Bubblehammerblog

While I'm no pacifist I'm not in favour of judicial killing under any circumstances. Since early childhood, scenes of execution in films have remained among the most vividly recalled - from Lesley Howard's guillotining in A Tale of Two Cities, Cagney's screaming appointment with the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces, to the most harrowing of all in Krystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing.

A person's views on capital punishment are for me a touchstone, determining all other assessments of that person's opinions or personal qualities. In the spirit of Sartre's statement that 'all anti-communists are swine', I make the same sweeping gesture concerning apologists for the death penalty.

I've heard all the arguments about vital revolutionary necessities, heard the tales about Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, choosing the most magnificent vistas and exquisite sunsets when dispatching fascists, and listened to the intricately constructed logic of thought experiments that point inexorably to the firing-squad, but I remain unmovable.

Which is why, despite the man's odious crimes and unrepentant responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, I would not condone Tony Blair being put against a wall and shot.

Guardian readers who have not, through relentless exposure, become finally deaf to irony will have noted with the flicker of an eyebrow the small headline on page 6 of today's paper:

Materialism a threat to planet and human identity, says Blair

It may have been Donald Rumsfeld who rightly pointed out that being a hypocrite is better than having no values at all. The piece goes on to report that Blair delivered a speech at the 'prestigious' Communion and Liberation conference in Rimini. The adjective is superfluous, since had the event not been prestigious Blair would not have been there. The speech was made during a stopover Blair made on his way to a holiday aboard a five-deck luxury yatch as the guest of an American billionaire.

I'll quote a little of what he's alleged to have said - I use that qualifier because I'm not entirely convinced that some cunning devil isn't making all this stuff up. The language seems too thoroughly unctious, too evocative of the sermons of Rev. J.C. Flannel, to be authentic:

This is surely the role of faith in modern times...To represent God's truth, not limited by human frailty, or by the interests of the state or by the transient mores of a community, however well intentioned, but to let that truth bestow on us humility, love of neighbour, and the true knowledge that indeed passes all understanding.

Of course, since leaving office and becoming a multi-millionaire, Blair has entered into the Roman Catholic communion. I'll be frank about my prejudiced view of Roman Catholicism. This is not a religion but a conspiracy against the human spirit. Of all the main religious movements centered around the person of the rabbinical carpenter's son from Nazereth, it is the furthest removed from its source. I'll not speculate on what attractions it held for Blair.

I was once listening to Radio 4 interview with Blair's missis, Cherie. Her aquisitiveness is well known, and she's openly caricatured in the press as a greedy scouser, elbowing her way to piles of designer freebies like a footballer's wag, and stuffing her face at prestigious charity banquets. At one point the interviewer, a bit impertinently but with the customary delicacy, asked her about the vast sums of money she and Tony were raking in. She talked of the deprivations of her working class upbringing, touching upon her feckless piss artist father, and wondered whether the experience might have caused her to need millions in the bank in order to feel secure. Oh, the relentless vulgarity of the times we live in.

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I had a dream last night of the type that Burroughs calls a 'Land of the Dead' dream. These are characterised by being set in a region of permanent starless night, in an oddly familiar landscape of paradoxical topographies, where there is no discernable difference between the inside and the outside of structures.

Such dreams are uncommon, and though they're distinctly unsettling and call for attempts at interpretation, it's difficult to reassemble much of them on awakening, since the action is usually fitful and disordered. But last night's dream was remarkably different from other examples of the genre my unconscious has screened for me. All the other Land of the Dead features were present, including narrative incoherence, but this one was distinguished by the fact that it was, for the most part, pleasing, rather than being disturbing or ominous, and I'm able to clearly recall some scenes from it.

The dream concerned a former girlfriend I haven't seen in some forty years, (distinct personalities are unusual in LoD dreams). Perhaps for the sake of the narrative coherence of this tale, and for readers of a certain sensibility, I should say that I was in love with her, though this would be misleading.

She was the first posh girl I'd ever had what people now call a 'relationship' with, being from a part of society with which I'd previously never had any direct contact. In a tangible sense she was a different species, and this was utterly fascinating. Her parents were academics, and she was reading French Literature at Cambridge. At the time I was working, when I could force myself to turn in, at a concrete mouldings factory, and reading the labels on stolen pharmaceutical products.

I used to love, and that's the word, to stretch out on the couch at her flat and simply watch her - for she was beautiful - doing the things that other people did, but that she could perform with an air of such radical alterity. For instance, the elegant disdain with which she pushed a vacuum cleaner over the carpet, or the way she could sit at her kitchen table reading, while at the same time unerringly transferring her delicate underwear from the washbasket into the washer with the tip of her shoe. Such sights were a marvel.

Before meeting her I'd only dimly considered the notion that her species had sex. When I mentioned this to her she chuckled, and placing two fingers lightly on my lips quoted St Teresa of Avila, 'Nous ne sommes pas des anges, nous avons un corps.'

It was an initiation into a fragrant mystery. In contrast, the girl I was living with then was a farmer's daughter, for whom sex had no mystique. Following the example of the farmyard animals, with particular attention paid to the donkeys, she proudly claimed to have been having sex of one kind or another since the age of six. (Which would would explain her fondness for coitus a tergo, during which she often liked to noisily eat her fish supper from a small trough, without benefit of cutlery - if she's now reading this I hope it induces a face-searing jolt of recognition. Serves her right for the breadknife incident.)

The message the dream might have been carrying, I sense, was occluded by the the pleasure I felt of having this girl brought to mind. As often in LoD dreams there was a general air of dereliction and decay. In the opening scene the girl and I were ascending, side-by-side, a steep, rickety wooden staircase:

[S]taircases and ladders in dreams [are] unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams)

Yet the dream oddly lacked any erotic charge at all. At the top of the stairs we went into a room, dark, cluttered with indistinct objects, and of course without a roof. We laid down together on a bed made from thick lengths of wood (sleepers!), so arranged as to make a sleeping posture impossible. We were fully clothed in thick overcoats made heavy by rain. She lay on her side curled up with her back to me, I was on my back, feeling discomfort from pieces of the wood pressing against my spine.

At one point I noticed in the darkness that there was another bed opposite us. On it sat, expressionless, silent, a heavy set man, bald, barechested - possibly Far Eastern in appearance - who was watching us.

I think the sequence where we ascended the staircase was repeated.

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Here's a rare treat - a French television show made in 1973 with Jacques Lacan, (see my last post), in 1973. Lacan's son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, is asking Lacan questions on psychoanalysis. It seems that Lacan's replies were delivered in a style that the master thinker thought appropriate for a televisual performance. Surely, his celebrated seminars, delivered before large audiences of the leading French and continental intellectuals of the period, cannot have looked like this.

Yes, it's ludicrous. British viewers familiar with the now almost forgotten wartime films of Will Hay, or with the lectures of the sublime Professor Stanley Unwin, will be struck with the similarity of Lacan's delivery.

This gem was discovered on the superb Ubuweb, a wonderful resource for film, video, music and poetry. It was on Ubuweb I found a full and subtitled version of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, along with all of his other films.

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I was anticipating a flurry of emails from readers asking for an explanation of the protracted silence on this blog, the last post being nearly a month ago. Surprisingly, I find that this has not happened. So to anxious readers who have perhaps composed a message and for one reason or another not sent it, to those who are merely reticent because of past experience, and to others who have been enduring patiently, I offer my apologies.

The reason for my silence is that I've been re-reading Heidegger, renewing an aquaintance with that most difficult of philosophers who I abandoned in frustration over a quarter of a century ago. Now I'm no longer burdened with the distractions of being young, and while I'm reluctant to claim to be any wiser, I have picked up along the way a few mental dispositions that seem to be making this second encounter less fraught and more fruitful. The chief among these is undoubtably persistence. Heidegger himself frequently reminds his readers of this - persist in this endeavour, he declares, and then step back a moment.

And why do I think that studying Heidegger is worth the all perplexity and prolonged effort it entails? Because I persist, that's why.

My initial project, begun some time ago, was to make a survey of the state of contemporary Western philosophy. I might have added 'since Marx', because the truth of the matter is that what I set out to look for was some inkling of a renewal of Marxism, or at least an opening for a politics of emancipation for these times. Because in an emotional respect the past three decades or so have been marked by an accumulating sense of loss.

I came upon Marxism as a barely educated teenager. My ancestors were industrial workers, miners, steelworkers, soldiers and sailors. I learned nothing at school. If I later became one of that vanished tribe, the working class intellectual, it was because I was chivvied off the streets, while serving an apprenticeship in shoplifting and petty theft, by Trotskyists from the Labour Party Young Socialists, who put into my hands pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky, introduced me to the habits of reading and discourse, opening up the world and its history. It was from these sources that I first experienced the soaring exhilaration that can be had from ideas. Something similar might befall a young man today, but his recruiters and mentors would more likely be fascists.

The emotional charge from all this remains. As Ginsburg says, 'I get sentimental about the Wobblies'. Hearing the Internationale can bring about a searing rush in the breast. Watching the scene from Bertoluci's Novecento, where the workers and peasants raise above them the impossibly gigantic red banner is almost unbearably intense. Before long there will be no one left able to access these emotions.

A vivid memory comes to mind: around the mid 1970s I was leaving a dole office, having signed on for unemployment benefits, as I very often did at the time. I was carrying a copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Outside the dreary building there was as usual a parade of sellers of various revolutionary newspapers, each calling out their title and a brief positional slogan - 'Socialist Vanguard. Supports the Irish Worker's Struggle.' One of them spotted my Rilke, and he pointed to it and said to me, 'Bout the only decent thing to come out of fucking Germany in the thirties, that was.'

In that moment the longhaired Workers Fist seller and I shared a unique solidarity, a kinship, possible only in an singular epoch perhaps, a time when another Europe was being glimpsed. I can see him now, his grin sending static through his beard, my own smile reflected in his mirror shades. Never saw him again. The Workers Fist feller would've been able to call this from memory:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrible.

...

So, a lot of attention has been expended on difficult texts. For a little light relief I'll DJ a few riffs that might serve as a jingle or ringtone on the theme of the current condition of Western philosophy.

You can't barge far in philosophy today without coming upon the slippery Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek. Not only is he a conspicuous presence, quoted and referenced on an array of political and cultural topics in prestigious journals like the NLR, the LRB, and the NYRB, while he's less than 60 years old there's already an institute founded for the study of his work and times - the lively and entertaining International Journal of Zizek Studies

He's startlingly erodite and an engaging performer. You can see him in action on YouTube, for instance in the clip of his closing remanks to the 2006 'Future of Communism' conference at Birbeck. He looks every bit the engaged intellectual, an exotic species rarely found in this country outside of the psychiatric facility. Hirstute, of course, as he delivers he pokes and mauls the air in front of him, welshcombs his grey mane and tugs furiously on his misshapen teeshirt. I took to him immediately.

There's a rumour he's done a beer advert in Slovenia, and I wouldn't be taken aback were he to appear on Jonathan Ross's couch, but it would be a mistake to take him for a nouvelle philosophe type wanker. His origins are in the Slovenian stalinist era punk movement, and he remains active in an agitprop (does that word still exist?) arts collective, NSK (Neue Slowenischer Kunst).


Zizek says he's a dialectical materialist, which is alright with me, though Hegel is clearly his main man. Odd juxtapositions are a speciality. Reading Zizek is exhilarating, he writes much as he speaks, and if you imediately get the sense you're being unmercifully provoked, it seldom gets tiresome. Some chapter headings from The Parallax View (2006) will do for now:

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit.
The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One.
The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie it.

His other main man is Jacques Lacan. It seems that Zizek's avid promotion of Lacan is responsibe for a major ongoing revision of the view, formerly held in Britain and the US, that psychoanalysis is as dead as Marxism. Zizek's efforts have paid off particularly in America, where Lacan now figures prominently in culture and film studies. See for instance Lacan in America

I wasn't familiar with Lacan, so I read some popular short introductions - Looking Awry, an Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, and Lacan for Dummies - all by Zizek.

A common experience with Lacan, particularly among anglophones, is that he's painfully difficult to approach, both in terms of language and concept, other than through interpreters like Zizek. Cunningly perhaps, Lacan chose not to write any books, preferring to present, over a period of decades, series of lectures, which clearly contained a measure of performance, delivered before audiences of the cream of France's intellectual and artistic elite. Over the years the lectures have been transcribed and published. He made notes, though he presumed that only himself and his son-in-law would be able to decipher them. There are baffling neologisms, odd coinages, algebraic constructions, mathemes and graphemes. Zizek suggests you might read Lacan the way you would Mallarmé.

Again, what immediately strikes the anglophone sensibility is Lacan's repeated declaration that he is primarily a clinician, and his intention is to set the practice of psychoanalysis on a firm scientific basis. We assume that by this he means that he wants to make psychoanalysis more effective in alleviating human suffering. Given Freud's less than inspiring summary of the objective of psychoanalysis - that of turning profound despair into ordinary misery - Lacan's refoundational project appears to amount to creating a psychoanalysis that really works.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been now practiced for the past forty years, particularly in France, and in Argentina, where apparently it reigns supreme. But I've yet to come across news from those countries of the emergence of a new and effective cure for despair. There's an interesting acrticle HERE by Dylan Evans, a former Lacanian psychoanalyst, and author the widely read Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, that deals with this point.

But you see, as Zizek would quickly remind me, this way of looking at Lacan misses the mark, being merely an instance of what Heidegger calls 'technological framing'. Another reason to read Heidegger...

(Incidentally, all the books mentioned, and many more, can be had on Scribd in pdf format. This is a sort of YouTube for documents, and excellent resource for those who don't mind reading books on computer terminals.)

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