We Are of All Men Most Miserable

“We are all interpreters, and the world is our text. We interpret to survive, for although the world is our text, it is not an open book.”
George Stade (NY Times, review of Frank Kermode’s Genesis of Secrecy)

“Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”
1 Corinthians 15:14

“It is why one who believes in God cannot believe in God.”
Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialectics)

“Symbolical consciousness begins with the perception of the invisible reality of our present situation: we are dead and our life is hid. “
Norman O.Brown (Love’s Body)

I get the sense that nearly everyone I know is suffering some form of PTSD. If you are even remotely intelligent you will be damaged to some degree. The west today is so saturated with propaganda, but also with empty psychological by-product — chatter and the meaningless tweets or messages of social media, or nearly all entertainment let alone electoral politics — that it is impossible to not experience this sense of batterment (which I am aware is not a word, but which I think should be). We are assaulted with violent images, with graphic sexual violence in film and TV, with war and worse, with an overwhelming project of normalizing all of the above. We live amid a constant stream of lies and manipulation.

The remedy is reading and education (more, even, than before). I saw a photo of Che reading Goethe. And I thought here is the lesson. He wasn’t reading Marx or Sun Tzu even, he was reading from the canon. I am going to write about this more often this coming year and I want to develop a syllabus of some kind. Second point though has to do with the accompanying symptoms to this post modern PTSD, or the symptoms of batterment. And one is snark. We have two generations now, in the US (and I think it is appreciably less even in Europe), who literally cannot have a discussion that doesn’t begin and end with snark. Aggressive sarcasm is like breathing to most Americans.

“He had already spent 5 years at the parish school of his home town, Gori, which had set him on the path to the priesthood (as his separated mother fervently wished). Here he was already known and rewarded for his devoutness, attending all church services, even reading the liturgy and leading the singing in the choir—and invariably coming first in his class due to diligent and enthusiastic study. He was destined for the seminary, the highest educational institution in the Caucasus. In this institution, the earlier years of study included both ‘secular’ and theological subjects: Russian literature; secular history; mathematics; Latin; Greek; Church Slavonic singing; Georgian Imeretian singing; Holy Scripture. By the final years, the subjects became distinctly theological: ecclesiastical history; liturgy; homiletics; comparative theology; moral theology; practical pastoral work; didactics; church singing; Holy Scripture. Some subjects may have changed, but throughout Holy Scripture and church singing were con- stants. The young Stalin was noted by his teachers for his phenomenal memory, subtle intellect and voracious reading. His marks varied over the years, ranging from high to low, especially from the middle years onwards when he became involved with revolutionary groups outside the seminary (indeed, the seminary was known as a hotbed of unrest and became a recruiting ground for the Georgian socialist movement). Thus, he may have risen to fifth in a class of twenty-nine in his second year, but by the fifth year he had slipped to twentieth out of twenty-three. All the same, he became thoroughly versed in theological matters. He knew the history of the church back to front; he could sing; he read Greek and Latin; and he knew intimately how the church itself worked (which assisted immensely in his famous compact with the church in 1943). Above all, he knew the Bible. Indeed, he had already studied Old and New Testament while at school, before arriving at the seminary. Ten years or more of solid study of the Bible are bound to leave their impression on a young man. It is not for nothing that Stalin later was known for having memorised long stretches of text and quoting from the Bible at will. In the end, Stalin left the seminary before sitting for the final examinations, which would have qualified him to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, if not to proceed to university. Biographers remain puzzled as to why he did so. Stalin himself hinted it was because of revolutionary activity; others suggest it was because he was unable to afford the fees. But the most likely reason is that he realised that the life of a priest was not for him, so he chose to leave. It was, obviously, a big decision. Yet, for many years afterwards in revolutionary circles, he was known as ‘The Priest’.”
Roland Boer (Stalin: From Theology to the Philosophy of Socialism in Power)

The above quote is about young Stalin. It should absolutely come as no surprise to anyone. But I wanted to also look at art and culture in this context, a context of education and politics. But I use the word ‘politics’ in the broadest possible sense. Because part of this ‘batterment’, this societally induced PTSD, is linked to the loss of genuine education. Reading is both a step toward some form of awakening, but also prophylactic in terms of PTSD.

I see on social media (and here in Norway, certainly) people who will have Ukrainian flags next to symbols of support for Palestinian liberation. Such contradictions are common. Or anti Assad posts with avatars supporting Palestine. Given the control of media and propaganda by the U.S. (and to a degree Israel) this is hardly surprising. Many people recognize the media lies about Gaza, and yet that same media is believed when they demonize Assad. The same media is still believed about Covid.

We live in a punitive society. Though the U.S. has always been so (remember DH Lawrence’s now famous quote describing Americans: ‘The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.’) That stoicism , that Puritanism, the hard wooden straight back chair that America sits in forever, that is now become the snarky inarticulate aggressions of white boys, pimpled face and mean spirited, even when they lurch into their thirties. American men, overall, tend toward a reflexive aggro position if there is no other compelling reason. And women, too, though it manifests differently (think whining Karens, the avatars of entitlement and self involvement). And I was thinking about this during the last week when I read the uproar about Cormac McCarthy’s relationship with a woman twenty four years younger than himself. A relationship he wisely kept secret. The uproar is incoherent, for the most part. The word ‘grooming’ is used constantly and this made me ponder the evolution of that term. The point though is that god forbid people fall in love from the wrong demographics. And don’t take the lovers words for it, what do they know. McCarthy interestingly is described by Augusta Britt (the girl, now sixty something) as feeling he had wasted his later years. It is probably a reasonably accurate self evaluation, in fact. Though wasted is an awfully loaded word. But fame is toxic, of that there is no question. Not being famous is toxic, too, it should be noted.

It is spiritually toxic. Yearning for fame is toxic, too. Maybe all things related to fame are toxic. Psychoanalysis has, as a central tenant, the concept of over-determination. That there can be multiple symbolic meanings to everything. That everything is, then, symbolic. Resurrection then becomes a bit easier to deal with even from a literary perspective.

“Augustine had said: “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses, all of which are sanctioned by the concurring testimony of other passages equally divine?” The Medieval schema of a fourfold meaning in .everything—the quadriga, the four-horsed chariot—how-ever mechanical in practice, is at least a commandment not to rest in one simple solid and constant meaning.”
Norman O. Brown (Love’s Body)

As Brown notes, a return to symbolism would be the end of Protestant literalism.

“The crux in the reduction of meaning to a single meaning—both in scriptural and in literary exegesis—the crux in univocation, is the reduction of meaning to conscious meaning: intentio auctoris, the author’s intention. But the unconscious is the true psychic reality; and the unconscious is the Holy Spirit. { } There is also the new hierarchy of scribes, controlling the interpretation, the higher scholarship. Since the one single and solid meaning does not in fact reveal itself, the commentary which does establish it becomes the higher revelation. The apparent deference of the expert to the text is a fake. { } The modern historical consciousness is Protestant literalism. The aim of modern historical science is to establish for historical events a single simple, solid, and constant meaning—what really happened”
Norman O. Brown (Ibid)

So here we have our contemporary culture of ‘experts’. Science is protestant literalness (and Catholic Scholasticism). Medieval so called obscurantism was one of over determination. The medieval is much closer to psychoanalysis. And to quote Brown one more time..

“Instead of a living spirit, possession by the dead. The Protestant substituted for the ritual (magical) repetition of the past (Christ’s passion), a purely mental invocation; a historical commemoration. Instead of a dramatic reenactment a reanimation in the mind only—the quest for the historical Jesus. “
Norman O. Brown (Ibid)

From repetition to commemoration. It is timely given the Zionist settlers obsession with finding evidence of the historic (sic) King David. Such demands for literalness tend toward the fascistic, I think. The truth of repetition is too close to the death instinct anyway. The occupier cannot abide a psychoanalytic investigation, for that simply questions the power of a carefully constructed hierarchy. Often the occupier or authority must enforce the literal and burn some witches.

When I look at the western obscuring of Soviet history and especially the obscuring of the actual record of Stalin I see something not too far away from, say, putting Mandela in a cell for twenty six years. Killing Fred Hampton. Killing Malcolm and putting Mumia Abu Jamal in prison for life. This is historical destruction, too. That Stalin began in a religious environment, an almost monestarial environment, should not be surprising. There is an interesting paradox, of sorts, with the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Zionist (both Israeli and American Christian) who believe in the second coming, in very literal terms. For if they believed in less literal ways they would recognize nothing ever happens for the first time.

That Stalin oversaw the world’s first socialist revolution, or took part in it before overseeing it, and then having to deal with the delay of world revolution. Christ’s coming is delayed.

“…echoes of the early Christian phenomenon of the ‘delay of the Parousia’ should be clear: Christ’s delay in returning produced a range of responses in which the interim became the norm. The details may have been different, but the under- lying phenomenon of delay is analogous. However, the most intriguing aspect of Stalin’s thought is what may be called proleptic communism (analogous to pro- leptic eschatology), in which a communism of the future is creatively present as a type of reverse causality, determining the nature of the present even though it remains to be achieved.”
Roland Boer (Ibid)

Today’s leaders do not read. I suppose they read reports, or parts of reports, or summations of reports. They read bullitt points but not books, not long form anything. Long form itself is nearly obsolete. The unconscious desire for long form narrative is clear in the ‘binge’ phenomenon in TV/cable (sic). I feel it in myself. Man and the invention of text and reading, and of recitation. The staging of the primal crime as a rerun of sorts. This is that ‘das ding’ problem again. A problem that cannot be escaped or solved.

Before getting further into both the story and mythology of Stalin, or psychoanalysis, it is worth unpacking James I. Porter’s essay Disfigurations, Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura. Porter is still alive, in fact, in his early seventies and teaches at Berkeley. This is one of those semi forgotten essays (not by serious students of Auerbach, or Dante, or antiquity). For Auerbach in this essay is tracing the shift from pagan antiquity to Christian antiquity. Culminating, in a sense, with Dante.

“I believe we can say that Auerbach’s theory of figura contributes to a reassessment of the transition from pagan antiquity to the Christian Middle Ages, inasmuch as it repositions that historical epoch in a fundamentally new and provocative fashion. But if so, then it does this by responding to the particular circumstances in which Auerbach found himself as a German Jew living and working in the Weimar Republic, then under Fascism, and finally in a state of exile. “
James I. Porter (Disfigurations)

This is a less esoteric discussion than one might think. The supression of antiquity by Christianity, of rhetoric by theology and Judaic Bible learning by Christian typology — and all of them by secular modernity. The word itself, ‘figura’ suffers contraction of meaning when it transitions from Greek (meaning shape) to Latin. Contraction and distortion.

“In Latin, this vocabulary is quickly reduced both in number and in concreteness. This trajectory will prove to be fateful. Of the five original Greek equivalents for outward plastic shape and form singled out by Auerbach (morphē, eidos, schēma, typos, plasis), Latin reduces the number to two: figura and forma . Figura soon assumes a high level of abstraction in grammatical and rhetorical discourse, ousting forma as the term of choice for denominating linguistic morphology or rhetorical figures, both of which categories of usage, Auerbach complains, are ganz unplastisch (“completely non-three-dimensional”…”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

Auerbach saw a tendency for literalness and this underlying neutrality (illusory though it might be) and in spite of contradictory subsidiary trends:

“Secular realism triumphs, not figuralism, which is itself marked by the “conflict” between history and prophecy that runs deeply through the Christian tradition and that ultimately led to its undoing.”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

Without tracing the details (which I might write about, because its fascinating) and jumping ahead, the final conflict was between sensory appearance and meaning. This is echoed in that famous first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis.

“Forever short on spiritual reality and forever in need of historical reality, figures reenact the founding gesture of Truth’s descent upon the world—its literal incarnation—in a kind of repetition compulsion that continuously assures itself of its own validity. Adam prefigures Christ (see “F,” pp. 80, 92, and so on), but so does Moses (“F,” pp. 82–83, 85, and so on), Joshua (“F,” p. 79), and Saul. Not only does the Old Testament prefigure Christ by giving his “prehistory” (“F,” p. 94), but even Christ prefigures in the flesh his own spiritual truth: “The sufferings of Christ non fuerunt inania, sed habuerunt figuram et significationem magnam [were not meaningless, but rather were powerful figures and had great significance],” writes Lactantius (quoted in “F,” p. 83).”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

This is not all that far from Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. Here, Noah’s Ark prefigures the Cathedral. Moses prefigures Christ. And so on and on. Auerbach used the term *umbra* (shadow or shadowy) to suggest the shadow of the truth so prefigured. History as the march of shadows.

Porter in a footnote: “wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff is mentioned, it is supposed to be a prophetic allusion to the wood of the Cross; . . . even Moses spreading his arms in prayer, even the spits on which the Passover lamb was roasted—all allusions to the Cross and as it were preludes to it! Has anyone who asserted this ever believed it?” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak).”

This too, is echoed in Ted Hughes opus on Shakespeare (The Goddess of Complete Being) a somewhat Jungian analysis of the Bard. This was the alchemical reading of Shakespeare. A long march of prefiguration. Culminating in the storm of The Tempest. The black of Macbeth’s heart, the robes of Richard III, and on and on.

“Hughes was not interested in the worldly, laboratory–based alchemy from which modern chemistry derives. His interest was in the spiritual alchemy which began in Italy when, in 1460, Cosimo de Medici, instructed Marsilio Ficino to translate an ancient Greek document, purportedly based on the writings of an Egyptian sage know as Hermes Trismegistus. These Hermetic writings were taken up and further developed by Pico della Mirandola, and, especially, by the Franciscan friar, philosopher and poet, Giordano Bruno, who brought his teachings to England in 1583.”
Ann Skea (Ted Hughes, ‘An Alchemy’ and Shakespeare)

“…the Old Testament was transformed as a result of figural interpretation from a book of laws and a national history of Israel into a series of figures of Christ and of Redemption.”
Erich Auerbach (Ibid)

Auerbach warned of a tyranny of ‘meaning’ where meaning comes to supplant that for which it IS the meaning.

“Figural interpretation, in Auerbach’s eyes, obliges the reader to gaze upon a deep past, one that is hoary, somewhat blurred and inaccessible, and pregnant with mystery. Figuralism is “the product of late cultures” (“F,” p. 99), not only in the Hegelian sense that critical reflection is an endowment that comes with historical maturity, but more importantly in the sense that simply to look back on the past for meaning is to cultivate an awareness of one’s own historical situatedness and, inevitably, one’s own belatedness as well; the act of searching in the past produces a culture that can consider itself to be late and, so too, young and on the verge of new possibilities.”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

Historical situatedness. Something that has been forgotten today, I think. Auerbach locates the origin of western historical consciousness in the Herbrew Bible. This means Dostoyevsky and not Tolstoy, Melville and not Twain, and Kafka and not anyone else. Kafka was re-writing the Hebrew Bible.

“Once Auerbach arrives at modernity in the central chapters of the book, his attention shifts entirely to the realm of meaning that, he argues, figura in its defections made visible and palpable, if not fully valid, for the Christian and post-Christian world: earthly, concrete, materially sensuous and individuated reality. He calls the model that eclipses figural interpretation in Mimesis tragic realism. It is buttressed by a theory of the radical mixing of low and high styles (Stilmischung)…”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

Auerbach wrote, in Mimesis, of a change in human consciousness triggered by the Hebrew Bible, by its demand for interpretation.

“The hiddenness of God and finally his parousia, his incarnation in the common form of an ordinary life, these concepts—we tried to show— brought about a dynamic movement in the basic conception of life, a swing of the pendulum in the realms of morals and sociology, which went far beyond the classical antique norm for the imitation of real life and living growth.”
Erich Auerbach (Mimesis)

Earlier in that book he had written

“If the text of the Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation (deutungsbedürftig) on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority (Herrschaftsanspruch) forces it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, to feel ourselves to be elements of its universal historical structure.”

And Porter adds “Auerbach explains just how it could happen that the Jewish Bible could exert such a tyrannical grip on later Christian readers. It was perfectly calculated to do so. Dark, incomplete, and hidden from sight, the reality of the Bible, like the Jewish God himself, is an enigma that provokes the search for meaning, but ultimately does not reward it; much like a novel by Franz Kafka, biblical reality forecloses on this possibility for the simple reason that meaning of this kind cannot be extracted from the text either by divination or by force.”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

One can easily enough track forward to the rise of modernism in the early 20th century and the promise it held for thinkers like Adorno. The backdrop to Mimesis is of course Auerbach’s own exile from National Socialism, and the war itself. A war that leads one back to the figure of Stalin, and the mythology that the West continues to manufacture about him. That the west directed its study to a Protestant literalness, to a logical positivist orthodoxy, would unsurprisingly end with *entertainment*. That Zionism would find such support in the legatees of fascism is also hardly surprising, but ironic all the same.

Modernism coincided with the development (invention, really, or discovery) of psychoanalysis. It was an oppositional force from its inception. Much has been written about Weimar Germany, of the forces that produced the first World War. Artistically, there was remarkable painting, literature and theatre, and all of it was set against the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. What came before, from the intelligentsia in Vienna and London, in Paris and New York, was profound, but after 1917 the work took on a different quality. Just as, when the Soviet Union fell, in 1991, the new void behind an already crumbling and impuissant cultural sphere was felt deeply and as catastrophe. I had wanted to get to Freud more and to Yogācāra Buddhism, here, in something like a conclusion. I expect to write more on all this in coming posts. The figure of Saint Paul, also, looms over these themes, over figura as an idea, and for subjectivity itself. Both Agamben and Badiou have written entire volumes on Paul, and thinkers for the last several hundred years seem fascinated by him. Perhaps we all do, to some degree. There is an anticipated damascene moment in the back of all our heads –as well as the inherent pathos and beauty of Paul’s writings.

“…since two thousand years of translation and commentary coinciding with the history of the Christian church have literally cancelled out the messianic, and the word Messiah itself, from Paul’s text. Not that one should conclude that there was something like a premeditated strategy of neutralizing messianism, but anti-messianic tendencies were doubtlessly operating within the Church as well as the Synagogue, at various times and in diverse ways; nevertheless, the problem raised here touches on more essential matters. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the seminar, a messianic institution—or rather, a messianic community that wants to present itself as an institution—faces a paradoxical task. As Jacob Bernays once observed with irony, “to have the Messiah behind you does not make for a very comfortable position” (Bernays). But to have him perennially ahead of you can also, in the end, be discomforting.”
Giorgio Agamben (The Time that Remains)

The messianic takes on renewed importance as the second world war looms. And then even more after it.

“…the world vested such great expectations in the form of the Enlightenment. The hope of the Enlightenment seemed to be totally falsified by the Holocaust, inasmuch as it manifested itself to be a consequence of Enlightenment thinking. What had thus become necessary was a new reflection on modern Enlightenment thinking, especially on its great critical representatives, Kant and Hegel. Adorno’s ideas on Jewish religion, and to a certain extent his reflections on Christianity, also belong to this new critical reflection. How does Adorno develop his ideas in his reading of the history of philosophy, which is a philosophy of history at the same time? { } We see that the idea of God is always treated in relation to Kantian and Hegelian discourses. This results in his understanding of the aesthetic experience as the representative religious experience – the peace of art as the presence of the Absolute.”
Gerrit Steunebrink (Adorno’s Philosophy, Religion, and the Second World War)

Genocide was the endgame for the administered world. Industrialization of death. It is telling that in his last years Adorno considered converting to his mother’s religion of Catholocism. How seriously he considered this is an open question but he spoke of it and discussed his feelings in letters. Aquinas is like the shadow that lurks behind much of the late Adorno, in a sense the way Kierkegaard did for the younger Adorno. And there are hints of this neo-scholasticism in some of his writing (the fallen man, the reconciliation with nature). Steunebrink quotes :

“Christian dogmatics, in which the souls were conceived awakening simultaneously with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent—more enlightened, if you will—than speculative metaphysics, just as hope means a physical resurrection and feels defrauded of the best part by its spiritualization.”
Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialectics)

The point here, if there is one, has to do with batterment, with PTSD. The absolute failure of art today, the turn toward something Auerbach would class with Homer and not the King James Bible, is one that fits so nicely with instrumental logic and thinking. It fits seamlessly with Enlightenment values and that seemed sufficient for a time. One can look at Dreiser or Hemingway and feel the strategies to sneak up on the Absolute. If Pauline messianism lives on (and it does), it does so in secret. Freud enters at this point unavoidably. I feel as if this culture, today, HAS to reject Freud. Any other tactic would be too painful. But after WW2, the art of western society became largely kitsch. America was to produce no more Melvilles. In poetry it did, with Lowell and Wright and Bly. And in a sense in the most compromised of art forms, cinema, the anticipation of ‘something’ can be glimpsed. It is there in Bresson certainly. In Fassbinder and Antonioni. In film noir, of the golden age, it seemed present in every frame. It was almost unbearable and edged close to the ‘impossible’. Cahiers du Cinema titled one essay ‘The Impossible Cinema of Douglas Sirk’. (Godard once said of Sirk, it was a.. ‘delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope.’). Sirk was the Pauline auteur. Tag Gallagher once described Imitation of Life as like watching a ritual sacrifice.

But film art is dead now. There are sidebar distractions (many for small screen formats, in limited series formats) and there are talented directors working, but the context, the social context, societal context perhaps, is missing. Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example, is both brilliant and somehow disappointing. Still, it approaches this idea of aesthetic transcendence Adorno wrote about.

Stalin is the most powerful figure in the 20th century. His mythology and anti-mythology are almost outside any reading of them one might enlist. The Soviet society was without precursor. To understand Stalin, and Roland Boer is right about this, one has to understand that it was left to him to invent a new society — at the same the forces of counter revolution were acute and never ending.

“In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit and hope of further profit were obviously tremendously important…But there is more than that to imperialism and colonialism. There was a commitment to them over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and, on the other, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples.”
Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism)

There is always more.

This is one the problems when discussing most anything today. The turn toward instrumental thought, to scientism certainly, has meant that if there IS more we already know it. And if we don’t we will. But the idea of undetected forces, even within ourselves, is anathema to contemporary culture. Look at films, genre films, from the 1940s. Take Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Now Preminger was deeply reactionary, a later Zionist cheerleader (who made Exodus) but he was also a technician of some skill, and he channeled something in the war years Zeitgeist that turned his three or four noir features into something special. The Dana Andrews character (we could do an entire aside here on Andrews, who remains a favorite of mine and profoundly neglected): Mark Dixon (great noir name), an unhappy disgruntled and excessively violent cop. Andrews vs Eastwood in Dirty Harry (or a dozen others). Preminger is the anti moralist. And Andrews plays Dixon as if he has a migraine the entire film (Ralph Meeker was the great migraine actor). But its not just Dixon’s impulse control, because Andrews plays him as if HE is the hunted, the prey. Dixon is the fascist enforcer. A cop who worked his way up because he did what others, nobody else, wanted to do. Eastwood as Harry Callahan is simply a sadist. Dixon is that, too, but he is haunted. This was the shadow meaning. The allegory (or figural) that looks both backward and forward. We see National Socialism reflected back at us in the eyes of Mark Dixon. Worth noting the screenplay is by Ben Hecht. Based on a pulp novel by William L. Stuart. The other factor in this film is the Oedipal backdrop. Dixon is acting out a violence intended for his father, a criminal, and a ghost to Dixon despite still being alive. And Dixon has already inadvertently killed a suspect during interrogation.

The noir films of the forties were made by mostly European emigres. They were steeped in the aesthetics of Weimar, in psychoanalysis, and they all distrusted authority. Preminger was most famous for his noir melodrama Laura, but he also made Angel Face and Fallen Angel. Both exceptionally good. Now Dirty Harry itself is still resonant with a certain lurid anti-establishment ethos. Its fascistic, but its at least investigating fascism. And Don Siegal, the director, was one the last voices of individualism in Hollywood.

Exile was a substitute for death. Adorno referred to it as a ‘life in suspension’. But gradually over the second half of the 20th century the trope of homelessness became something more. The story that Auerbach (and Porter) tell is of the Latinization of Greek thought. And it was Heidegger (and he should know) who saw this process affecting western politics. Thinking like Romans meant thinking imperially. Adorno noted the contemporary condition meant not being at home in one’s home.

“Oudeis, who compulsively proclaims himself to be Odysseus, already bears features of the Jew who, in fear of death, continues to boast of a superiority which itself stems from the fear of death; revenge on the middleman stands not only at the end of bourgeois society but at its beginning, as the negative utopia toward which coercive violence tends in all its forms. “
Adorno and Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Odysseus becomes Ben-Gurion.

“Jewish and Oriental traits are noticed elsewhere in theExcursus, if briefly and in passing: the metamorphosis of Odysseus’s crew into pigs at Circe’s hands is speculatively considered to be a reminiscence of the taboo on swine among Jews and of its possibleIonian counterpart; the “lotus is an oriental food” . These are only the explicit clues. Designating Odysseus a homo oeconomicus and the Odyssey a Robinsonade, and stating that Odysseus is a shipwrecked hero who makes of his “weakness . . . a social strength,” rounds out the picture . Capitalist economy has its origins in Odysseus the wandering Jew, in this, the founding document of European civilization, our Homer.”
James I. Porter (Odysseus and the Wandering Jew of the Enlightenment)

When Said says, but there is more, more than just plunder and more even than control, he was right. But there is more than even Said suggests.

“Judaism and the Enlightenment share several key traits. In tendency, they are both disenchanting ideologies; both are nominalist (that is, severing the natural or magical link between words and things or essences), both antimimetic, simply in another, nonrepresentational way from the nominalist tradition of the West and its ban on the naming of substance in general.Yet, at the same time, both are prone to reenchanting the disenchanted domains, by reanimating what they negate: in short, both are prone to a dialectic of denial and illusion.”
James I. Porter (Ibid)

The Zionist who changes his name, like Odysseus. The German right had already suggested anti-semitic themes in the Enlightenment and in Homer, and here is where we come up against that warning of Auerbach’s that meaning not come to replace that for which it is giving meaning. Porter quotes :

“Now that [their existence] is no longer needed by the rulers for economic reasons, the Jews are designated as their absolute object, existing merely for the exercise of power.”
Adorno & Horkheimer (Elements of Anti-Semitism)

The economically useless Jew becomes the Devil.

“11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.”
Mark 4:11-12

For those outside, for those not knowing the secret handshake — all is in parables. As Frank Kermode titled his study of narrative (with much focus on the New Testament)…The Genesis of Secrecy. To the elect comes the allegorical meaning. To those on the outside, only the literal. The Latinizing of Greek thought. The Hebrew teaching is part of a prohibition on images. The teaching is of secret meaning. That meaning itself must always be secret.

“But in my opinion the distinction holds, that in this tradition insiders can hope to achieve correct interpretations, though their hope may be frequently, perhaps always, disappointed; whereas those outside cannot. There is seeing and hearing, which are what naive listeners and readers do; and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved to an elect. The apoc- ryphal Epistle to Barnabas distinguishes between those within and those without by saying that the former have circumcised ears and the latter not. And all who teach and practice interpretation, whichever god is their patron, are in the business of aural circumcision. We have to see that another generation of elect interpreters will be ready to succeed us.”
Frank Kermode (Genesis of Secrecy)

The birth of interpretation in a sense. Divination, for that is what it was at the time.

“First, though, I want to dwell for a moment on what, so far as this book is concerned, is the central problem: the existence, among initiates, of a preference for spiritual over carnal readings—that is, for interpretations that are beyond the hearing of the outsiders. If one were to write the history of such esoteric readings, and their place in our culture, one would need to make much of the moment when the Old Testament finally became joined to the New, when it was assured a permanent place in the Christian canon, from which there had been a determined attempt to exclude it. This joining, which occurred late in the second century, was of a kind that permitted Christian interpreters to assume that the more obvious senses of the Old Testament, including its historical meaning, were of small or no importance, were dangerous illusions, even. The Old Testament made sense only insofar as it prefigured Christianity. The rest of it —a great deal —was deafness, blindness, forgetfulness.”
Frank Kermode (Ibid)

There is a good deal more to say on this but that will be in part 2. The points here, I hope, will suggest the framework, even the causes, directly, for our PTSD. Our batterment.

Contemporary society is stripped of depth, the institutional control of meaning is really a erasure of meaning, and where once, say forty years ago, this meaning was replaced by kitsch meaning, or pure jingoism in many cases, it is now not replaced at all. Our unconscious tries to complete its formation but cannot. Children increasingly find it difficult to ‘read’ faces (or complex sentences) and this echoes Jameson’s take on postmodern art …

“a neutral practice of [parodic] mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.”
Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism)

The serious has become impossible. Satire is impossible. Ideas of evidence become neutralized. That might be AI, whatever it is, it MIGHT be AI. There is no audience for the serious, and in this psychologically strip mined society the onslaught of propaganda is part of the larger frame that is disenchantment. Where or what is cultural practice today or what should it do? How is it children should be educated? And more, how are we to stay to evaluate our own sanity?

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