas within the Balkans over ‘Grandfather Frost’. National factions insist on their own version of the childhood legend, or, in the case of Bosnia & Herzegovina, reject it altogether as something ‘imposed from the outside’. The episode is amusing – and, to Americans, familiar – until a radio host who maintains that ‘Grandfather Frost is one of the rare things that unites people’ is assaulted for his opinion. Similarly, in EEG, the narrator reports that Latvians despise the widespread perception of Rothko as an American artist; they insist that Markuss Rotkovičs ‘is in fact ours, he’s not yours, but in fact ours’.

Of course, this is how nations function, by guarding distinctions between their constituents and foreign nationals, while neglecting divisions within their borders. Nurturing the illusion of nationality, these tendencies can only preserve or expand social fragmentation. Drndić is a pessimist, yet her will to fragmentation cannot help but accentuate, through sheer contrast, the human bonds that remain untroubled by it. In an illustrative paragraph towards the end of Battle Songs, Tea reflects on her daughter’s childhood:

Little keys for tightening the tooth braces which kept getting lost, glasses, doctors’ checkups, orthopedists – ugly high shoes, diaries (allergic to Pentrexyl, sleeps well, sleeps badly, high temperature, low temperature, likes pureed squash, likes apples, doesn’t like sour things, can take cherries, not oranges, will eat spinach, dumplings, dresses herself, ties her shoelaces, right-handed – left-handed, draws circles, distinguishes colours, doesn’t distinguish colours, has grown 2 centimeters, gained 300 grams, doesn’t like the story ‘Hansel and Gretel’, does like ‘The Ugly Duckling’: When I grow up I’ll be a white swan, hard stool, soft stool, throat swab sterile, new words: I can’t get down!)

Like everything else in Drndić, Sara’s life is ‘preserved in pieces’. But this collage is somehow free from the contortions of identity or manias of self-maintenance; rather its parts are suspended in the resin of a mother’s love, boundless, transparent, selfless. What is civilization but the hope that this local, instinctive love can be extended? Drndić spent her career anatomizing how this remains a fantasy within nation-states that must feed fraternity and acrimony at the same trough. In Toronto, Tea sometimes overhears Sara in the shower, singing to herself: ‘What can we do to make things better, what can we do to make things better. La-la-la-la.’ Another daydream: the prospect of people cooperating toward their mutual flourishing is something children sing to themselves when they think no one is listening.

Read on: Robin Blackburn ‘The Break-Up of Yugoslavia and the Fate of Bosnia’, NLR I/199.

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Unabated

Heather Lewis’s Notice – recently republished after decades out of print – is a blistering and disturbing work. Rigorously deviant, technically merciless, to read it is almost an act of physical exertion, the effect viscerally stunning like a gut-punch. The resignation implied by its title – in the sense of ‘giving’ notice, abandoning a task – impels you to encounter it as an agonizingly extended suicide note. Lewis’s final novel was first published two years after she took her own life in 2002 at the age of forty, having relapsed following a long period of sobriety; she had also suffered an addiction to OxyContin, and ‘knew her way around heroin’ from her early years. Notice’s unanimous rejection – publishers recoiled from its relentless catalogue of cruelties, as well as an assumed proximity to its author’s life – coupled with the hostile reception that met The Second Suspect (1998), were widely perceived as precipitating Lewis’s decline. She had ‘gone too far’, though experimenting with limits – and with seeing how much both writer and reader could stomach – was also key to Lewis’s triumph.

The Second Suspect was an attempted compromise. A portrait of a female detective struggling to prove the guilt of a corporate male sadist who has raped and murdered legions of young women, this was Notice repackaged as a commercial thriller. Yet the novel still attracted epithets of rote ‘transgression’ and jejune ‘shock tactics’. Such criticism must have stung. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College and mentored by the writer-teacher Allan Gurganus, Lewis’s youth had been scarred by sexual abuse and parental neglect. House Rules (1994) was Lewis’s first – devastating, jarringly controlled – attempt to transmute her experience into a novel. In high school, she had made a foray into the world of show-horse jumping: the novel tells the story of a teenage runaway, victim of a sexually abusive father, who finds work as a trick rider. Existential squalor follows. Trick riding refers to the act of performing stunts on horseback. The sentence which begins Notice is ‘For the longest time I didn’t call it turning tricks.’

Notice follows a young woman, Nina, as she becomes ‘mixed up’ in brutalizing sex work, drugs, violence and prison. It begins with an ‘ordinary’ commute home, except home is an empty house from which the narrator’s parents have been absent for months. This isolation perhaps makes Nina more prone to the seductions of ‘Ingrid’s husband’ (also never given a full name) who picks her up by the side of the road: ‘Right there he’d flipped the game, right from the start’. Her subsequent account melds stark description with a cavernous lyricism:

I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged, and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing had ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.

In her former writing mentor’s words, Lewis’s ‘truest subject’ was ‘the void’ between the half-truths we tell ourselves, and the more complex, unflattering impulses behind what we do. Here the premise of turning tricks for money is punctured by the narrator – ‘because it just couldn’t be as simple as money’. Lewis instead sketches an alternative economy where the currency is suffering. As she puts it in House Rules, the narrator is interested in ‘the kind of pain that kills pain.’

The situation that unfolds could be portrayed as tragic, yet the novel resists any trace of pathos. Lewis’s tone has often been described as ‘chilling’, but a more diagnostic term would be dissociative. The writing is glazed and flattened by torment. Yet it carries the weight of something profoundly lived (if not fully resolved). Nina ultimately fluctuates between wanting to feel nothing – ‘it would make me feel something, which naturally is about the last thing you want’ – and wanting to feel everything. Between wanting to endure – ‘to prove I could take anything’ – and ‘a tremendous pull to give in, to give up.’ She knows she must escape Ingrid and her sadist husband, but also that – for ultimately enigmatic reasons – she cannot.

The carnal scenes in Notice are frequently harrowing: those in which Nina is made to dress in the clothes of the couple’s deceased teenage daughter are particularly gruesome. Eventually she is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she meets Beth, a therapist with whom she pursues a romantic relationship and who eventually ‘gets her out’, but not before Nina has to undergo nightly ‘visitations’ from the patrolling guards. It does not get any better. As the novel raced towards its climax, I waited, almost squinting through my fingers, for some pay-off catharsis, a release from the unabating build-up of traumatic incident, but one never came. 

It is hard to resist a ‘reverse-image-search’ kind of psychoanalysis, reading Notice as the culmination of a lifetime’s effort to deal with the trauma she suffered at the hands of her father (Lewis’s long-term partner, the writer Ann Rower, called Hobart Lewis ‘the grand villain’ of everything she wrote). It is also tempting to read the relationships that Nina has with women as possessing a more sustaining, nurturing dynamic. Yet these attachments sour and turn savage too. The French title of the novel – Attention, translated and published in 2007 – might better encompass the book’s ambivalence, the tightrope walked between vigilance and exhibitionism. Throughout, we are made aware of the narrator’s fear of ‘never holding anyone’s notice for very long’. Perhaps the nightmare Notice dramatizes is not that violence and abuse will lead to further escalation or even loss of life. The nightmare is that such violence will simply continue, without being registered at all. 

Read on: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, ‘Notes for a Feminist Manifesto’, NLR 114.

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On the Threshold

The American language, like the American landscape, is a trash heap. On top of the hundreds of thousands of loan words from over three hundred languages handed down from its British forebear, American English is strewn with the numerous subcultural slangs and professional jargons of a diverse, technocratically administered society, as well as the acronyms and neologisms born to designate two industrial revolutions’ worth of concepts, companies and consumer products (the most phonetically bizarre are undoubtedly those coined by the brand consultants in today’s tech and pharmaceutical sectors). From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and A.R. Ammons’ Garbage (1993), the sheer ontological profusion of a nation born and raised in capitalist modernity has fascinated its poets, many of whom have taken up the task of sifting through this detritus in their work, navigating the strange coagulations and dialectical reversals of ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’ that have ensued from the often violent, sometimes salutary contact between the cultures and economies of Europe and the dimensions of North American space.

Today, the American tradition of the literary gleaner is upheld by the poet, critic and visual artist Wayne Koestenbaum. Following in the footsteps of the New York School of poets and French transgressive writing, Kostenbaum, in his poetry and his critical prose, turns waste into a matter not just of aesthetic, but also ethical and political import. Like his father before him – a Berlin Jew who fled the Nazis as a youth, first for Caracas, then for northern California – Koestenbaum is a living representative of a lost culture: the gay scene that flourished in downtown Manhattan between the mid-60s and the late-80s, which produced a hyper-sophisticated connoisseurship for experiments in literature, dance, music and the visual arts before being decimated by AIDS. Koestenbaum left his home in suburban San Jose to go east for school, arriving in New York as a Princeton doctoral student in 1984, coming of age against the darkening horizon of the scene’s sunset years. The ensuing decades saw the razed terrain of downtown bohemia salted by conservative mayors, finance capital and real estate developers, who turned it into a space as culturally square as it is expensive. Now 65, Koestenbaum teaches Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and lives in his old apartment on West 23rd Street, on the same block as the luxury condominium that was once the Chelsea Hotel.

Stubble Archipelago, Koestenbaum’s new collection, discards the short, Creeleyesque stanzas of his 1200-page Trance Trilogy (The Pink Trance Notebooks, Camp Marmalade, Ultramarine) with their full-stop-free, left-justified lines, visually cordoned off from each other by horizontal bars floating in the stanza breaks, for ones that retain the norms of punctuation, but vary long lines with short, indented lines and has more frequent recourse to enjambment. (In an elegant variation on the sonnet, each poem has a total of fourteen of these longer lines, spread across four stanzas.) Along with the clipped, implied-subject sentences that appear to owe their provenance to the notebooks Koestenbaum has kept for four decades – in the solitude of a diary one can begin with the verb rather than the first-person pronoun – the poems of Stubble Archipelago have the taut, angular dynamism of a vehicle making hairpin turns at speed, rather than the stop-and-go-traffic-tempo of the earlier collections. Not surprisingly, they provide the scene for fascinating collisions between contemporary linguistic ephemera (‘STEM’, ‘bromace’, ‘community standards’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘sub bottom’), high theoretical jargon (‘Anthropocene’, ‘subject position’, ‘heterotopia’), and scraps of French, Italian and German. These are fused together under the heat of witty changes in parts of speech – such as the verbifications of the proper nouns in the line ‘Thousand sex partners giggle to Sontag it / Mercutio her’ – and outré personifications – as when Koestenbaum ‘woofed the zeitgeist’ but ‘Temps perdu didn’t woof back’. This is ‘diction as drag, diction as ecstasy-catalyst, diction / as hairpin, dic- / tion as transitional object’, whose irreverent juxtapositions of tonal register, speaking of Sontag, are one of the hallmarks of camp sensibility in literature.

The overall effect is reminiscent of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, where ‘this’ is often ‘cruising’, and ‘that’ is often ‘dreaming’. The thirty-six lyrics form a complex spiral of conceptual oppositions between erotic mobility and oneiric immobility, flow and friction, fantasy and materiality, announced in the striated and smooth textures of Koestenbaum’s cheeky title. ‘Desirability’, as he observes in www.mypornessay.com, ‘rearranges space’. Thus the ‘ferocious stubble’ of a passerby ‘undoes wan / pedestrian’s equanimity’ as does the ‘flat-assed beanie-and-wedding- / ring wearing man reading / Financial Times on C train’, who alas is ‘fruitlessly cruised’. Koestenbaum conceives of space – whether it is the physical space of downtown Manhattan or the virtual spaces of the unconscious mind, social media apps, or the page – as a kind of Platonic khora, a murky atmosphere or surreptitious aura he sometimes calls ‘nuance’ and other times ‘fag limbo’, the latter being a zone where ‘all territorial claims, all hygienes between philosophy and poetry’ are thrown into question. Apropos Hart Crane: ‘the point of queer poetry’ is to ‘make murky, to distort’ the reader’s experience through unusual syntactical choices and stylistic mannerisms. Elsewhere, in an essay on his friend, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, he expands the definition of queer-affirmative writing to include ‘any . . . project buoyed by excess’.

Excess, as Koestenbaum employs it, is a synonym of waste, a conceptual filiation which owes a great deal to the theory of expenditure advanced by Georges Bataille in such texts as ‘The Solar Anus’ and The Accursed Share. Bataille rejected the Malthusian assumption of resource scarcity that underpinned classical economic theory in favour of what he called économie générale; far from being subsistence economies, pre-capitalist societies in Europe and elsewhere were based on the assumption of abundance, symbolized in the unlimited thermodynamic productivity of the sun. These societies were organized not around utility and cost-benefit analysis, but around displays of luxury, which took the form of useless expenditures of wealth, that is, around the deliberate waste of surplus production in highly aestheticized rituals of gift-giving and sacrifice.

For Koestenbaum, waste has a somewhat more ambivalent significance, depending on what kind of entity is producing it. On the one hand, there is the equation of ‘Garbage / fecundity’ and ‘ecocide’, which proceeds not only from ‘Anthropocene / bad vibes’ and ‘capitalism’s thrum’ but also waste’s ‘embeddedness within linguistic inattentiveness’ of a rotting ‘cultural system’ that forbids ‘slow discernment’ in order to produce apps, etch-a-sketches, Benadryl, craft beer, Stevia, chewing gum, shower curtains, GI Joe denim and the other assorted junk that is sifted through in Stubble Archipelago. On the other hand, the excreta produced by the body – urine, shit, pre-cum, tears, sweat – as well as its unruly overgrowths – Whitmanesque armpit hair, ‘memento mori pubes’, ‘hennaed Frühlingsnacht hospice hair’, hairy shoulders, eyebrows, mustaches, and of course, stubble – are lovingly attended to, along with their atmospheric odours. (In a medium that has historically prioritized auditory and visual effects, Koestenbaum does not neglect olfactory and tactile sensory experiences.) Although writing – an at-present overproduced and undervalued consumer good – might seem to fall into the former category of waste, Koestenbaum reclaims it for the latter. Because interpretation focuses on signification, it tends to treat the concepts that result as immaterial, and thus we often forget that language is something that is produced and consumed by bodies. Sex and digestion provide more apt metaphors for communication than any vocabulary that relies on mental states: ‘writing / is a waste product / and therefore disgusts us, / and we choose, / as ethical and lunatic / stance, to form literature in waste’s image’. To what end, this ethical and lunatic stance? Koestenbaum’s answer: ‘to stretch threshold / experiences’.

‘We have grown poor in threshold experiences’, Bataille’s friend Walter Benjamin noted in the Konvolut on gambling and prostitution in The Arcades Project, referring to those moments of transition between states of being pre-capitalist societies marked with ceremonial rites. Koestenbaum uses this as the epigraph for his essay ‘Heidegger’s Mistress’, and Benjamin’s ghost – along with the ghosts of Brecht and Adorno – haunts Stubble Archipelago. Watching a film set in Berlin, for example, Koestenbaum imagines the ‘rickety red house facades / my father or Walter / Benjamin might once / have passed’; he discovers ‘messianic time’s momentary / emissary’ – a reference to Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history – in the ‘meat’ of a men’s room tryst. Thanks to the disenchantment and rationalization of everyday life in market societies, one of the few threshold experiences that remains to capitalist subjects, according to Benjamin, is dreaming. Less than a century later, even that, as Jonathan Crary argues in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is under threat from developments in digital media, targeted advertising and the other insomniac technologies designed to ceaselessly extract profit from our attention, draining and impoverishing it. That is no doubt why such counter-strategies as unprofitable indolence and aimless wandering receive praise in Koestenbaum’s criticism, and why dreams appear so frequently in the Trance Trilogy and Stubble Archipelago. The twenty-nine dreams recorded in the latter – whose subjects range from visions of a ‘bombed, burning’ New York City to a performance of Montemezzi by his beloved soprano Anna Moffo – each constitute a small refutation of Henry James’s chestnut, ‘tell a dream, lose a reader’. No less than writing, dreams are the waste products of consciousness; to cross the threshold between waking and sleep is to enter a hazy land of excess experience; the experience of reading, whatever its subject, has much in common with hallucinatory and hypnogogic states.

Poetry has a distinctive formal tool at its disposal for simulating and stimulating threshold experience. Originally a layout convention for transcribing the metrical units of oral poetry onto parchment by scribes and later paper by typesetters, the line break is a visual demarcation of a boundary. Enjambment – from the French enjamber, ‘to stride over’ – is poetry’s means of allowing a reader to cross, after a momentary pause, the visual and sonic threshold of the line as she follows the semantic trail of the sentence; the commas, semi-colons, em-dashes, or ellipses that conclude lines are, on this analogy, not merely ways of organizing sentences, but are also like the stone horoi that were used as boundary markers in ancient Greece. For Koestenbaum, who describes his own poetic style in Whitmanian terms, as a ‘recklessly utopian vers libre approximating thought’s freedom’ and as a ‘democracy . . . of solitudes assembled in taboo congregation’, the ‘line-making impulse’ is a kind of ‘art activism’ and prefigurative politics, ‘a communitarian enthroning’ of a ‘heaven’ that can be ‘occupied today’, instead of deferred to the just political and economic order that may or may not lie in the future. And heaven, not unlike the dreams which are said to anticipate it, is a space of excess or surplus being usually only thought to lie beyond the ‘death-life interstice’, the ultimate threshold. If ‘fag limbo’ is a threshold space where the genres of poetry and philosophy meet, it is thanks to the ‘profound formalism’ of poetry’s ‘rear ends’ that it achieves philosophy’s stated goal: the preparation for death. Of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’, Koestenbaum writes: ‘he breaks the line because he wants to slay me, and I want to be slain: we participate together in this funerary rite’. It is a truth that holds for the writing and reading of all lineated verse, including his own.

This is no doubt why in his criticism – whether he is writing about Thoreau, Sontag, Schulyer or Bolaño – Koestenbaum takes such an interest in closural effects. (In By Night in Chile, for instance, he admires the way the ‘horror’ alluded to in the final sentence ‘remains offstage, as in a Greek tragedy’.) Stubble Archipelago concludes with a memory of himself as a fresh-cheeked, thirteen-year-old boy biking home, with his ‘Jacob’s- / ladder tail tongue hanging’ out of his mouth, open to a future where experiences will climb like angels into the heaven of what he characterizes in an essay on punctuation as his ‘suggestible’, ‘spellbindable’ brain. The image is an instance of the ‘stillness-in-motion’ Koestenbaum claims as the modernist ideal. It also recalls an observation he makes about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel – another famous instance of the aestheticization of trash – in his commentary on Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Called Back’. ‘Even a spiral or wheel consists of lines’, he writes. ‘The line’s odd secrets involve circularity, cycling and recycling, an ecology of perpetual replenishment, perpetual relineation’. For those who know the odd secrets of the line, as Koestenbaum does, thresholds – and threshold experiences – are everywhere.

Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘By the Fireside’, NLR 96.

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Without Heroes

Cinema arrives in Turkey by way of a French clown named Bertrand. In 1896, Bertrand is tasked with entertaining the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who is at this time carrying out a series of massacres against the Armenians that will later bear his name. In the memoirs of the Sultan’s daughter, we learn about the clown: how Bertrand hung a damp curtain from the wall of the Yıldız Palace in Istanbul and projected images upon it using a machine fuelled by gasoline. (No electricity yet in the Ottoman Empire.) It made an awful noise and stunk up the room, but the images produced a keen sense of hayret, or wonder – a term of high praise for poetry and shadow plays in Ottoman culture – and the night was deemed a success. Though we aren’t told which films the Sultan was shown, we know that the first public screening took place only a short while later at a beer hall in Galatasaray, with the now-famous L’Arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat and Cortège du Tsar Nicolas II à Paris on display. Audiences reportedly jumped from their seats when the train arrived; for the Tsar, they stood to applaud.

Cinema remained an itinerant European marvel for the next few years, with Pathé opening its first theatre in Istanbul in 1908. Turkey developed its own film industry thanks to the First World War: İsmail Enver Pasha founded the Military Office of Cinema in 1915 and began training soldiers to use filmmaking equipment, chiefly in service of propaganda, with the 1914 Censorship Act controlling what can be shown on Ottoman soil. (The earliest surviving Turkish film features a declaration of war against the Russian Empire; Enver Pasha was killed fighting the Red Army in 1922.) It was not until after the Second World War that cinema emerged as a form of popular entertainment. In the 1960s, ‘Yeşilçam’ films dominated – melodramas with mass appeal named after the location of their production companies (think Hollywood). By 1966, Turkey was the fourth largest film producer in the world, behind Egypt, India and the United States. A few people got rich, but the money was never invested in any coherent infrastructure, and with the various coups and constitutional crises over the next few decades, the industry soon collapsed – from producing two-hundred films per year to about ten by 1990.

You can trace the rise and fall of the Yeşilçam years through the career of Yılmaz Güney. Sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1958 for ‘Communist propaganda’, Güney appealed the case and, thanks to the disruption of the 1960 coup d’état, spent only a year in jail (using his time to write an explicitly communist novel). Soon after his release, Güney became a star in the Yeşilçam system, dubbed its ‘Ugly King’ (think Belmondo), and later moved to directing in 1965. His films are often compared to Italian neorealism for their simple moral narratives, on-location shooting, and non-professional actors. Though the Turkish state had no interest in funding filmmaking at the time, it maintained the Central Film Control Commission as an ideological censorship apparatus, and films like Güney’s Umut (1970) were banned for ‘subversive’ content, making him a cause célèbre on the left. He was arrested in 1972 for harbouring Mahir Çayan and other members of the People’s Liberation Party-Front, and again in 1974 for shooting a judge. (His family lawyers are currently trying to relitigate the latter case.) Imprisoned for much of the decade, Güney nevertheless managed to produce some of his finest work, with the films directed by proxy – shot lists and scripts smuggled out, rushes smuggled in. Güney was so well-regarded at this time that he was often allowed to edit from his cell, the films projected on prison walls.

‘Read and write without rest,’ urges Nâzım Hikmet in Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison. ‘I also advise weaving / and making mirrors.’ All that time behind bars inspired Güney’s next film, Yol (1980), set during the military putsch of 1980, which follows five prisoners on a week of home leave. The yolk: it’s all a prison, with walls ‘not made of stone, but paved with stuck traditions and hypocritical morality’. The iron bars are evenly weighted – economic, social, religious, political – though Güney pays particular attention to the Kurdish plight, daring to title one location ‘Kurdistan’. (This scene was cut from subsequent state-approved releases in 1993 and 2017.) Güney escaped from prison in 1981 and fled to Paris, editing Yol in exile and announcing his support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982, with some four-hundred demonstrators on the Croisette calling for a free Kurdistan; Turkey meanwhile stripped Güney of his citizenship and demanded his extradition. He was sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment should he return – which he hoped to one day, we learn from interviews, but Güney died of cancer in 1984.

Only one other Turkish filmmaker has won the Palme d’Or: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. At a glance, his films appear less radical, and his personal life certainly so. Yet Güney said that revolutionary cinema should function not as a blueprint for action, but a ‘guide to thinking’. Ceylan’s winning film, Winter Sleep (2014) is all thinking, no action. A bourgeois hotelier and former actor, Aydın, lives an idyllic life in Cappadocia with his younger wife, Nihal. The plot is set in motion when İlyas, son of one of Aydın’s tenants, throws a rock through his car window. İlyas’s father, İsmail, had failed to pay rent, and Aydın inadvertently has him beaten by police. Nihal takes pity, stealing a large sum of money from Aydın – enough to buy a house – and offering it to İsmail. He throws it in the fire. Drawing inspiration and sometimes dialogue from Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Winter Sleep presents a simple enough parable. Güney would have told it from the son’s point of view, but the message remains the same. Yet the film is over three hours long. What else is there in the ether – in the dark hollows of those Cappadocian caves, in that seemingly infinite winter? Aydın is a would-be historian who keeps delaying his work. Might there be some kind of blockage?

Ceylan’s career began with the ‘Provincial’ trilogy: the 1997 debut feature Small Town, Clouds of May (1999), and Distant (2002). Each was made for less than $100,000, with Ceylan eschewing public funds. The director and his family act in the films, which take an autobiographical approach – all centre on the agony of abandoning home. Ceylan grew up in Yenice, a small town in Çanakkale Province just southeast of Gallipoli, where he would be labelled taşralı (think hick) by the bourgeoise metropolis. He studied engineering at Boğaziçi University, later moving to London to pursue filmmaking, and considers himself as something of a transfuge de classe. ‘His trajectory embodies the tradition of the Turkish intellectual with the contradictions and impasses in which he finds himself today’, writes Ferhat Kentel. ‘He belongs to a sort of middle-class in the process of gentrification, keen to “enlighten” society while remaining cut off from it.’

This also describes many of Ceylan’s protagonists: well-educated men who think to know better than everyone else, who are never necessarily wrong, never totally irredeemable, but who nevertheless remain outside of history. Given Ceylan’s love of Russian literature, you might call them superfluous men: bastard sons of East and West, intelligent yet politically impotent, bearing a false dignity undermined by contact with reality – which only leads to alienation, neuroticism and self-destruction. ‘That so many Russian literary heroes should be “superfluous men” seems almost inevitable’, argued Irving Howe. In nineteenth-century Russia, ‘no other kind of hero is possible’. Do Ceylan’s films make the same case for Turkey today? Lifted by the hopes of the large and militant Turkish left before it was vanquished, Güney’s films believed in revolution, and envisaged a heroism of the masses. Ceylan’s instead offer what Howe calls ‘heroes of estrangement’ – self-exiled individuals ‘unable to act heroically’.

In The Wild Pear Tree (2018), the protagonist is another would-be historian, who can only get public funding for his novel if he engages with local myth. Sinan refuses, preferring something more ‘meta’; should his career fail, he will simply join the riot police with his friend who brags about beating protesters. The film concludes what some have called Ceylan’s ‘Land of Ghosts’ trilogy, following Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). All are about the impossibility of a present that ignores the past. Set in Çanakkale, it avoids the tourist view of Gallipoli, which has become one of Turkey’s major marketing tools – a kind of founding myth for the modern state that allows secular and Islamic histories to live concomitantly.

The Turkish title, Ahlat Ağacı, bears a significance missed by the English translation, pointing to the Turkified name of the region in East Anatolia, Khlat, the pre-Manzikert Armenian homeland. The wild pear tree is endemic to the region – described by Ceylan as ‘quite ugly’ and bearing ‘very bitter fruit’. It seems to represent the twisted outgrowth of Turkey’s sullied soil. ‘When they find one near a village’, Ceylan said in an interview, ‘the locals will graft it to make it into a normal pear tree’. The mythmaking of state officials functions in the same way: on 25 April, 1915, the Allies made landfall in Gallipoli and Atatürk fought them off; the day prior, the Armenian Genocide began. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – a slow-burning crime drama set over the course of a single night in the desert – is a film that asks where the bodies are buried. Nobody seems to know.

Ceylan’s latest film, About Dry Grasses, centres on the superfluous Samet, a schoolteacher from Istanbul begrudgingly assigned to a small town in Eastern Anatolia. For much of the film his politics are difficult to ascertain: he plays FIFA with a friend in the army; he drinks with dissidents; he loathes the locals yet takes pity on stray dogs. At first, we think he might even be a paedophile – Samet pays too much attention to one of his students, a young girl named Sevim, who openly courts his affection. When Samet is reported for inappropriate behaviour, presumably by Sevim, he lashes out, publicly shaming her and the other (predominantly Kurdish) students. ‘None of you will become artists’, he tells the class. ‘You’ll plant potatoes and sugar beets so the rich can live comfortably’. From here, Samet sours on everything but fellow schoolteacher Nuray, a recently crippled Socialist. He competes for her affection with his roommate, Kenan, who has similarly been accused of inappropriate behaviour (though seems the nicer guy). The two are invited to Nuray’s house one evening, and Samet, conniving and self-centred, fails to pass this on, arriving alone with a bottle of wine. He does his best to seduce Nuray, but before she or Ceylan can gratify this seemingly irredeemable figure, he must first be unmasked.

‘I don’t feel the need to define myself as anything’, he says, responding to Nuray’s question of what ‘ism’ he belongs to. She calls him lumpen, a coward, says he talks ‘like a liberal’ and should get involved, take action. ‘Should I get beaten by the cops?’ Nuray rolls her eyes. They discuss order and chaos, the limits of collectivism; the conversation turns apocalyptic. ‘For me’, Samet says, ‘history recalls the weariness of hope’. Nuray begins to cry. ‘I’m weary, too’, she says. ‘Like I’ve lived a really long time’. He kisses her tears, and they head for the bedroom, with Samet making a quick exit – out onto a film set – to take Viagra, his impotence apparently extra-filmic.

‘Turgenev’s heroes define their humiliation as a function of their hope’, writes Howe. Is the same true of Ceylan? Later in the film, Samet confesses that what he saw in Sevim was a vision of the future – an energy or transcendence of which he was personally incapable. ‘I just wanted to make her a means for a dream world I had built beyond her’. One thinks of Marx writing to Arnold Ruge: ‘The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality’. Or of Herzen on the superfluous man: that ‘Decembrist’ ‘trembling with indignation and visionary feeling’ who ‘strives to discern, at least on the horizon, the promised land he will never see’.

Ceylan said in a 2004 interview that ‘winning the Palme d’Or could be a tragedy for me’, and since accomplishing this feat his stand-ins have only become more self-effacing. There is a sense, in Samet’s relationships with Nuray and Sevim, of Ceylan confronting Güney’s ghost. He can only squirm and apologise. Güney’s Palme served to celebrate the revolutionary spirit. Does Ceylan’s effectively represent capitulation to the Bertrand school of cinema, where French aesthetics satiate genocidal sultans? Samet is an emblem of guilt, a mode of apology – his role in the effective colonization of the Kurdish southeast mimicking Ceylan’s identity as leading mythmaker of a would-be Westernized state. (One character in Anatolia asks: ‘Is this how we’ll get into the European Union?’)

Ceylan has downplayed his political responsibilities in the past, arguing that a filmmaker is not a journalist and ‘should be more interested in the soul of the spectator’ – yet Ceylan’s tortured bourgeois soul seems the lonely subject of these later films. (A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy, Tolstoy said. What of spiritual agony?) Samet ends the film with a kind of soliloquy, delivered from the historical ruins of Mount Nemrut, with some advice intended for Sevim: ‘Time will pass, and if you survive in this land of unending setbacks, you will still dry up and turn yellow in the end. You will find yourself at the midpoint of your life and see you’ve gained nothing but the desert inside of you’. One hopes she would reply: speak for yourself.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads’, NLR 127.

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Undoing Oslo

Five months into Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people – a compendium of colonial violence, from the bombing of maternity wards to what Raphael Lemkin once called ‘racial discrimination in feeding’ – there has been no shortage of critical commentary. Diaspora intellectuals have worked tirelessly to counter Zionist hasbara; yet when Palestinians are called upon, it is usually to bear witness to brutality and dispossession, not to give their political prescriptions. Haidar Eid’s Decolonising the Palestinian Mind, published late last year, is a vital intervention in this regard. The book sets out to revive the politics of Palestinian liberation by articulating a transformative anti-colonial praxis that would break with sundry ‘peace initiatives’ while redrawing ‘the (cognitive) political map of post-Oslo Palestine’. 

Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.

Though informed by Eid’s experience of living between bombing and blockade, the book is not a testimonial. It is an attempt to carry forward the intellectual project of the late Edward Said, taking cues from his intransigent criticisms of the Oslo ‘peace process’ along with his warnings about a statehood bereft of sovereignty and delinked from decolonization. Oslo, writes Eid, has become a seemingly untranscendable horizon for Palestinian politics, both in spite of and because of its manifest failure. Its framework has segmented the Palestinian population – the refugee diaspora, those living under distinct occupation regimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and the second-class Palestinian citizens of Israel – and created a fractured ‘Bantustan endorsed by the international community’. Gaza, Eid writes, is now ‘the mirror image of Oslo’: both the enabling condition of the current disaster and the true face of a peace process that promised coexistence but never countenanced justice or repair. As Eid reminds us, ‘75-80 percent of Gazans are refugees whose right to return is guaranteed under international law, a right that has been totally ignored by Oslo’. In his account, the ‘invasion and siege of Gaza was a product of Oslo. Before the Oslo Accords were signed, Israel never used its full arsenal of F-16s, phosphorous bombs, and DIME weapons to attack refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.’

‘Oslo’ names a form of false consciousness that afflicts Palestine’s ‘assimilated intelligentsia’ and political elites, who have been defanged, coopted, NGOised and corrupted by the apparatus bequeathed by the Accords. Neither the residual left nor the Islamist resistance has managed to break out of this iron cage. Even Hamas, with its proposal for a ‘long-term truce’ (hudna) based on 1967 borders, has succumbed to it. For Eid, this two-statism – ‘the opium of the Palestinian people’ – cannot challenge the logic of Israeli apartheid, since it implies the reduction of ‘Palestine’ to the current inhabitants of territories occupied and besieged by Israel. It effectively endorses ‘racist ideas about the separation of peoples’, when the sine qua non of liberation should be to reunify the Palestinian people that Zionism has divided by design.

Said’s legacy looms large in this effort to extricate Palestinian politics from the Oslo Accords. Eid reviews the great critic’s dissection of the so-called peace process, from 1993 until his death in 2003, and seconds his conclusion that ‘no negotiations are better than the endless concessions that simply prolong the Israeli occupation’. Looking back on the Accords, Eid asks whether

we have been forced to endure horrible massacres, a genocidal siege, the unstoppable annexation of our land, the building of an apartheid wall, detention of entire families and children, demolition of hundreds of homes, and many other abuses only because a comprador class saw ‘independence’ at the end of a closed tunnel!?

A return to the anti-colonial tradition of Said, Césaire, Fanon and Biko is necessary to counter a Palestinian ‘neo-nationalism’ which ‘beautifies occupation, endorses normalisation, and defends the racist two-state solution’, regardless of the fact that it ‘denies the rights of two-thirds of the Palestinian people, namely refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel’. By tacitly accepting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and coordinating with its repressive apparatuses, writes Eid, this neo-nationalist ideology has become a partner of the Zionist project. Its only ‘solution’ is to give a circumscribed political class the trappings of statehood (flag, anthem, police force) and delegated power over a fragmented population. This means denying the existence of the Palestinian people as a people, and reducing Palestine to the status of a governable or ungovernable enclave. Statehood, thus conceived, is tantamount to surrender. At most, such a state would grant the Palestinians notional ‘autonomy’ on 22% of their land, with no control over their borders or water reserves, no right of return, and no defence against Israel’s military juggernaut.

Eid also engages with Said to diagnose the impasse of the political class in the West Bank and Gaza. He denounces the decision to build a representative structure under Bantustan conditions in the 1996 Legislative Council elections, and describes the 2006 elections both as a repudiation of the political logic of Bantustanisation and an implantation of the ‘Oslo Virus’ – even among a victorious Hamas. After 2006, Eid claims, Hamas played the role of ‘prison sergeant’ in Gaza: applying illegitimate religious laws while appealing to the US on the basis of a sui generis two-statism. Eid does not address how this détente of sorts was destroyed on 7 October, nor the gestation of this operation during the years of apparent containment. Yet his assessment of Hamas’s government prior to that date is bleak:

Day by day, we have seen this authority shift from the stage of resistance to the siege, to coexisting with it and finally reaching a stage of taking advantage of it. It has created a new, unproductive, rentier class whose capital is based on trade in the tunnels (before their destruction by the Egyptian authorities), land trading, a monopoly on the marketing of building materials, etc. This went hand in hand with a monopoly on the definition of resistance, excluding the possibility of reconciliation with those who do not follow its ideology.

Eid dwells in particular on Hamas’s inability to capitalize on the Palestinian unity and international solidarity in the wake of the 2008-9 war (Operation Cast Lead for Israel; the Battle of al-Furqan for Hamas). Like its predecessors and sequels, the Israeli assault was intended to create a sense among Palestinians ‘that they are confronted with a metaphysical power that can never be defeated’. Yet Israel failed to break the spirit or the substance of resistance, declaring a unilateral ceasefire after killing 1,400 Palestinians and destroying swathes of Gaza. What followed was, in Eid’s view, an ‘abortion of victory’, marked by futile efforts to broker a national unity government between Hamas and Fatah and fruitless engagement with the US, fuelled by false hopes in the Obama administration. This demonstrated that Hamas had embraced the statehood fetish, reinventing the broken wheel of ‘independence’ rather than leading a popular emancipation struggle. 

Eid stresses the need for a different path to liberation – one ‘that makes the de-Osloization of Palestine its first priority’ and ‘divorces itself from the fiction of the two-state or two-prison solution’. His proposal is to disengage from the political structures of Palestinian governance, breaking with both the religious right (Hamas) and the secular right (Fatah), whose main priority, he argues, is their own political existence. Eid’s programme involves dismantling the PA along with the ‘classical national programme’ of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, and working towards the formation of ‘a United Front on a platform of resistance and reforms’ through the reconstitution of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). Eid draws on Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘untested feasibility’ (inédito viável), which claims that the oppressed can use ‘limit situations’ to develop critical practices with the potential to transform ‘hostile conditions into a space for creative experimentation of freedom, equality, and justice’. This may sound utopian given the intense hostility of conditions in Gaza today. But as imperial powers begin to rehearse ‘solutions’ for the day after the genocide, alternatives may amount to a permanent denial of Palestinian freedom.

What of the Palestinian left? Much of it is materially integrated into the subaltern economy of Palestinian political representation: ‘Most members of the political bureaus of the major left parties are either directly employed by the PA/PLO or get paid monthly salaries without being directly employed.’ Eid claims that the PFLP, DFLP and People’s Party have failed to mount an effective challenge to the authoritarian drift of the PLO and PA. He therefore argues that the left must be rebuilt outside the existing Palestinian political system, drawing on the grassroots mobilizations against the ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin, the Unity Intifada and the resistance to the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. The principles of this movement must include a firm repudiation of two-statism; support for international solidarity and boycott campaigns; unity among Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora; a rejection of neoliberalism and revitalization of the PNC; and a willingness to learn lessons from both the Latin American left and the South African anti-apartheid struggle. All this would require not just a different politics, but a new cognitive mapping that ‘challenges the space newly drawn by the US, Israel, and their Arab allies – the so-called new Middle East’, and instead posits a ‘secular-democratic Palestine in the heart of a democratic Arab world’. In other words, it would require an abandonment of the fatal conceit that one can repair the legacy of partition by repeating its foundational premises.  

Eid’s intervention is valuable for its urgency of purpose and openness of outlook. Its proposals are especially resonant as the spectre of statehood hovers over the rubble of Gaza. Yet it is worth recalling that international law, invoked by Eid to underscore the injustice and criminality of apartheid, operates with statehood as its frame. A two-state vision sets the terms of juridical affirmations of Palestinian freedom, as seen in the ICJ cases challenging the legality of Israel’s occupation and seeking to apply the Genocide Convention to the current war. One of the key challenges for any alternative Palestinian political programme will be to navigate an international legal order which provides one of the only arenas for the legitimized assertion of rights while also leaving such claims prone to capture and domestication by hostile powers, above all the United States.  

As for Eid’s view of ‘one democratic state’ as the lodestar for Palestinian liberation, it goes without saying that this will come up against the imposing obstacles of the imperial system. It will also be confronted by the overwhelming commitment of Israeli Jews to the Zionist logic of elimination and domination, which has only been hardened by recent events. Eid echoes Césaire’s universalist refrain, ‘there’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory’; but what rendezvous, or even tolerable coexistence, can be imagined with those who have rallied en masse to a war promoted and prosecuted in explicitly exterminist terms? Even if we keep faith in the most utopian of visions, it is hard to avoid the sense that transitional arrangements will be required: perhaps some variant of the blueprint laid out by the Moroccan Jewish Marxist Abraham Serfaty in his prison writings on Palestine, where he argued for the establishment of two states, a ‘de-Zionised’ secular Israel under ‘one person one vote’ principles, and an ‘Arab’ Palestinian nation, as an interim solution.  

Who is capable of pursuing such a vision – one that, to quote Eid’s final line, could ‘turn the whole hegemonic picture upside down’? While Eid is forceful in criticizing the organized formations on both the left and right, and in centering grassroots cadres and the BDS movement, he is less clear on the role of armed resistance. There is little discussion of the armed wings of the various parties and factions (which have not always cleaved to the positions of their political leaderships), or of the popular resistance fronts that emerged in the First and Second Intifadas and which continue to operate in various defensive guises, most prominently in Jenin. Eid formulated his view of Hamas as ‘prison sergeant’ before 7 October, but it is not easy to square with Tufan Al-Aqsa – an attack which seemed like a deliberately irrevocable undoing of the status quo ante. It is also worth registering, contra Eid’s critique of left-wing collaboration with the PA, that the PFLP has recently joined forces with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian National Initiative to denounce Abbas’s appointment of a new ‘technocratic’ PM, Muhammad Mustafa. Still, it is to Eid’s credit that at perhaps the bleakest and certainly the most murderous moment in Palestinian history, he has had the intellectual courage not just to break with conceptions of peace pregnant with the disasters of war, but to affirm an expansive anti-colonial vision of liberation.

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