Le Club Filth (notes on A Serbian Film)

'it's like a cartoon for grown-ups'


this is no country for art,
one take -
live transmission of sex.


This is porn vitalism,
life is the life of a victim:
that's 'newborn porn'


pissing blood.
After death,
available object:
'start with the little one'

Zengakuren

Barthes's Empire of Signs might well be read as another chapter in what Federico Luisetti calls 'political Orientalism' (pdf). 'Japan' is explicitly rendered as the possibility of displacing our own narcissism, of locating 'the very fissure of the symbolic' (4), and allowing Barthes to '"entertain" the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system' (3). One of the 'flashes' Japan affords Barthes is a reflection on 'The Writing of Violence'. For Barthes the riots of the Zengakuran permit 'a writing of actions which expurgates violence from its Occidental being: spontaneity.' (103) As he goes on:

In our mythology, violence is caught up in the same prejudice as literature or art: we can attribute to it no other function than that of expressing a content, an inwardness, a nature, of which it is the primary, savage, asystematic language ... [it is] an anterior, sovereignly original force.' (103)

In contrast the violence of the Zengakuren 'is immediately a sign': expressing nothing' (103). It is intransitive, concerned to create 'a great scenario of signs' (106), and exhausting itself in its immediate expression.

Of course, Barthes's caveats don't exhaust the dangers of 'Orientalism', but here we can, along with his work in Mythologies, a neo-Brechtian reaching for the 'pure sign'; in the case violence that is not primordial but signifying, but then not signifying a meaning or use, but only the 'nothing' of its own immanence.

Negativity as a Practice

"The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood, their lot would do labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them."

CLR James, The Black Jacobins (thanks to Jessica)

Negativity as a political practice, and thanks also to Jason Read for his excellent comments/review on my book. I have to say on D&G's Anti-Oedipus I'm picking up on a tendency in the book, which certainly doesn't exhaust the text. That said I don't find it personally that engaging, perhaps due to the reason Jason has identified in its 'productivism' versus representation matrix, although more obviously stylistically (for me).

In a general way the critical identifications in the book are noting commonalities and can't be exhaustive, but the chapters are designed at least to ground my arguments in the textual evidence (I can't stand arguments that fail to even read the texts they analyse and simply identify a thinker/writer by their pre-existent image, or create a 'straw-man' (it used to be 'postmodernists')). Part of the point is that each of the thinkers I analyse operates in a point of tension with negativity and, of course, my overall reading doesn't have to accepted but I would say I don't think this tension can be contested.

In some recent presentations of the book I've been a little ruder about the 'negativity of finitude' tendencies, but whether they will or deserve to see print I don't yet know.

Next year

This what I am currently scheduled to do next year, of course thanks to the cuts I could end up with a lot more time and far less money... I'm also trying to write a review of Blanchot's Political Writings, planning to write an essay on Debord's cinema, specifically In Girum, and working on the spaghetti western paper.

Conjunctural Dilemmas

If one believes that Agamben's notion of the reversibility of 'bare life', abandoned by the state, into stateless potentiality is magical (as I do)...

But one also believes the capitalist tendencies of the present are to produce an abandoned/surplus humanity that at once figures something like the classical (negative) definition of the proletariat but incapacitates politics (Balakrishnan, Endnotes)

Then isn't one back to Agamben, but vectored via the tendency and w/o political hope (doh!)

Concrete Problems

I must say that this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind we were reproached with, because it is idealizing and, in the end, ethical in nature. (To say: "One must stop being abstract, one must be concrete" without worrying whether such a slogan has the least meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.)

Blanchot

Mute Launch event - 9 December

Further details here

9 December 2010