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Blind Spots

Forty minutes into the latest film by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, the opening credits begin to roll. It is one of many reminders that the Japanese director has refreshingly little interest in following conventions of duration or sticking too closely to his source material. Previous features have run for four or five hours. Drive My Car clocks in at three. The short story by Haruki Murakami from which the film takes its name is structured around a series of flashbacks, but Hamaguchi dispatches with these in the pre-credits sequence. The film portrays a forty-something actor and theatre director, Kafuku, as he works on a stage production of Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima, shortly after his wife’s sudden death. The 40-minute prelude informs us of her infidelities with a younger actor, which will haunt Kafuku for much of what follows. In Hiroshima, where he has come in his much-loved red Saab, he is forced to take on a chauffeur to shuttle him back and forth between rehearsals and his hotel. We will spend a lot of time in this car, where an audio recording of Chekhov’s play read by Kafuku’s late wife runs on a loop.

All these elements exist in Murakami’s original story, but Hamaguchi’s film is less an adaptation than an excavation of its various themes, in particular the idea of ‘blind spots’, evoked in a literal sense by Kafuku’s early glaucoma, and metaphorically through the difficulty characters have in understanding each other, and themselves. This is captured in a line from the story that Hamaguchi said inspired him to make his film: ‘maybe that’s the challenge’ a character says to Kafuku one night:

to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you can find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.

Using Murakami’s story as a springboard rather than a framework, Hamaguchi introduces many new elements, notably making Uncle Vanya central to the action when in the original it occupied just a few lines. Approximately half the film is taken up by scenes from the play: Kafuku repeating Vanya’s dialogue in the car, the cast at rehearsals delivering their lines in Bressonian deadpan, and the final production on stage. Here Drive My Car follows a rich tradition of films about the theatre, in which the play in question is interwoven with the film’s story and themes – a fine example would be Opening Night (1977) by John Cassavetes, a director who Hamaguchi cites as a key influence.

At the same time, Drive My Car is a charmingly untypical road movie starring a red Saab and a twenty-something female chauffeur. Whenever she appears, the film comes alive, and yet she does apparently so little – straight-faced and tight-lipped, looking more like a character out of a Chaplin noir. She never smiles, just hunches her shoulders over the steering wheel with her gaze set on the horizon, a near-permanent cigarette in her hand or mouth. But she does not complain or judge, and this calm is welcome for Kafuku. Over time it gives way to conversation between them as he shares his deep sorrow and she reveals her own, which leads us to the film’s moving conclusion.

Patience is a characteristic of Hamaguchi’s cinema. He favours long, unhurried takes and allows an event, be it a lunch between friends or a car journey, to play itself out as though it were happening in real time. This was particularly evident in Happy Hour (2015), which explores the daily lives of four middle-class women living in Kobe. Hamguchi’s focus on this social stratum – his characters tend to work in the media or publishing industries, or as relatively successful artists – distinguishes him from the likes of Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose family sagas such as Shoplifters (2018) concentrate on Japan’s underclass.

The quiet, unhurried quality of Hamaguchi’s films sets them apart from another tendency in Japanese cinema that works within the constraints of genre, often horror or noir – exemplified today by the likes of Takashi Miike or Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Hamaguchi’s sensibility is very different. He gives us the time to observe his characters as they live, doing everyday things like taking public transport or cooking breakfast, and this has a cumulative effect, for when a dramatic event does happen, such as a character crying, or some form of violence, its emotional force is all the more powerful. The intelligence and complexity of his screenplays, which often deal with characters who struggle to communicate with each other or articulate their feelings, has been celebrated on the festival circuit. Drive My Car, with its subtle, resonant use of extracts from Uncle Vanya intermixed with the developments in Hiroshima and the red Saab, deservedly won this year’s best screenplay award at Cannes.

‘My child, how heavy my heart is. If you only knew how heavy’ says Vanya to Sonya in Chekhov’s play. We see these last exchanges in the penultimate scene of Hamaguchi’s film, as it is performed on stage with Kafuku playing Vanya and, in the other great performance of Drive My Car, a deaf-mute actress as Sonya. ‘What can we do’, she signs, ‘we’ve got to live!’

As with much of the film, this quiet moment urging us to take courage is both moving and pure cinema.

Read on: Edward Yang, ‘Taiwan Stories’, NLR 11.

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Abiy’s Misrule

The 21 June general election was supposed to be a day of triumph for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The Nobel laureate’s first electoral test since coming to power three years ago, in the intervening period he had imprisoned or forced into exile nearly all credible opposition as well as potential challengers within his own party. He had also invaded two regional states, using federal troops to remove undesirable administrations, and unleashed a reign of repression on other unruly parts of the country. Such actions resemble those of the previous regime of the EPRDF, in which Abiy served as a Minister and surveillance chief. But the level of repression has been such that they are more reminiscent of the bloody regime of Mengistu Hailemariam. Indiscriminate aerial warfare against population centres and public executions of civilians are phenomena from which Ethiopia has been spared since his removal from power in 1991.

Abiy had taken all possible precautions to guarantee electoral success. In many constituencies – particularly in the sprawling and restive Oromia region – only his party, the Prosperity Party, was on the ballot. In other places, where his party’s hold is the weakest and where repression is consequently the greatest, elections were not held at all. This included the entirety of the northern region of Tigray. In areas where the vote went ahead, the full force of the state was mobilized to campaign for Abiy’s party, while what remains of the opposition largely boycotted the spectacle. The stage was set for a resounding victory, befitting of the ‘Seventh Emperor’ (as Abiy has described himself). Yet as Ethiopians were called to the polling stations, the Tigray Defence Forces – the armed resistance to the invading forces, commanded by Tigray’s regional government – launched its first major offensive since the war in Tigray begun in November 2020.

The campaign overshadowed the elections and shattered any illusions that the war was over as Abiy had proclaimed in late November. Tigrayan forces routed the Ethiopian army across the central, northern and eastern parts of the region, forcing their hasty withdrawal. Since then, Tigrayan forces have pushed into the neighbouring Amhara regional state, capturing swathes of territory including the city of Woldiya – home to nearly 200,000 people. The army responded to the defeat with atrocities against Tigrayans. On 24 June, the regime’s air force bombed the market town of Togoga, killing scores of civilians, and subsequently blocked ambulances from evacuating the wounded. (Tigrayan forces responded by downing an aircraft the same day.) All told, the offensive made what many observers have long held abundantly clear: that Abiy’s war on Tigray is unwinnable. 

Soon after the army’s retreat, the bodies of Tigrayans who had been tortured and executed were seen floating down the Tekeze river from Humera, the westernmost city in the region still held by Abiy’s forces. The withdrawal having been redefined as a ‘unilateral ceasefire’, it was immediately replaced by the encirclement and blockade of Tigray, denying its population access to basic goods such as food and medicine. Hundreds of thousands are now suffering under famine conditions, and malnourished children are wasting away in the region’s under-resourced hospitals. Tigrayan forces have sought unsuccessfully to evade the blockade by expanding their operation southwards. With Ethiopia’s rainy season at an end, fighting has once again intensified, with Abiy’s forces seeking to regain lost territory.

In addition to their misadventure in Tigray, Abiy and his government face crisis on multiple fronts. Two officially uninvited armies are operating on what Ethiopia considers its sovereign territory. Eritrea has engaged in systematic abuses of Ethiopian citizens and remains embedded in North-Eastern and Western Tigray despite Abiy’s insistence that its forces would soon depart. Whether he truly wants them to leave is a moot point: Abiy has no means to impose his will. Sudan’s army meanwhile occupies a triangle of land – al Fashaga – that Ethiopia has in the past recognized as Sudanese, but which it has nevertheless retained partial control over until the past few months. As the war in Tigray began, Abiy requested that Sudan fortify its borders. Consequently, the military presence on both sides increased, leading to clashes. Ethiopia at that point renounced its acknowledgement of Sudanese sovereignty over the triangle, which prompted Sudan’s armed forces to expel Ethiopian troops from the area. Sudan now poses a serious military threat to Abiy’s government and its Amhara militia allies, should they not renounce their newfound claim over al Fashaga.

In both cases, Abiy’s powerlessness is clear. In the Oromia region, meanwhile, the insurgency of the Oromo Liberation Army has gained strength over the past year, scoring a string of victories that have greatly expanded its areas of operation. It is now confident enough to stage public graduation ceremonies for its new recruits. Here too, atrocities have followed the frustration of the central government. In May, a teenager was publicly paraded to a central square in the city of Dembi Dollo, where he was executed on suspicion of links to the Oromia rebels.

The Ethiopian economy is also suffering from serious problems, exacerbated by deteriorating foreign relations. Most of Abiy’s former patrons in the West – whose support was crucial to the consolidation of his rule – have abandoned him. As a result of the human rights abuses in Tigray, the US and the EU have frozen aid payments, and the US has imposed economic sanctions which are likely to restrict Ethiopia’s access to funds from the World Bank and IMF. Credits and loans from these institutions, which Abiy once likened to ‘borrowing from one’s mother’, have been essential to staving off a full-scale debt crisis.

One must not expect Washington to promote a genuine democratic solution to Ethiopia’s problems. The US is motivated by its own interests – limited to keeping Ethiopia in a stable enough shape that it can continue to support the status quo in the region, which has been imperilled by Abiy’s mismanagement. Since coming to power, Abiy has craved closer relations with Western countries and financial institutions, presenting himself as a free-market reformer opening up the economy to foreign investors. His government’s ‘homegrown economic reform’ agenda is a carbon copy of the recommendations pushed by Washington in recent decades, and he has cultivated alliances with fellow evangelicals in Washington, including the hard-right Republican Senator Jim Inhofe. Initially, Abiy’s government sought – and partially succeeded in attaining – an international realignment that would bring Ethiopia further into the orbit of Western states. Washington’s first response to the war on Tigray was therefore to support it. This only changed when Abiy proved ineffective on the battlefield.

The rift between Ethiopia and the US has compromised the former’s regional standing further, against the backdrop of already souring relations with Egypt, Kenya and Sudan. Responding to this conjuncture, Abiy suddenly announced that he would close over half the country’s diplomatic missions, citing financial pressures. For a state with a strong diplomatic tradition – a founding member of the League of Nations, the UN and the OAU, and the host of the headquarters of the African Union – which has consistently fashioned itself as a linchpin of pan-Africanism, this certainly signals a lowering of ambition. Missions earmarked for closure include embassies in Nairobi, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Abidjan, Accra, Kigali, Dakar, Kinshasa, Harare and Algiers.

The fervour that the regime whipped up in the early stages of the war remains strong in several areas across the federation, with continued statements from political and religious leaders that can only be described as genocidal. But in Addis Ababa, a public mood of widespread despair and despondency is also palpable. This is partly due to the war’s economic toll: inflation is sky-high, unemployment soaring. Whatever optimism existed a few years ago about Ethiopia’s unbalanced yet growing economy is now all but gone. Lately, cautious dissent from Abiy’s vain pursual of a military victory at whatever costs has begun to be voiced from within the regime’s heartland. That 24 Ethiopian NGOs – some of which had previously expressed support for the government’s war aims – recently petitioned for negotiations and ceasefire is an indication of the changing mood in the country’s capital. The mayoral candidate of the hitherto strongly pro-war party Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, likewise, has urged the government to negotiate an end to the conflict. Such calls must be understood in the context of the different positions of the two sides: whereas Tigray’s regional government has repeatedly expressed its willingness to negotiate, Abiy’s government has refused to consider it.

Despite being cash-strapped, struggling in the battlefield and facing increasing scepticism from former foreign allies and the Ethiopian public, the regime has dug in. Senior officials have redoubled their belligerent rhetoric, while the regime’s mobilization of ethnic militias has gone into overdrive. Abiy has gone shopping for drones and armaments to restore the advantage UAE’s air force offered him in the early stages of the war. His government has treated foreign envoys and UN officials seeking dialogue on the humanitarian situation with open hostility. On 30 September it announced the expulsion of seven senior UN officials involved in the hampered relief efforts. The UN Secretary General, hitherto seen as close to Abiy, expressed shock at the move. He ought not to have been surprised, however: starving Tigray into submission has been an aim of Abiy’s government since the early months of the war. This project has now developed into a severe and multifaceted crisis that is gripping all corners of the country. More convulsions are to be expected, as the regime tries to get out of this hole by digging further.

Read on: Emilio Sarzi Amade, ‘Ethiopia’s Troubled Road’, NLR I/107.

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Lines of Succession

In Egypt, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War is a timeless event. But nearly fifty years later, the generation that fought on the banks of the Suez Canal and in the Sinai Peninsula is dying. The conflict will soon be resigned to historical memory, its battles memorialized in the media and official proclamations, but nowhere else. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was a teenager in the early 1970s, appeared to acknowledge as much during an educational symposium this week on the anniversary of the war, which came just after the death of one of its most famous veterans, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

Tantawi, who was eighty-five years old, fought in both the Six-Day War in 1967 and the War of Attrition in 1967–70, but he distinguished himself as commander of the sixteenth infantry battalion in 1973. Among the first Egyptian detachments to cross the canal into the Sinai, the battalion is perhaps best known for its role in the Battle of the Chinese Farm, a brutal two-day confrontation with the Israeli military on the western edge of the Sinai. The Egyptians retreated from this fortification on 17 October, but not without inflicting significant damage on the enemy. Tantawi was awarded a medal for his courage.

Born in the Cairo neighborhood of ‘Abdeen in 1935, Tantawi graduated from the city’s Military Academy in April 1956, on the eve of the Suez Crisis, and fought alongside Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip soon after. He returned to the Military Academy to teach tactics and in the 1960s travelled to post-independence Algeria, where he established a similar institution. After the 1973 war, he rose through the ranks of the motorized infantry, eventually becoming commander of a division. Tantawi led the Second Field Army, the Republican Guard and finally the Operations Authority. From the mid- to late-70s, his role as Egypt’s military attaché in Pakistan and Afghanistan shielded him from civil-military tensions at home – as President Anwar Sadat repositioned Egypt geopolitically with the signing of the Camp David accords and fought to suppress the country’s opposition.

From top to bottom, the ranks of the military were displeased with Sadat’s unilateral realignment with the United States and rapprochement with Israel. So when a uniformed officer, Khaled Islambouli, opened fire on Sadat during a military parade, it was far from unexpected. A couple weeks earlier, the security forces had reportedly rounded up twenty people – some of them military officers – on suspicion of planning an attack. Aside from exposing the inability of the military to control its personnel, the assassination of Sadat precipitated intense internal surveillance and scrutiny. As Hosni Mubarak’s regime emerged in its wake, so too did a new order in the army, beginning, as it often does, with purges. Those who remained in uniform were sent a stark message: stay in line, and don’t fly too close to the sun. Mubarak found at least one senior-level officer who seemed willing to follow these injunctions: Hussein Tantawi.

During the US-led operation in Kuwait, Tantawi coordinated the deployment of Egyptian forces to the Gulf. He also became the primary liaison between the commander of the Arab forces, Saudi prince Khalid bin Sultan, and the Egyptian leadership. Tantawi was appointed defence minister shortly after the war in May 1991. After moving into the official residence off Ibn al-Hakam Square, his main priority was to oversee the transformation – or ‘modernization’, as the US government called it – of the military from Soviet to Western hardware, training and doctrine. Though Tantawi was receptive to Washington’s reforms, he was constrained early on by other senior officers who remained committed to the Soviet model. Whereas Tantawi had never attended a foreign military academy, his immediate predecessors all received training in the Soviet Union, while two of his successors spent time in the United States. His tenure, much like his background, represented an about-face for the military – and for Egypt more broadly.

When the military rules, soldiers are not just soldiers. Bureaucratic organization in an authoritarian state is often conflictual, so while war may have been the army’s vocation, politics became its specialty. They were forced to balance the competing priorities of loyalty and professionalism, reacting to the whims of the ruler (and sometimes the people). Of the twenty Egyptian defence ministers since the 1952 coup, Tantawi held the position the longest, weathering successive rounds of political violence, popular mobilization and economic liberalization. This was frequently interpreted by Egypt commentators as evidence of his complacency, lack of ambition and deference to Mubarak. Yet such characterizations overlooked an important fact: Tantawi beat the odds. In a country where top military officials are often jailed, exiled, muzzled, cashiered early – and have occasionally died in unusual circumstances – Tantawi’s longevity may have also been a sign of his political acuity.

Tantawi was, in fact, willing to push back against Mubarak at critical moments in his presidency, including the Egyptian revolution of 2011. From the first days of the protests Tantawi made his position clear: that the military would neither mount a coup d’état nor prop up the ailing regime. He believed that Mubarak had not grasped the severity of events on the ground, and doubted that he would cede control of the government even after he had agreed to a formal transfer of power. On 10 February Tantawi called a meeting of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces without its formal chairman, the president. The next day, Mubarak resigned and Tantawi took power. He oversaw a referendum on changes to the constitution – presidential term limits, a vice presidency, electoral reforms – and presided over the indictments of senior figures from the outgoing regime. Yet, as protesters continued to flood the streets calling for presidential elections to be brought forward, Tantawi’s forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds – at one point sending armoured vehicles to run over demonstrators staging a sit-in at the state television headquarters. Tantawi became a symbol of the ongoing state violence. His removal, or execution, was demanded by the crowds in Tahrir Square.

Two months after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi came to power, Tantawi was asked to step down from both his military and political positions. He remained an adviser to Morsi and received an honorary Order of the Nile, but otherwise retreated from public life. In his place, the ambitious and adroit Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ascended to the role of defence minister. Morsi had invited the coup-maker in – and before long the unstable civilian government had been toppled by a revitalized military high command.

Prior to the Arab Spring, Tantawi regularly stated that the military would not tolerate succession: a rebuke to Mubarak, who planned for his son Gamal to take the helm. Yet in Egypt, positions of power are often passed from important men to their understudies. One retired Egyptian general described to me the Sisi–Tantawi relationship as that of a mentor and protégé. Another speculated that Tantawi had marked Sisi out to become defence minister ever since he was a young major. While consolidating his iron-grip on the country, Sisi has canonized Tantawi, lauding his heroism and self-sacrifice, and frequently drafting him in for ceremonial duties. Sisi ordered a colossal mosque to be built in his honour, and the military produced a eulogizing film titled ‘A Tribute to Loyalty’. In it, we are presented with a striking succession of Egyptian leaders: Nasser, Sadat, Tantawi, Sisi.

Read on: Hazem Kandil, ‘Sisi’s Egypt’, NLR 102.

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Notes on the Curriculum

1.

Canonizing. Sociology is apparently in the process of de-colonizing itself. A strong point of the project is the recognition that sociology emerged during the age of imperialism and that this gave the field a cosmopolitan and comparative ambition lost after the Parsonian synthesis which was both grand, and a bit boring. The weakness of the decolonizers lies in their deadening approach to ideas. For the enthusiasts of this project, such as the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell for example, the elevation of Durkheim and Weber (then joined at a later period by Marx) to the status of classics is the result of translations, edited volumes and curricula. In the past, per Connell, there were different figures such as Spencer, Comte and Martineau. In the future there might be new ones. Undoubtedly there is considerable truth in all this, but what the decolonizers never get around to is the analysis of ideas. Why is this? It is connected to a cluster of epistemological and ontological assumptions shared across sociology from the most ardent exponents of post-colonialism to hardcore positivists. It could be called the dogma of the shapeless flux. Its picture of intellectual history is something like this. There exists a massive body of texts of more or less equal quality (Connell equates Sumner’s Folkways to Weber’s sociology of religion and Comte’s theory of progress to Hegel’s philosophy of history for example). Some of these texts are arbitrarily elevated to the status of must-reads because their study serves some latent function for sociology such as reinforcing professional pride and presumably also the interests of the white middle-class men who embody it. Occasionally the time comes to shake up the texts; this is an especially urgent task in the current period because of the need to diversify in demographic terms the voices in the curriculum. Without falling into a lazy traditionalism, it should be obvious that this set of protocols for understanding the history of sociology is guaranteed to produce nothing but cynicism, both concerning the previous canon, and concerning whatever new candidates are forthcoming. What it forgets is that the first step in an analysis is the critique and reconstruction of the ideas. Whatever one might say about Parson’s Structure of Social Action at least he got this starting point right. The decolonizers, in contrast, are producing nothing more than more or less extensive annotated bibliographies.

2.

Sunk costs. It is hard to avoid the impression that ‘canonical’ struggles are really a misrecognized clash of quite specific material interests. The importance of ‘sunk costs’ in academic life should never be underestimated. Every professor has a large stock of written materials, images, graphs, reading notes and ready-to-hand interpretations which she has accumulated over years of study and thought. Although one really must avoid the slipshod analogies encouraged by the term ‘cultural capital’, these artifacts have a certain resemblance to ‘fixed capital’ in the Marxian lexicon. They provide a basic framework through which new information can be easily digested or ‘valorized’. In a material sense a challenge to the ‘canon’ poses the threat of the rapid devaluation of fixed assets. The rational response of these asset holders is ‘stand and fight’, to preserve the value of their assets even if their intellectual equipment is somewhat dated. They can at least make good use of it to valorize their ‘circulating capital’. The challengers in a material sense have quite opposite interests. They would like to leapfrog the incumbents and set up shop on the basis of an entirely new set of fixed endowments. This is the material meaning of the various projects of syllabus revision underway across the sprawling complex of US higher education, although ideologically this campaign is carried out under the sign of ‘decolonizing the syllabus’ or similar slogans. A couple of observations are in order about this struggle. First, it is important to point out the limits of the analogy. For in academic life there is no field of natural selection operating to weed out less efficient producers (as much as the managers of the neoliberal university would like this to be the case). Nor is there any analogue to exploitation. Second, the highly paradoxical character of the conflict should be emphasized. The most conservative actors in any struggle over the canon are likely to be in the least prestigious positions with the fewest opportunities to retool. To make matters worse, these are also the actors most likely to be the most vulnerable to negative student evaluations and the bureaucratic apparatus. Thus, we can fully expect that the costs of ‘de-colonizing the syllabus’ will be borne by those least able to bear them. Conversely those likely to win the most from the struggle will be those actors most well-placed with the lowest teaching loads and the most time to retool. The openness of this stratum to student demands for transformation is largely an index of its academic privilege. The outcome, in any case, will hardly be an overthrow of the canon, but a heightening of ‘barriers to entry’ for all players. A final note to the reader. The message of these lines is contained both in what they say and in how it is said.

Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘Lockdown Limbo’, NLR 127.

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Yesterday’s Mythologies

There is a world, not too dissimilar from our own, in which Jonathan Franzen is a professor of creative writing at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. He still has his bylines at the New Yorker and Harper’s (in fact, he writes for them more frequently); he still has his books (even if they’re all a bit shorter, one of them is a collection of short stories, and his translation of Spring Awakening lives with his unpublished notes on Karl Kraus in the Amish-made drawer of his ‘archive’); he still has his awards (except his NBA is now an NEA). Despite his misgivings about the effect of social media on print culture, he also has a Facebook page, which he uses to promote his readings and share photos of his outings with the local birding society, and a Twitter account, which he uses to retweet positive reviews and post about Julian Assange. Aside from his anxiety about how much time teaching and administrative duties take away from his ‘real work’ as a novelist, whether his diminishing royalty checks will be enough to cover his mortgage and his adopted son’s college tuition, and whether it would be wise to keep flirting with the sole female member of his small group of student acolytes, the greatest drama in his life occurs when he periodically becomes the main character on Twitter for saying something hopelessly out of touch – pile-ons he less-than-discreetly attributes to other writers’ envy for his hard-won success.

In the actual world, however, Franzen’s face has been captioned ‘Great American Novelist’ on the cover of Time. His publicist has not been too embarrassed to say that he is ‘universally regarded as the leading novelist of his generation’. In this world, he has the time, money, and freedom to do nothing but write what he pleases. Before he finishes a single sentence, he can take for granted that there will be a wide audience for it. In this world, publication alone is enough to justify his book’s presence on the New York Times Best Seller List, on the shelf of every airport bookstore on the planet, and in every outlet – print and online – that still reviews fiction. If privately he hankers after the Pulitzer that yet eludes him, he can console himself with the knowledge that it would amount to little more than a sprinkle of establishment recognition on a career that has evolved beyond the power of prize committees. In this world, when he goes hunting for comp titles, he finds them, not in any of his contemporaries, but in canonical Victorians like Dickens and Eliot. Whether he is America’s indispensable novelist is a matter of opinion, but in this world no one disagrees that since the publication of The Corrections in 2001 he has been the inescapable literary figure of the world’s inescapable nation.

The reason for the difference between the hypothetical Franzen and the real one can perhaps be summed up in a single word: Oprah. If the selection of The Corrections by Oprah’s book club was largely a matter of luck, and his rejection of it a career-defining risk, his reconciliation with Oprah after the publication of Freedom was a piece of canniness that is paying dividends to this day. Still, the plausibility of the former presents a problem for the critic of the latter. The hypothetical Franzen’s books would rarely be read and sporadically reviewed; the real Franzen’s novels cannot be read or reviewed without reference to the vast publicity apparatus that has been put at their disposal. Other than with time, there is no clean way of separating a Franzen-text from the para-Franzen. With Franzen, we are dealing with what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept’. Discussions of his post-Corrections work tend to devolve quite quickly into a series of rival camps which all end up talking past each other in defense of positions – about snobbery, privilege, merit, progress – for which he is merely a symbolic proxy.

The truth of the matter is that the para-Franzen is the masterpiece, whereas the Franzen-texts are essentially mediocre. This is not an insult, exactly. Most novels are mediocre, and mediocrity has been more than enough to satisfy the basic needs of reading publics – for entertainment, for edification, for recognition of self, for communal totems, for the idle passage of time – since the days of Amadís de Gaula. For all these needs, Franzen-texts are perfectly satisfactory. Because of the para-Franzen’s acclaim, it is nevertheless a controversial proposition, so I’ll spend a little of my word count proving it. Since the success of The Corrections, Franzen has settled into a comfortable formula: from the one-word abstract noun of the title, to the use of a series of third person close perspectives differentiated by diction indexed to intelligence or worldliness, to the middle-class heartland milieu, to the East Coast/Midwest opposition, to the trip abroad subplot, to the use of Christmas as a telescoping event, to stakes that lie in the fates of marriages and nuclear families. Many novelists have tics and preoccupations to which they return over and over again throughout their careers, but there is nothing particularly Franzonian (a term notable in its absence) about his treatment of these familiar elements from the canonical novel. Indeed, his strict adherence to these conventions in Freedom and Purity have made these books targets for the increasingly widespread suspicion that the cultural prominence of literary fiction is undeserved, nothing more than genre fiction for a specific market segment.

What ought to distinguish a great novel from a passable one is not the social position of its audience, but the quality of its prose. And here, of the dozens of examples I could have chosen, is a representative Franzen-sentence:

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a White Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon.

These forty-nine words – the opening of Crossroads, the first book of Franzen’s trilogy A Key to All Mythologies, which is being touted as a culminating achievement – contain a series of errors so basic the hypothetical Franzen would not have failed to circle them in red pen had one of his eager-to-impress students turned it in for their first workshop. It begins with the sort of melodramatic statement about the weather with which he already opened The Corrections and for which Bulwer-Lytton is mocked to this day. ‘Moist’ is an imprecision; the pair of frontal systems have caused there to be moisture in the air, not in anyone’s anticipation of the unremarkable occurrence of snow in suburban Chicago in late December. Along with ‘broken’ and ‘colluding’, they produce the ‘emotional falseness’ Ruskin described when he coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’. If the repetition of the ‘pro’ sound in ‘New Prospect’ and its cognate ‘promise’ a few words later is evidence of a tin ear, the ironic-symbolic place name and the portentous-symbolic make and model of the station wagon are evidence of a heavy hand. The second clause is a misplaced modifier and the appearance of ‘grayly’ in it is a textbook violation of the adverb rule. Granted, this is not the sort of merely competent, work-a-day, unexciting prose for which young, degree-holding American novelists are often chastised; it is nonetheless prose of a very deep shade of purple, and its author is not in a position to plead inexperience, time pressure, editorial meddling, or the need to appease the public.

In one respect, however, Crossroads is a departure for Franzen: historical fiction by a novelist who once claimed to be ‘particularly resistant’ to the genre. Of the book’s next 145,000 or so words, around half unfolds on 23 December 1971 and around half during the following spring (with a coda that takes place during Easter, 1974). Dissatisfied in his marriage, Russ, the associate minister of the First Reformed Church, has fallen in love with one of his widowed parishioners. His wife, Marion, is punishing herself for her guilt about the life she led before she met Russ by overeating and is secretly seeing a psychiatrist. Their eldest son Clem, a student at the University of Illinois, has had a crisis of conscience, dropped out of school, and revoked his student deferment to Vietnam. Becky, their second child, the most popular girl at New Prospect Township High School, has received a surprise inheritance from her mother’s estranged sister, and has fallen in love with Tanner Evans, guitarist in the band Bleu Notes. Their third child, the mentally unstable Perry, is using his genius-level IQ to conceal his budding drug addiction, unless he is using drugs to dull the pain of his intelligence. At the age of nine, Judson, the only Hildebrandt who does not get his own chapters, is as yet too young to do anything but watch with incomprehension as his family disintegrates.

The lives of the people of New Prospect, adults and teens alike, circle around Crossroads, the church youth organization Russ founded with the charismatic young minister Rick Ambrose, and named after the Robert Johnson song recently made popular among white suburbanites by the English band Cream. Three years earlier, Russ was humiliatingly excommunicated from the group due to an untoward comment he makes about Marion to a teenage girl during its yearly service trip to a Navajo reservation. Under Ambrose’s leadership, Crossroads has become something more akin to an encounter group than a church group however. One character calls it a ‘cult’; Ambrose himself calls it a ‘social experiment’. In this form, it sucks first Perry, then Becky into its orbit.

A crossroads, of course, is a folkloric setting where a fateful decision is made, where one might choose otherwise – not to slay the stranger blocking the road, not to sell one’s soul to the devil—though one never ends up doing so. The Hildebrandt family unit finds itself at a crossroads on 23 December 1971, and by implication, so does the nation. We will have to wait for the second and third volumes of A Key to All Mythologies to see to what degree this ultimately proves true for Russ, Marion, and their children. As for the United States, we already know what happens: the Nixon Shock will pave the way for financialization of the economy; the Powell Memorandum will lead to the corporate capture of the media and the universities; the Southern strategy will embed white supremacy and Christian nationalism into the electoral fortunes of the Republican party; the War on Drugs will create the largest prison system in history and revive Jim Crow; the Vietnam War will continue for another three years and military defeat will only be a road bump in the expansion of the American Empire across the globe; the findings of a paper entitled ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate’ will go unheeded; the grandchildren of ARPANET will inherit the earth.

The question, for Franzen, is whether, in telling his story about the Hildebrandts, he provides a richer, more complex, more profound aetiology than the ones we’re used to. Yet aside from a keen insight into the outsized role the status hierarchies produced by the institution of high school have played in the making of American values and his clever staging of the way therapeutic fads hollowed out certain liberal political impulses in American Protestantism, we are served yet another helping of sex (adulterous desire for Russ; incestuous desire for Clem; first love for Becky), drugs (‘ludes for Marion; pot, ‘ludes, Dexies and coke for Perry), and rock n’ roll (whose cachet in the person of Tanner Evans is responsible­­­ for the popularity of Crossroads) with a side of War, What Is It Good For, all of which is covered with an insipid gravy of period signifiers. (That said, there is something anachronistic and even calculating in the explicitness of Russ’s critiques of white saviourism and power differentials in his parishioners’ interactions with members of the Black community on the South Side of Chicago and of the Navajo Nation in Kitsillie, Arizona. It is as though the para-Franzen – perhaps rightly – does not trust contemporary readers’ ability to differentiate presentation and endorsement when it comes to race. Despite this preemptive strike against the sensitivity readers, the fact remains that the non-white characters serve mainly as props in Russ’s great struggle to get laid by someone other than his wife.) Like most families, the Hildebrandts are held together in a complex network of ancient grudges and mutual deceptions, unconscious repetitions and defence mechanisms mistaken for identities. The issue isn’t that such things are too trivial to be put in a hardback-sized box and shaken up until all the permutations of dramatic irony are exhausted, but that in this case they are not strong enough to bear the social-allegorical load that Franzen has foisted on them.

Part of this is due to the limitations of the framework of the canonical novel, which is forced to reduce society to an aggregation of subjects (a.k.a., characters), the subject into psychology (i.e., narrative interiority), and psychology into desire (paradigmatically sexual desire, a metonym for motivation itself, whose friction with various social blockages – ‘instinct’ and ‘purity’ in Franzen’s terms – moves the plot forward). Franzen has taken the name of his new trilogy from the subject of Casaubon’s monograph in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (unless he’s been brushing up on René Girard). In an early passage in Crossroads, Franzen rushes in where Eliot feared to tread, having Perry hazard a hypothesis as to what the key to all mythologies actually is:

The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love…[Ambrose] inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use the rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life…

This is not, in fact, a convincing theory of how religion works, but the conceptual web of personal relationships, charismatic leadership, uninhibitedness in speech, novelty, and sensation does capture the puerile spirituality of the United States, where God is just another of many addictions. The most charitable way of reading Perry’s theory is ironically. Franzen is suggesting that the belief that one has found the key to all mythologies is itself a mythology, and a potentially dangerous one at that: the climax of the novel occurs on a freezing desert night when drug-addled Perry takes himself for God. But the task of the novelist-rhetorician – as this rather Bloomean-Rortyean passage would also seem to acknowledge – is not only to demythologize, it is to mythologize better.

Neither ‘new’ nor particularly ‘strong’ let alone ‘counterintuitive’, the first volume of A Key to All Mythologies gives little indication that Franzen is up to it. Then again, his own fateful decision – standing, as he put it in his 2002 essay on his erstwhile literary hero William Gaddis, at the crossroads between ‘status’ and ‘contract’ – to adopt the canonical novel’s framework and inherit its wide public and its formal limitations rather than to use his freedom and influence to extend, challenge, deepen, or reimagine it, was made long ago. Thinking back on his meeting with Marion, Russ laments, ‘She’d seduced him into a contract before he knew his value in the marketplace’. Franzen made no such mistake when he wrote Crossroads. For an American novelist to court comparison – even tongue-in-cheek – to Middlemarch in 2021 seems so pompous that it is easy to overlook that it’s not quite the virtue it’s presented as being – and not simply because the lesson of modernism, unlearned here, was that literary tradition is more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Crossroads arrives into a world that has grown bearish about the prospects of the United States and for once, Americans seem to agree. This marks an epochal shift in national mythology. During the years of Franzen’s fame, America has turned its back on its characteristic optimism, its openness to experiment, its future-orientation – an overdue concession to the reality of what the United States has become during the period: an Old World Empire. (We should be under no illusion that this is what underwrites its literary culture’s command on the world’s attention.) Whether Crossroads, as a cultural artifact, should be understood as a sign or a symptom of this shift will be for future scholars of American Literature (if there are any left) to decide. It is nonetheless revealing that the person regarded as the nation’s ‘leading novelist’ should stake his claim to the title not by attempting to write the novel of tomorrow, but by attempting to update a novel published a century and a half ago, at the height of the British Empire. Crossroads is far from the novel that America needs; unfortunately, it is exactly the one it deserves.

Read on: Peter Gowan, ‘Crisis in the Heartland’, NLR 55.

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The Intruded

Writing some years after he received a heart transplant in the early 1990s Jean-Luc Nancy remarked on the historical contingency of living beyond his early fifties. Had he been born twenty years or so earlier he would not have survived; twenty years later he would no doubt have survived differently. He also noted the sense of strangeness that accompanied the experience of receiving, and of living with, the heart of another: transplantation, he wrote, imposed an image of nothingness. Into that space most associated with intimacy and interiority, a different emptied-out space had intruded, provoking a sense of no longer being properly oneself. If Nancy was able to turn the experience into something like a philosophical parable, it is because he had long been engaged with questions of the material contingency of thought. Before it is something that we can think of as the site of our most proper self, our body is already inhabited by and exposed to the outside – a condition of co-belonging in the world as well as source of vulnerability. For over a half a century, Nancy elaborated a corpus of philosophical thought that ceaselessly traced its own limits. His thinking addressed fundamental questions of ontology, freedom and consciousness, reason and the foundations of judgement, while constantly exposing itself to philosophy’s various outsides, domains with which it has been historically and perhaps irreducibly intertwined: the political and the social, ethics, art and aesthetics, the theological and the religious.

The bare facts of Nancy’s career are quite straightforward and well-documented. Born in 1940 in Caudéran near Bordeaux, he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1962, took the agrégation in 1964 then worked at a lycée in Colmar before taking a position at the Strasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968. He completed his doctorate in 1973 and that year became a lecturer at Strasbourg’s Université des Sciences Humaines, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. Until his illness in the late 1980s he was active on academic committees and was a visiting professor at numerous universities around the world. Yet this outline belies the richness and complexity of his intellectual trajectory, one that is exemplary of a wider sweep of late twentieth-century French philosophical culture. During his adolescence, as a member of Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne he was steeped in a culture of Christian socialist militancy as well as the wider atmosphere of the French left of the period, defined by the struggle in Algeria as well as the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the difficulty of other attempts to recast socialism in Europe and elsewhere. Yet his beginnings in academic philosophy were made in the absence of any decisive heritage or orientation.

This all changed in the following decade when Nancy encountered the influences that would shape the rest of his career. In 1961 he was introduced to Hegel by the philosopher and theologian Georges Morel, and the following year wrote his master’s dissertation on religion in Hegel under the supervision of Paul Ricœur. Although, by his own account, Nancy was no longer personally religious, he nevertheless continued in these years to participate in activist Christian circles as well socialist and trade union groups. During this time he also discovered Heidegger, and was influenced by the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem who taught him at the Sorbonne. In 1967 he met Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, another deeply engaged reader of Heidegger with whom he would participate in the events of May ’68, and who as a colleague at Strasbourg became a long-standing friend and philosophical collaborator. The sixties bear witness to the eclecticism of Nancy’s intellectual formation, one in which the influences of his religious upbringing and milieu, his political activism and philosophical engagements were so deeply entangled as to be inseparable. In this environment Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics could align with a profound disaffection with the political perspectives of the period and fuel non-conformist or non-communist Marxist activism and even insurrection.

Nancy’s discovery of Heidegger was mediated by Gérard Granel, who first translated the key Heideggerian term Abbau as ‘déconstruction’ and who greatly influenced both Jacques Derrida and, much later, Bernard Stiegler. It was through an early article of Granel’s dedicated to the then far less renowned Derrida that Nancy first encountered what would become widely known as deconstruction. With the rise of structuralism in the early 1960s – to a great extent influenced by Canguilhem – Nancy was amongst those who felt that the specificity and even existence of philosophy was under threat. By his own account, his first contact with Derrida was a letter sent in 1968 or ‘69, addressing the relation of philosophy to the human sciences and in particular the supposedly ‘scientific’ status of Althusserian Marxist theory. It is at this point of initial contact with Derrida, which inaugurated a second crucial philosophical association and friendship, and with his appointment at the Université des Sciences Humaines that Nancy’s career as a philosopher can be said to really begin.

His 1973 doctoral thesis, also completed under the supervision of Ricœur, was on Kant, confirming that although Heidegger is often thought to be Nancy’s paramount influence, his early readings of Hegel and then of Kant were nevertheless decisive. Nietzsche likewise became an important reference, shaping Nancy’s interest in the formal properties of philosophical discourse and informing the argument of his first book, The Title of the Letter, published in 1972 and co-authored with Lacoue-Labarthe. A highly critical reading of the writing of Jacques Lacan that reflected Nancy’s scepticism about the status of the structuralist human sciences, it led Lacan to refer to its authors as Derrida’s ‘underlings’. The judgment was hardly fair, but the books that followed over the next several years on Hegel, Kant, Descartes, and German Romanticism could be broadly characterised as deconstructive commentaries, which offer anti-foundationalist readings of canonical texts of philosophical modernity and explore the permeable relationship between literature and philosophy. Yet however much they betrayed a proximity to Derrida these commentaries, with their distinctive synthesis of Nietzschean and Heideggerian approaches to overcoming metaphysics, were highly original, and ultimately paved the way for the differences that would open up between the two.

The turning point was perhaps the establishment of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique at the École Normale Supérieure in 1980. Founded by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe at Derrida’s suggestion, the centre intended to explore the political dimension and implications of deconstruction. There was a constitutive ambivalence to this project, one that soon produced fault lines: while there was an acknowledgment that philosophy is unavoidably a political practice and therefore always implicated in political activity or struggles, at the same time deconstruction refused any direct assimilation of philosophy to politics or attempts by philosophy to offer a foundational programme for politics, as well as overhasty attempts to seek conjunctions with Marxism. The thinking that emerged at the Centre, and in deconstruction more generally, should be understood against the wider intellectual background of post-war France, in which Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophical foundationalism were perceived to have been retroactively tainted by the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Holocaust and the violence of European colonialism and imperialism. Hegel, viewed as the paradigmatic thinker of system and totality was taken to be exemplary of a philosophy which, in its aspiration to absolute fulfilment in history, provided a model and expression of the very real ideological conditions of historical violence, totalitarian state-forms, and genocidal projects. Heidegger’s political itinerary also loomed large in this sense of philosophy having been compromised by its relation to politics.

In truth Nancy was a subtle and attentive reader of Hegel, fully aware of the complexities of a philosophical discourse whose drive towards systematicity and the absolute might have been mitigated or undermined by its dynamic of negativity. Nevertheless, the question of philosophical and political subjectivity dominated the concerns of the Centre and informed Nancy’s response to deconstruction’s ambivalence about the relation of the philosophical and the political. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were convinced that philosophy’s tendency to produce idealised conceptions of subjectivity – the people, national or racial identity, the proletariat, homo economicus – and proffer them as a basis for political community and forms of social and economic organisation was essentially metaphysical. In this context the ills of both totalitarianism and capitalism could be seen to have a common shared condition. It was therefore the passage from the philosophical production of foundational identities to the enactment of political projects that required deconstruction. By 1984 however, it had become clear that this orientation was not shared by all of the Centre’s participants: Claude Lefort’s work emphasised a much clearer dividing line between democracy and totalitarianism, rejecting Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heideggerian understanding of subjectivity, while Denis Kambouchner similarly dismissed their distinction – again inspired by Heidegger – between politics understood as an everyday practice and ‘the political’ understood as a more fundamental order of relation organising collective life. Without consensus on these assumptions, it was hard for the work of the Centre to progress.

For Nancy, the impasse coincided with his divergence from Derrida. He now returned to an engagement with Heideggerian ontology and to the question of shared being-in-the-world, fusing this with Bataille’s conception of finite embodiment and corporeal excess. This allowed him to transpose the concerns of deconstruction from the paradigm of textualism onto that of existential phenomenology and its focus on shared, material and worldly existence: it was not just the decentred subject of intertextuality or the differential rupturing of intentional consciousness that would be at play in deconstruction. He understood thought to be fundamentally embedded in the contingency of bodily life, according to which sense and meaning were disseminated as shared worldly existence. Nancy would insist from the 1980s onwards that, prior to the political ‘there is the “common,” the “together,” and the “numerous,” and that we perhaps do not at all know how to think this order of the real’. The attempt to think this ‘order of the real’ would inform his unapologetic return to an – albeit fully deconstructed – ontology that Derrida would always refuse.

From this emerged his conception of ‘inoperative community’ in the early to mid-1980s. Positing community as irreducibly incomplete and open-ended, this was an attempt to recast the experience of historical, social and political community, outside of any logic of shared subjectivity or common identity but as a form of fundamental ontological co-belonging. This was less an instance of philosophy laying the ground for politics than it was an attempt to conceive of an originary space in which relationality of one kind or another could be understood to unfold. There were resources here for rethinking concepts such as equality, solidarity, freedom, democracy and globalisation outside any logic of identitarian political destiny or state form. Yet Nancy continued to refuse the assimilation of philosophy into politics or the collapse of ontology and politics in the service of any given project or programme.

The turn away from Derrida saw Nancy exposed to criticism on at least two fronts. On the one hand there were early critics of the work of the Centre who demanded that it more directly engage with existing political struggles and projects. A trenchant critique by Nancy Fraser urged Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to ‘venture forth from their transcendental safe-house’. On the other there were those more aligned with Derrida, who were sceptical of Nancy’s return to ontology and its Heideggerian inflection. Later, philosophers such as Simon Critchley, conjugating Derridean deconstruction with Levinassian ethics, saw in Nancy’s return to ontology an elision or repression of the ethical as such. Both criticisms – that Nancy’s thought failed to give sufficient philosophical impetus to political struggle and that it constituted a regressive re-embrace of ontology – would recur throughout his career, informing his long-standing dispute with Maurice Blanchot on the question of community, as well as Badiou’s critique of his primary focus on finitude. In response, it could be argued that the return to ontology that has been evident over the past twenty years might suggest that Nancy was ahead of his time. At the same time, his caution towards the relationship of philosophical foundationalism to the grounding of political projects can be said to respond to the lessons of twentieth-century history, no less relevant today.

It was from this inflection point in the early 1980s that Nancy’s subsequent philosophical oeuvre flowed. His doctorat d’état, supervised by Granel, was published as The Experience of Freedom in 1988. Its demonstration of the failure of Kantian reason to secure a totalising ground for being yielded a conception of existence freed from any unity of foundation and understood as an irreducible multiplicity of contingent beings. This was the hinge which turned Nancy’s philosophy towards the major themes of his mature works of the nineties and of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. A Finite Thinking (1990) established the model for Nancy’s philosophy as an experimental, non-systematic practice which sought to bring itself to the limits of its own conceptual powers and possibilities in order to proceed, in the absence of any grounding or foundational gesture, as an encounter with the contingency and multiplicity of a material existence whose totality exceeds conceptual determination. This would be characterised in different ways in the works that followed, as the fragmentary experience of embodiment in Corpus (1992), as shared ‘sense’ in excess of all phenomenological disclosure in The Sense of the World (1993), as the singular plurality of being that resists ontological determination in Being Singular Plural (1996). These were followed by Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (1998), which, along with Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel (1996), signalled a definitive end to the post-war image of a ‘totalitarian’ Hegel. From the mid-1990s onwards Nancy continued to engage with questions of politics, most notably concerning ethics and democracy, but also and extensively with art and aesthetics. His meditations on art reconnected aesthetic experience to a renewed realism of touch or contact with the sensible-intelligible world. His major late project, the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ recast the inner logic of monotheism as an originary absenting of God from the world. In this way, he argued, the seeds of atheism had always already been sown within theism, leading to the eventual secularisation of historical religious forms. Nancy never returned to an embrace of religion as such, but his thinking has proven to be a rich resource for critical understanding of a contemporary return to religion and the category of the post-secular.

Nancy died in August, leaving various projects suspended in a state of incompletion, perhaps testifying to his understanding of thought itself as ongoing, and always incomplete. Decades before the vogue for ‘new materialism’ and ‘speculative realism’, Nancy inaugurated a shift in the wake of deconstruction towards a renewed, albeit highly novel, realism. His refusal of all politics grounded in idealised conceptions of subjectivity, self, and of political community grew out of a collective experience of historical disaster in the twentieth century. What one might call his embodied worldly realism of relational coexistence speaks to the post-secular identity politics and ecological problems of the twenty-first. Without prescribing easy answers or determinate programmes it traces and marks out the relational space in which the challenges of politics will be met.

Read on: Peter Hallward, ‘Order and Event’, NLR 53.

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No Recourse

In The Use of Man (1976), the second instalment of Serbo-Croatian novelist Aleksandar Tišma’s Novi Sad trilogy, a schoolboy stares at the books in his Jewish neighbour’s library on the eve of World War II ‘as if they contained the clues to salvation, as if they could rescue one from being beaten, cursed, spat upon, killed’. The books, it turns out, can do no such thing: the neighbour is murdered by the Nazis, while his daughter, Vera, is forcibly sterilized and put to work in a concentration camp brothel. Are words just so much dust in times as dire as these?  

Tišma does not think so. For his characters, language is no mere luxury: it is, in its own way, as indispensable as food and shelter, for it is only language that can render a private pain public. After the war, Vera yearns to confide in someone, but her memories remain ‘stuck inside her, silent, like resin’. When she is asked to write out her biography on a communist questionnaire, she finds herself trying ‘to put the unutterable on paper’. In the end, she crosses out, ‘in thick ink, every word she had written’. She annihilates first her family, then herself: ‘Father’s name: nothing. Mother’s name, maiden name: nothing. Day, month, year of birth: nothing. She was nothing’. Now, she is ‘a prisoner of those blank sheets of paper, as she had been a prisoner in the camp’. She has been exiled from intelligibility, thereby from human community.  

If silence debases and depersons, then the desire to speak – and to be understood – is no less than a desire to become human again. In Kapo (1987), the last and best book in the Novi Sad trilogy, newly reissued in English translation by New York Review Classics for the first time since 1993, Vilko Lamian is riven by conflicting imperatives: even as he strives to avoid punishment, he longs to confess to the many misdeeds he committed as a kapo in Auschwitz. Sequestered in the remote Bosnian town of Banja Luka, he gains weight and dons dark glasses in an attempt to disguise himself from former inmates who might recognize and report him. But try as he might, he cannot escape his victims entirely. As he goes about his business, working a mindless job at the local railroad, he is haunted by thoughts of the fellow Jews he helped to murder – and the many female inmates he contrived to rape with the help of corrupt camp authorities.  

It is to one of these women, Helena Lifka, that Lamian dreams of making a complete confession. The ‘summing word had to be spoken, and heard, and confirmed – by someone, whose response could be even silence, a look of damnation or forgiveness’, he thinks. Like Vera, Lamian knows that he must talk – and be heard and understood, if never forgiven – if he is to go on living. Before long, he has quit his job and embarked on a quest to find Helena, in hope that she can restore some measure of his drained humanity. 

* * * 

Tišma himself did not testify until late in life. He was born in 1924 in Horgos, a village on the border of Hungary and Serbia. The child of a Serbian father and a Hungarian-Jewish mother, he was raised in the then-Yugoslavian and now-Serbian city of Novi Sad. Before setting out to memorialize his own war-time agonies, he spent years working as a journalist: he began writing about the Holocaust only after a trip to Auschwitz in the 1960s. Though he was never interned in the camps and though he escaped the most violent massacres – a Hungarian neighbour lied to soldiers knocking on doors during the infamous raid of Novi Sad, when an estimated 1,400 Jews and Serbs were rounded up and slaughtered by occupation forces in just three days – he nonetheless considered his fiction broadly autobiographical.  

The result is some of the finest and most brutal writing about the Second World War and its bruising aftermath that I know of. Unlike his Yugoslav compatriot, Danilo Kis, Tišma makes no recourse to the leavening forces of fabulism and black comedy. His fiction is merciless, bereft of relief or respite. It is the work of a documentarian accustomed to confronting atrocity without allowing himself the indulgence of looking away. Even among Holocaust literature, it is uniquely bleak: its capitulation to hopelessness is near complete.  

The novels that make up the unsparing Novi Sad trilogy – The Book of Blam (1971), The Use of Man (1976), and Kapo (1987), all originally translated into English in the late 80s and early 90s and reissued by New York Review Classics in the last few years – are paranoiac and nightmarishly non-linear. They flit from one decade to another as the past claws at the present. In The Book of Blam, a quavering travel agency employee is racked by guilt as he contemplates his improbable survival, the product of his marriage to a Catholic: his unconverted Jewish parents and sister are dead. In The Use of Man, a group of acquaintances – a lonely German teacher, a dreamy schoolboy, a sadistic Serbian youth, and a prosperous Jewish businessman and his family – attempt to navigate an increasingly fraught political landscape as the Nazis solidify power. The two characters who live to see peacetime spend their days not planning for the future but reminiscing, by way of reading and re-reading the diary of their erstwhile German tutor, who died before the war. And in Kapo, Lamian is tormented by flashbacks that yank him out of his solitary life in sleepy Banja Luka and plunge him back into the cold heart of horror. On a warm day when other men on the street are lounging in their shirtsleeves, he shivers, recalling the Nazi who made him stand for hours encased in ice, a perverse punishment for appropriating a sweater from a corpse. ‘Leaving the camp behind’, writes Tišma, ‘he now found himself in a camp of his own’, a camp he cannot describe and therefore cannot escape.  

The Novi Sad trilogy endeavours to speak the unspeakable by means of lists and litanies. Even when its catalogue of deaths and indignities at last comes to an end, they gesture at continuation, as if to intimate that the horrors go on at greater length than we can endure or imagine. One chapter of The Use of Man consists of an inventory of ‘natural deaths and violent deaths’: ‘Sarah Kroner…choking in an Auschwitz gas chamber disguised as a bathhouse’, Robert Kroner ‘lying on his black winter overcoat in the transit camp’. In Kapo, Lamian comforts himself by reciting the names of the witnesses of his crimes and assuring himself that they are all dead: ‘Schmule and Krumholz – by injection. Schmauss and Leitner – sent to the front and killed. Varminsky – strangled in a bunker. Lang, Mell – dead in the revolt at Crematorium 2’. The sheer volume of the slaughter is overwhelming, especially when Lamian reflects on all those he was forced to kill,  

the columns of those who had been selected for him to lead to the dispensary to receive an injection of phenol in the heart…..Or the little girl with the doll who stood by the wall in the execution yard as SS man Pfalzig killed her father and mother with a bullet to the back of the head…..And the Russian prisoners, three hundred and sixty of them crowded into a log hut at the Brzezinka, the windows sealed with mud so that the effects of cyanide D could be tested on them. And the new arrivals who came at a time when the crematorium was too full. Led into the birch woods one by one, they were killed with a bullet to the head and thrown onto a grate across a fire, where their bodies burned, the fat crackling and the black smoke rising.  

All this is ‘too much for one head, one mind; and that was why it rushed forth to be told, to be revealed’ – and why Lamian is bursting to speak. 

Yet he has no one to talk to, even casually, much less anyone to confess to. His university friends became Nazis; his parents and neighbours perished in the camps. Insofar as he interacts with anyone else at all, he does so from a distance: he stands alone in a hotel, gazing out his window at a man behind another a window, or he eats alone in a restaurant, staring intently at the other patrons and speculating about their origins. He is incapable of even touching the prostitute he coaxes to his room, a woman whom he watches with interest but makes no effort to seduce. For the most part, he conducts imaginary conversations – with the Nazi who anointed him a kapo, with the dead, and, most urgently, with Helena Lifka.  

* * *  

Many of Lamian’s monologues consist of frantic attempts at self-justification, for he is desperate to believe that ‘no one was wholly untainted. Each of them, in one way or another, in one form or another, had been an accomplice in that degradation and suffering, even if it was only by consenting to endure it in order to live’.  

It is hard to say if this is just an excuse. Maybe it is true, as Primo Levi once cautioned, that no one is ‘authorized to judge’ kapos, ‘not those who lived through the experience of the camps and even less those who did not’. Lamian himself insists that ‘one had to live through the squalor and the cold and the threat of death to understand’. If we cannot understand, then we cannot judge. The camps are unspeakable precisely because they defy comprehension: do the crimes that took place inside them therefore defy moral censure? 

On the other hand, it is not possible to finish Kapo without experiencing Lamian’s transgressions as sickening. It was obscene to read Tišma’s masterpiece, as I did, in a café, so anathema are the abominations it chronicles to pastries and pleasantries. There are few images more bitterly, biliously hideous than that of Lamian coercing starving Auschwitz prisoners into bed with him by offering them food he knows they cannot resist. ‘If you want to eat, you have to come here and sit with me on the bench and kiss me’, he instructs his emaciated captives. ‘For every kiss you get a bite of bread and butter with ham on it, and a sip of warm milk. Want some?’ The women he selects have no choice but to acquiesce, and the grotesque ritual is repeated with one after another: ‘When she swallowed the food, he took his hand away, raised the pot, and brought it to her mouth so she could drink. He set the pot back on the table. “Kiss.”’ 

For Lamian, women are not only plied with food but equated with it: 

He wasn’t sorry that this one or that one would soon die because he no longer wanted her and asked for her…Because he saw in them….nothing but flesh, shape and colour, which were transient qualities of a fruit bound to spoil. And he used them for his pleasure until they did spoil, just like apples or lemons, which carry in their meat the imminence of rot, though their destruction is still invisible. They are eaten and sucked in the knowledge that if left untouched, they will go bad and be useless. All the women were fruit condemned to rot, tossed in a heap amid the stench of the camp; but then he would appear, the Kapo of the workshop, to grab the best, the soundest ones before the mould and stench got to them. 

If Jews are mere objects to their Nazi tormenters – at one point, a cadaver is heaved onto a cart ‘like a log’ – then Jewish women are ultra-objects, both to the SS men and to the collaborators who abuse them. Tišma is one of the few writers of Holocaust fiction to recognize the plight of those who were degraded both as Jews and women, and throughout the trilogy, rape victims are characterized by their torturers as animals, inanimate things, and bodies bereft of feeling: they are ‘meat without speech, without a voice, without a name, without a will, without a mind’.  

On the face of it, Lamian’s increasingly manic efforts to contact Helena Lifka may seem to entail a repudiation of his former misogyny. After all, a human being is the only suitable or satisfying audience for a confession: rotting meat cannot absolve or condemn. Yet Helena is the only one of Lamian’s victims he remembers by name, and even she remains for him a vague and self-serving fantasy. When he tracks down her cousin and learns that she died several months prior, he is jolted out of his dreams of exoneration by the sheer, recalcitrant reality of Helena’s independent existence. He is shocked to hear that the weeping woman he raped ‘always tried to emphasize the bright side of things’. ‘Oh?’ he exclaims, amazed. ‘Though he had never considered what Helena Lifka’s outlook might be like, her tears had given him the opposite impression – that she was prone to despair and hopelessness’. 

Ultimately, it is not Lamian who utters the unutterable, but Tišma. His prose is for the most part unadorned and unsentimental, but it is punctuated by images that pierce: after an air raid a horse drags behind it ‘a purplish braid suspended from its torn belly’; people lining up on the banks of the Danube to be shot in the raid of Novi Sad are ‘like grain walking to the mill’. Kapo succeeds for the very reasons that Lamian fails so heinously. Unlike his protagonist, Tišma addresses himself not to lifeless dolls or hunks of meat but to fellow human beings, for which reason he is able to say a little of what can never be said quite well ­– or quite horribly – enough.  

Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘On Re-reading Life and Fate’, NLR 95.

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Kremlin in Decline?

On 19 September, Russia’s three-day elections ended with the expected result – United Russia (UR), the Kremlin’s party, yet again won a constitutional majority in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. Since its formation in 2001, the party has always held a majority of seats. Though elections in Russia are neither free nor fair, the results are not 100% falsified either. The regime’s political operatives need to ensure the UR’s resounding victory every time without losing the air of credibility. During this electoral season, the challenge was particularly tough: UR’s popularity, even according to the official surveys, stood at barely 30%: not nearly enough for a simple let alone constitutional majority. Nevertheless, the party won 324 seats out of 450, only 19 less than in 2016. For this result, credibility had to be sacrificed – and it was.

Source: Meduza.io

The scatter plot above is the simplest visual proof of widespread electoral fraud in Russia. The dots represent individual electoral precincts, with the X axis showing the turnout and the Y axis the share of the UR vote. The comet-like shape indicates a strong correlation between the turnout and the vote for the Kremlin’s party – the higher the turnout at the precinct, the more votes are cast for UR. The comet’s ‘head’ – a dense cloud of dots – unites the precincts with more or less honest results. However, the ‘tail’ comprises the precincts with irregularities. There is only one way of explaining such a strong correlation between the turnout and the UR vote: ballot-stuffing of various shapes and sizes (the photo and video evidence of such practices is, of course, abundant). In fact, the dots in the top right corner of the plot are the precincts where both the turnout and the UR vote are close to 100% – the results there are falsified in their entirety. Such precincts are mostly located in the so-called ‘electoral sultanates’, where fraud is particularly widespread. Most of the Caucasus falls into this category.

Detecting fraud is not the only use of the scatter plot shown above. It also allows us to glimpse the real results of elections. The center of the comet’s head approximates the national turnout and votes for UR that were unaffected by fraud. Since the last election, held in 2016, the comet fell – that is, real support for UR declined by some 10 points, from 40% to 30% (a figure that corresponds to the pre-election polls). However, the official results did not decline nearly as much, suggesting that the scale of fraud has dramatically increased since 2016, perhaps to an all-time high.

Organic support for the regime is waning. After a decade of economic stagnation punctuated by deep crises, the government is out of ideas and has no vision for the future. The ‘rally-behind-the-flag’ effect of the Crimean adventure has disappeared, and the pain of austerity measures, particularly raising the retirement age in 2018, has been felt by the population. In this unfavorable conjuncture, the Kremlin was forced to hold elections that were particularly significant for its future: the Duma elected this September will preside over Putin’s attempt to reelect himself as president in 2024. Its failure to secure a landslide might exacerbate the ‘problem of 2024’, which is by far the most important obstacle for the regime. Gauging this, the Kremlin has acted increasingly brutally and erratically. Alexei Navalny was poisoned and then imprisoned, his organization banned as ‘extremist’; multiple independent media outlets have been closed; opposition activists have been sent to prison or into exile. The elections were held over three days, creating additional opportunities for fraud. The Kremlin’s strategy was to mobilize state-dependent groups such as public employees and workers at state-owned factories while avoiding high ‘real’ turnout that could result in a protest vote.

UR launched its campaign last spring by holding so-called ‘primaries’. Their official purpose was to identify the party’s strongest candidates in single-member districts, yet in reality this allowed them to test the capacity of the vast administrative machinery to coerce votes. State workers were forced by their bosses to register as participants in the ‘primaries’, which eventually attracted 12 million voters (half of them by electronic voting). This figure was already more than 40% of UR’s performance in the previous parliamentary elections. Thus, UR needed about 15 million more votes to reach its target and regain its constitutional majority (at least 300 deputies). With the party’s rating steadily declining, success could only be ensured primarily by a further expansion of compulsory voting.

To boost support for UR, which in the eyes of most Russians is associated with declining living standards and increasing repression, its party list was topped by two of its most popular members of the government – Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. In August, the government also made a one-off payment of 10,000 rubles (117 euros) to pensioners and families with children, which the state media portrayed as an initiative of the ruling party. The main message of UR’s election campaign was the need to maintain stability, since any attempt to challenge the status quo would only worsen the situation and be used by external enemies to weaken the country.

The elections thereby became a quasi-referendum where voters were enjoined to either accept or reject the current regime. In this binary system, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) finally became the most obvious way to register dissent. Despite the traditional conformism of its leadership and its close contacts with the Kremlin, the KPRF was the most oppositional of all parliamentary parties in the previous Duma: the only one to consistently vote against the unpopular pension reforms of 2018 and the amendments to the Constitution in 2020 that allowed Putin to be re-elected as president for two more terms. This position has attracted new voters to the KPRF in recent years: residents of large cities, disenchanted young people and the educated middle classes, for whom the KPRF’s traditional ideology – a mixture of Stalinism, nationalism and social democracy – mattered less than its insurgent energy. The emergence of this new electorate has also transformed the party’s rhetoric (which is increasingly focused on democracy and social justice) as well as its cadres. Over the past few years, a number of bright young party leaders have sprung up in different regions of the country, marking a rupture with the old image of the KPRF as an archaic fragment of the Soviet state apparatus.

In Saratov, for example, Nikolai Bondarenko, 35, a member of the local KPRF leadership and one of the most popular political vloggers in Russia, ran as a candidate in a single-member district. His YouTube channel, which has more than 1.5 million subscribers, features live reports from protests and regional parliament sessions, where Bondarenko regularly confronts the UR deputies. The authorities made exceptional efforts to prevent Bondarenko from entering the State Duma: his supporters and election observers were constantly detained by police. Bondarenko ultimately lost to a little-known UR functionary from Saratov. Meanwhile, in the northern region of Komi Republic, local KPRF leader Oleg Mikhailov, 34, managed to defeat his UR competitor after coming to prominence as one of the figureheads of a protest against the construction of a huge landfill site. In Moscow, the KPRF backed the candidacy of a university trade union activist, 37-year-old mathematician Mikhail Lobanov. His campaign was supported and staffed by members of radical left-wing groups such as the Russian Socialist Movement. Lobanov, who openly describes himself as a democratic socialist, was able to draw support from a wide range of voters and mount a forceful challenge to his UR opponent, a well-known propaganda talk-show host on Russian TV, whom he beat by 12% (more than 10,000 votes); though the victory was eventually stolen by UR’s electoral fraud.

One of the main problems for the Kremlin during this electoral season was the ‘Smart Voting’ strategy proposed by Alexei Navalny two years ago. The essence of this strategy was to identify UR’s strongest opponent in a single-member district and urge all opposition voters to support this candidate regardless of her party affiliation, with the singular goal of decreasing the number of seats available to UR. With the ruling party’s credibility steadily declining, Smart Voting has become a serious threat to UR’s chances of winning a constitutional majority in the new parliament. Russian security agencies made enormous efforts to block all web pages that offered Smart Voting recommendations (even Apple and Google were forced to comply and remove Navalny’s phone apps a few days before the election). Nevertheless, Smart Voting lists, most of which were occupied by the representatives of the KPRF, circulated widely on the internet. In numerous videos, Navalny’s supporters endorsed the KPRF on a party-list vote as the only opposition party guaranteed to pass the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation.

When the first election results were published, based on voting at regular polling stations but not on electronic voting, they showed a huge increase in support for the KPRF, whose candidates stormed to victory in a number of single-member districts. In Moscow, candidates from the KPRF and the liberal Yabloko party won 8 out of 15 districts. In Moscow as a whole, the KPRF took first place on the party lists, receiving 31% of the vote (while the UR got 29%). However, the next morning, when the results of the electronic voting were made public, the picture was inverted: UR was now the winners in all of Moscow’s single-member districts, with an outright victory on the party lists. Electronic voting proved to be the Kremlin’s trump card, enabling them to manipulate the outcome in their favour.

Still, even after all the Kremlin’s machinations, the election results showed a major increase in support for the KPRF. Compared to the previous election, the party received 3 million more votes and finished second behind United Russia with 18.9%. In four regions (Khabarovsk Area, Yakutia, Mari El and Nenetsky Autonomus District), the KPRF came first, overtaking the ruling party. Despite UR’s official victory (49.8% for the party lists and 198 seats out of 225 in the single-member districts), its position is weaker than ever before. Without voter coercion and fraud, it is now unlikely to win a majority. Further losses of support will push the authorities towards openly repressive methods and accelerate the regime’s mutation into an outright dictatorship.

The other main outcome of the election was the success of the Communist Party, which finally became Russia’s main legal opposition force. By contrast, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s right-populist LDPR abandoned its image as a protest party and lost almost half of its vote (7.4% compared to 13.1% in the previous election). The new position of the KPRF will inevitably activate an internal contradiction between the old leadership, accustomed to acting within the limits set by the Putin administration, and the younger generation of activists, determined to transform the KPRF into a mass party of non-parliamentary protest. The radical left, which has always viewed the party as a conformist remnant of the Soviet bureaucracy, incapable of militant, independent politics, will have to adjust its approach as well.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Contours of the Putin Era’, NLR 44.

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Wintry Moods

The Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy practices an astringent minimalism. Her icy, rigorous fictions are naturally preserved in the manner of an alpine corpse. The elegance of her prose disguises its lurid appeal. Elements of the gothic mode are often present – suicide, terror, insanity – though scrupulously denied the fuel necessary for spectacle. Something is always held back, a force at odds with its own circumscription. While reading a Jaeggy novel, one senses the dark sea roiling beneath the ice, the uncharted depths, entire phyla of creatures, great shelves of stone. But her restraint never falters; the hoary crust remains inviolable. ‘She could even tidy the shelves of the void’, one of her characters says admiringly of another. The dedicated reader of Jaeggy feels something similar about the author. This austerity is a matter of profound artistry. But over the course of a four-decade career, it has also come to suggest its own repressed opposition. The implications of Jaeggy’s fictions are forever attempting to escape her control, like light around the edges of a collapsed star.

Jaeggy, 81, was born in 1940, in Zurich. She grew up speaking German, French, and Italian. (She would later translate Marcel Schwob and Thomas de Quincey into Italian, the language in which she writes.) Like several of her protagonists, she spent her adolescence at a Swiss boarding school. Having completed her studies, she modelled in the United States before moving to Rome. There she befriended the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who sometimes appears in her stories, and married Roberto Calasso, the novelist and future editor of the prestigious publisher Adelphi Editions. Her stock has lately risen in the Anglophone world. The writer and translator Tim Parks discovered her first masterpiece, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), while browsing a bookstore in Italy in the early ‘90s. (The book had already established her reputation there.) Its recent reissue aligned with a vogue for short, elliptical fictions written by women, including rediscoveries like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979) and Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark (1983), and newer works by writers like Kate Zambreno, Sigrid Nunez, and Nathalie Léger. Jaeggy is too severe and macabre for a Ferrante-like sensation and too good to fade into respectful obscurity. Instead, she is passed around like secret cargo among devotees who have come to rely on her exactingness, her black humour, and the clean, crystalline beauty of her prose.

An early novel, The Water Statues (1980), has recently been published by New Directions, in a translation by Gini Alhadeff. It is a strange addition to Jaeggy’s canon of frozen miniatures, a brief and mesmeric work structured in part like a play. (A dramatis personae is provided.) The novel concerns a man named Beeklam, a recluse who stocks the flooded basement of his Amsterdam villa with statues. His father, Reginald, lives in seclusion with an enigmatic servant, Lampe. Father and son circle the abyss of their late wife and mother, Thelma. There is no plot so much as a series of wintry moods, a vast, disembodied brooding. Narration proceeds in a sort of depleted roundelay, with Beeklam, Reginald, servants, and family friends drifting through the opiate fog of memory. As in much of Jaeggy, this obsessive recursion signals morbidity. For Beeklam, being a son means inheriting an already fallen world. His nostalgia is a form of resentment. ‘He had a horror of anything hereditary’, he says of himself, ‘because whatever comes to us by natural inheritance belongs to the dead’.

This is a familiar anxiety in Jaeggy’s fictions, which often dramatize the unwelcome legacies – financial, psychological, physiognomic – that entangle her narrators in baffled need and obligation. The inscrutability of family life estranges them from the social rituals of the adult world. Friendship, sex, and community become confounding and self-negating trials. In Sweet Days of Discipline, a young woman develops an obsession with a fellow student, Frédérique, at a Swiss boarding school. While the devouring intensity of their relationship takes centre stage, the novel is also notable for its cast of despised mothers and distant fathers, inscrutable figures who visit during holidays for brief hotel lunches or send cards in which nothing is offered or explained. Money is often given in lieu of time and attention. Bought off or ritually abandoned, the students seem unable to enjoy their youth while remaining forever mired within it. Jaeggy offers a vision of ‘senile childhood…protracted almost to insanity’. That this condition carries over into maturity is suggested by Frédérique’s eventual fate. (At twenty, she lives ‘as if she were in a grave’.) The girls’ savage intimacy is in some sense a response to this unstated filial lack.

S.S. Proleterka (1993), a semi-autobiographical novel in which a woman remembers a cruise she took as a girl with her dying father, advances the conceit. The girl’s absent mother, acting as legal guardian from South America, authorizes the cruise as a kind of farewell tour. But the father’s reticence and social enervation render him unknowable. He is a living tomb, sealed in silence and mystery. The girl ends up spending her nights with various members of the ship’s crew in a sexual initiation that is itself a kind of annihilation, a running from emptiness to emptiness. Through it all there is a defensive posturing typical of Jaeggy’s narrators, though this can’t quite dispel the sense that the novel represents an inverted love letter to her father:

Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold…They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. And they go away. Towards a gloomy, fantastic and wretched world…Some children look after themselves. The heart, incorruptible crystal. They learn to pretend. And pretence becomes the most active, the realest part, alluring as dreams. It takes the place of what we think is real. Perhaps that is all there is to it, some children have the gift of detachment.

The publication of The Water Statues offers an intriguing view into the early development of the Jaeggy mythos. Many recognizable elements of her mature fictions are present – bewildered children, distant or dead parents, stasis, elegant lacunae – though they are collected here into a glancing and uncharacteristically lyrical novel. Those used to the gorgeously pared sentences of the later Jaeggy will be surprised to find a comparative surplus of language. This voluptuousness lends the proceedings a languid quality. All is submersion, iridescence, intoxication. (A late scene in which snails become drunk after eating cabbage leaves coated in beer droplets acts as a microcosm for the novel: creatures enmeshed in slowness, slime, inebriation, and curious beauty.) The specific motivations of Beeklam and the others are suggested but never spelled out directly. They move through a series of associative preoccupations – water, time, houses, rooms, parks – meditating, singly or in pairs, on the accumulation of years.

Beeklam’s habit of collecting statues to store in the lower regions of his villa suggests the subterranean posture of the novel. ‘From childhood he’d been a collector, museums were in him’, we are told, ‘statues were his playthings, a privilege of all who are born lost and start out from where they end’. The flooded basement seems immune to the flow of time, the marble figures he surrounds himself with displaying an enviable and soothing permanence. (He names at least five of them after his mother and her friends.) ‘I’ve spent a great deal of time in these basements’, he says early on, ‘not that I was weary of the sun, of the open air: I was simply losing control of the hours and of life’. It is only in the basement where the intimate pressures of history are returned to him. There his passion attains a certain surreal animation, ‘as though the irrigated statues were walking about aimlessly, like wading birds’. A mysterious existential transaction occurs with each descent. ‘As in fairy tales’, Beeklam’s servant, Victor, says, ‘we have come back up from the basements, laden with the years, tranquil, unwearied, almost not alive’.

The novel’s second section centres on Katrin, an old friend of Thelma’s who, while in boarding school, was accused by the head mistress of being in the grip of ‘some inscrutable witchcraft’. (The novel can sometimes feel like a testing ground for Jaeggy’s enduring archetypes.) Katrin lives with her companion, a widower named Kaspar, and both are attended to by Lampe, the servant previously employed by Reginald. (Some echo here of Kant’s servant Lampe, similarly dull, devoted, and dismissed?) The sticky, incestuous web of connections contributes to the feeling of airlessness and suspension. A speaking crow appears – this, too, is pure Jaeggy, the cryptic animal, a recurring motif alongside twins, gardens, crystals, crosses – and summons the group together for some final reckoning. Time and class overlap in Katrin’s pavilion, as servants and spectral, threadbare aristocrats speak past one another, obscure their motivations, and remember in a way very like forgetting.

Their meeting is partly to do with Reginald, who plays the familiar figure of the impenetrable father. At the age of seventy, he suddenly deserts the aforementioned Lampe with the ‘amiable freedom sometimes found in saints and the elderly’. The attempt to bridge this parental desertion – inevitably doomed in Jaeggy’s fictions – is enacted by Beeklam. ‘It is odd how suddenly the urge comes over us to find a certain person who has disappeared’, he says, ‘and we are naïve enough to think that lost things become so small, idle, and wayward that we might suddenly find them again on the ground’. He eventually discovers his father in a mountain sanatorium. Reginald is drunk and surrounded by other itinerants who think of their own phantom sons. The exchange between the two is terse and inconclusive. An attendant eventually pushes the young man out the door: ‘Are you here to identify someone? Go away’.

The Water Statues is a novel in which identifications of any kind – between reader and text, or character and character, or past and present – are never less than uncertain. Questions linger. We may ask, for instance, who this play is put on for. Over what stage does Beeklam wander? Is anyone watching the players? These are actors – children, parents – in search of a commensurate form, a drama to explain their diminishment and their distance. This is the great, hidden drama of Jaeggy’s fictions, to supply relation with adequate structure. Her horror and impotence before the fact of heredity can only be countenanced by way of literature’s delusions. The gorgeous vice grip of her prose is finally a fantasy of control. For these boarders, itinerants, and spiritual orphans – an entire deracinated kingdom – memory and death are life’s compensations. The novel ends with the image of a sundial surrounded by Beeklam’s statues: ‘From beneath chipped lids, placid eyes gaze at Time’. But for all the scene’s arrested motion, the dial’s shadow continues moving, ‘black and slithery’. Springing mindlessly from the light and the stone, it moves according to laws it cannot fathom. It is this liquid darkness that Jaeggy returns to continuously. In her incomparable fictions, shadows cannot help but apprehend their blinding source.

Read on: Jon Halliday, ‘Switzerland – The Bourgeois Eldorado’, NLR I/56.

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Montaldi’s Notebooks

It was in the pages of the journal Quaderni rossi (Red Notebooks) that the theoretical and political current known as Operaismo (Workerism) began to take shape in Italy during the early 1960s. Central to this body of thought was the idea that the working class exists as an autonomous, self-constituting force, and not merely as a passive victim of capital’s onslaught. Among its most original contributions was an emphasis on the relationship between capitalist expansion and the formation of working-class subjectivities. This was explored to particularly brilliant effect by one of the journal’s founders, Danilo Montaldi, a figure little known outside Italy. Through oral history and autobiography, Montaldi’s work produced a living image of worker and lumpen subjectivities in motion, one without parallel in Marxist theory.

Born in Cremona in 1929, Montaldi grew up in fascist Italy, surrounded by artists, workers, anarchists, and socialists – all friends of his father, a transport worker with ties to the Bordigist faction of the Italian Communist Party (an anti-Stalinist left current). He left school at fourteen to fight in the resistance, acting as a courier for the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) Fronte della Gioventù. Joining the party after the war, Montaldi soon left when his father and several of his comrades were expelled. The experience was a formative one: in Montaldi’s view, the PCI’s leader Palmiro Togliatti had sacrificed the most intellectually vibrant wing of the party for a national-electoral strategy that was ultimately reformist and patriotic in character.

Cremona was also decisive in shaping his outlook. Situated in the heart of the Po river valley, the region had been subject to an intense wave of agrarian capitalist development in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was the setting for some of the first socialist organizing in the country. Montaldi faulted the PCI for misunderstanding the needs and aspirations of the region’s farm workers, who wished ‘not at all to take possession of the land in order to reach the standard of living of the landowners, but to reach the level of the industrial worker in the cities. In fact, when these peasants occupied land, they never divided it into small properties, but made it into cooperatives.’ To focus solely on agitating in the factories was thus to exclude a mature and radical element of the rural proletariat.

Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Montaldi made contact with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, which had recently broken away from the Trotskyist international. Their politics were oriented around a critique of bureaucratization: that millions of workers were organized into hierarchical parties and trade unions constituted, in their view, a key barrier to social revolution. In a more libertarian vein, they looked to explore different forms of proletarian revolutionary action. To this end, the first issues of the group’s journal featured a serialized translation of The American Worker, a pamphlet published in Detroit in 1947 consisting of an autobiographical account of factory life by an autoworker, Paul Romano, and a theoretical analysis of that experience by Grace Lee Boggs. When he returned to Cremona in 1953, Montaldi published a translation of Romano’s account, explaining in a preface the significance of this text. It showed that it is in the realm of production that the proletariat’s ‘revolt against exploitation takes place, where it finds its ability to construct a better kind of society’. This was an implicit critique of Togliatti’s strategy for the PCI, which operated on the premise, first argued by Gramsci, that Italian capitalism was exceptionally backward: it was thus the responsibility of the party to overcome the disparities between north and south by building a strong national base and working with bourgeois parties. Secondly, Montaldi argued, the text demonstrated that the labour expended in the factory entailed a total subsumption of the worker’s personality to capitalist production: his or her physical as well as creative capacities were exhausted in the course of their daily work. This for him was the essence of Fordism, whether it was in the factory or the countryside: the experience of subordinating one’s life to the rhythms of production.

Montaldi was ultimately searching for a politics more directly connected to workers’ struggles. In 1955, he organized a study-group whose aim was to map the productive relations in Cremona, and in doing so, establish a common basis of struggle between workers and intellectuals. In 1957, this developed into an activist organization, the Gruppo di Unità Proletaria (GUP). Montaldi had by now fine-tuned the research technique that would guide its strategy: ‘conricerca’ or ‘co-research’. Its objective was not to produce a totalizing picture of social reality, or have workers simply report their knowledge to intellectuals who would then theorize about it. Instead, the starting point was the ever-changing ways that workers experienced forms of domination. By focusing on the subjectivity of workers, the partnership between intellectuals and proletarians could reveal the lines of fracture and class tensions that structured the workplace. This could enable them – as Montaldi emphasized in their 1957 program – ‘to give support and appropriate direction to the demands of the working-class base’. Accordingly, Montaldi called for co-research initiatives at the largest industrial and agricultural concerns in the region, from Sperlari and Negroni to Consorzio Agrario.

From 1948 on, Italy experienced the greatest economic boom in its history – a ‘miracle’ as it came to be called, with annual growth rates above 5 per cent, and giant leaps in per capita income. But, as Lucio Magri has noted, ‘everyone had to pay for accumulation, and the powers-that-be decided that workers and farmers should be the first to pay and the last to profit.’ A coordinated political attack against the left hobbled its capacity for concerted action, and empowered bosses and landlords at its expense. Mass layoffs and evictions followed; wage growth remained sluggish through the 1950s even as labour productivity soared; and management dismantled the structures of worker representation while bringing new machinery and forms of hierarchical control into the workplace. In 1959-60, workers began to strike back. A first wave of actions by electrical engineers took place in Milan; a second broke out in Turin among autoworkers, leading to an industry-wide strike. Montaldi’s GUP called for a nation-wide general strike, arguing that a fragmented offensive was sure to be defeated by the bosses. It also pushed for workers to form councils in the factories and the countryside: ‘the emancipation of the proletariat’, wrote the group, quoting Marx, ‘will be the work of the proletariat itself.’

Bound up with Italy’s miracle was a set of migratory movements. One flowed outward toward other countries in need of manpower; the others were internal, streaming from countryside to city, and from underdeveloped South to industrialized North. At first, the internal migrants landed in the metropolises of Turin and Milan, but increasingly they settled in the borderlands of the cities, living in makeshift huts known as ‘Koreas’, so called because they began to appear during the Korean War. These slums were the subject of Montaldi’s first book, Milano, Corea (1960), co-written with Franco Alasia. Like much of Montaldi’s work, the book has an autobiographical dimension: half is a collection of life stories from inhabitants of Milan’s Koreas, which endow the migrants – an otherwise ghostly presence in the northern cities – with flesh and personality, giving them authority and authorship over their own lives.

The other half is an ‘investigation’ by Montaldi. With a kind of ethnographic precision, he describes the familial relations migrants brought with them; their patterns of work; their moral codes; the humiliations they suffered in the older districts of the city. Montaldi analyzes how migrants have changed Milan, collapsing distinctions between centre and periphery, old and new. He also attempts to explain how the subjectivities of the migrants are linked to the larger social and productive relations of the city. For this he mobilizes an impressive amount of quantitative research: showing how landlords and bosses profit from the construction boom around Milan; how the city’s web of social services continually fails residents of the Koreas; how the political machinery of the city works to exclude migrants from civic life while benefitting from their low-wage labour. What emerges is a multi-tiered diagram of capitalist expansion in the city. This system, Montaldi notes, is riddled with contradictions. Its size and complexity is such that it can absorb and displace them, but not forever: Montaldi predicts that the migrant cities will resist being integrated completely into Milan’s civic life, and will one day ‘bring into crisis the key institutions of the current system of relations’.

In its experimental way, the book is a living document of proletarianization, capturing working-class subjectivities as they are moulded by the rhythms of industrial capitalism. This anticipates a key tenet of Operaismo, that capital is a system of social control that functions not merely by exploiting workers through the wage relation, but by subordinating and dominating them through institutions and government-initiated planning programs. The city as a whole becomes a kind of ‘social factory’, in which labour-power is controlled and disciplined by the political forces of capital. The theorists of Operaismo would also argue that workers nevertheless find ways to resist this regime and reassert their autonomy – through wildcat strikes, slowdowns, and absenteeism. This interplay of subordination and autonomy is at the heart of Milano, Corea’s sequence of migrant autobiographies: all share the experience of displacement and relocation; but, at the same time, each migrant struggles to reclaim the unique features of their own life.

Montaldi explored this dynamic from a different angle in Autobiografie della leggera (1961). Like its predecessor, the book features a lengthy introduction followed by a suite of worker autobiographies, but these are set deeper in the country, among the inns and taverns of provincial highways, and along the banks of the Po. Its protagonists are not migrants but drifters, or, as the book’s subtitle would have it, ‘outcasts, petty criminals, and rebels’, scraping together a living at the margins. There is a temptation, notes Montaldi, to romanticize these figures, to see them as the remnants of a lost pre-capitalist world. But capitalist development had in fact been transforming the Italian countryside since the nineteenth century and had made possible the growth of the northern cities. It was ‘the agrarian crises of the Po valley’, writes Montaldi, that produced emigration, and sent luckless peasants into the slums of Milan and Turin. The people who remained in the country and did not become farm workers tended to practice the kinds of rural trades – fisherman, woodcutter, or boatmen – that had no place in city life. This left them suspended in an interstitial space: too unskilled to work in the old artisanal trades; but not deskilled enough to join the ranks of the proletariat in the factories or in the fields of capitalist agriculture.

As Pasolini noted in an admiring review of the book, there is a literary sensibility to its autobiographical narratives: ‘each writer-speaker seems to me to be fully aware that there is something special in the telling of their life stories’. The experiences of which they tell are remarkably unbound and contingent: the narrators wander from town to town, sometimes finding work, sometimes engaging in petty crime. Money is scarce, the police and fascist spies are everywhere, and most of the narrators spend time in prison. Fiu’s story opens with an orgy that is broken up by the police. Teuta, a thief, happens to be in France at the outbreak of the First World War and is sent to fight at Verdun; Cicci, a prostitute, moves at one point to Africa, where the pay is better but the work more dangerous. Like the Koreas, the world in which they operate is lacking basic provisions: few shops, pitiable schools, and minimal health-care services. Orlando P.’s brother dies of an unknown disease; Cicci’s mother attempts suicide by throwing herself in the Po.

For Montaldi, these narratives are symptomatic of their setting. On the one hand, capital’s restructuring of the countryside has meant the destabilization of older patterns of culture and modes of subjectivity. On the other, Montaldi sees in the authors’ adherence to older folkways a ‘refusal’ to conform, a conscious ‘non-adaptation to industrial life’. He even detects ‘traces of resistance to assimilation’ in the way the narrators switch out of standard Italian into local dialect – disobedience at the level of language. A similar point could be made about the narrative forms adopted by the authors, which often have the feel of a fable. Their modern use was explored by Benjamin in his 1937 essay ‘The Storyteller’. Unlike the novelist, who, Benjamin says, ‘isolates himself’ and begins from a place of solitude, ‘the storyteller finds his material in experience’, which he then recounts to a community of listeners. As such, the art of storytelling has ‘long flourished in the world of manual labour’ and ‘is itself a form of artisanal labour’. ‘It does not aim to transmit the pure intrinsic nature of the thing like information or a report. It plunges the thing into the life of the teller and draws it out again’.

But, ultimately, Benjamin, like Montaldi, resists seeing the storyteller merely as a relic of the old world. Rather the emphasis is on the new role they have assumed in modernity, that of sage or counsellor. For both thinkers, the autobiography-as-fable functions as a record of experience, but more significantly, it offers moral instruction: Montaldi’s authors model a radical autonomy in their refusal to submit to the domination of capital. In this sense, the proletarian autobiography is not an isolated product, but a moment of class struggle, the record of a social movement in formation.

As worker and student militancy boiled over to produce the biennio rosso of 1968-1969, Montaldi continued to work feverishly. He translated Lévi-Strauss’s Totemisme aujourd’hui, opened an art gallery in Cremona, and published another volume of worker autobiographies, this one focused on grassroots party militants (Militanti politici di base). Montaldi and the GUP was active in the worker revolts of 1969, agitating with ironworkers in Venice, and publishing texts and communiqués from the working-class insurgents. He regretted that there was no true proletarian party in Italy to help the masses take power.

Montaldi’s short life ended in 1975 when he drowned in unknown circumstances in the Roya, which runs along the Franco-Italian border. At the time, he was assembling materials for an oral history of the 1969 worker revolt, which had been proposed to him by the historian Carlo Ginzburg. Given Montaldi’s unique approach, it would have been a momentous document. Even so, Montaldi’s influence was far reaching. For Sergio Bologna, one of Operaismo’s leading thinkers, it was Montaldi’s two books from the early 1960s more than anything written by Marx that shaped the movement’s thinking in its early days: ‘As I remember it,’ he wrote, ‘the group of young people who gravitated towards the Quaderni Rossi in 1961-62 were characterized first and foremost by a desire to understand the profound transformation that both productive facilities and the urban environment were undergoing; the need to master a theoretical-systematic framework by which to interpret what was happening in accordance with a Marxian logic came second.’ Montaldi directly influenced a number of these Quaderni Rossi figures, perhaps Romano Alquati most of all, a sociologist from Cremona who used Montaldi’s ‘co-research’ technique to conduct a landmark inquiry into new forms of worker consciousness at FIAT and Olivetti. After a split in 1963, Alquati went on to found Classe Operaia with Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti, which became the core journal of Operaismo.

Well before Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Montaldi shattered the false antinomy between a supposedly idyllic, pre-capitalist countryside and a corrupted, industrialized city. The effect was to bring working-class revolt out of the factories into the migrant suburbs and depopulated countryside. It took a figure of Montaldi’s upbringing and outlook to see in the lumpen characters of the modern city and its peripheries the making of revolutionary subjectivities.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.