Hollier on Bataille on carnival

Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Batailles. Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989. xxii-xxiii:

Louis XVI was executed in January and Carnival is a winter celebration. This conjunction interested Bataille enough so that, when he was involved in the College of Sociology, he had a project for a book on the carnival origins of democracy. However, Bataille’s carnival had not much in common with the one Bakhtin was celebrating almost simultaneously in his 1940 book on Rabelais. “Carnival,” according to a recent book on Bakhtin, “is not time wasted but time filled with profound and rich experience.” There is no Et in Arcadia ego to be heard, but this is above all because there is no one to say “I” anymore in Bakhtin’s carnival, because the first person has disappeared, a joyful purge has swept subjects away in the great anonymous, or dialogic, sewer: the grammar of the irreplaceable has been excluded from the festivities. Bataille’s carnival, on the contrary, is the moment in which the I lives its loss, lives itself as loss. This is not a time of plenitude, it is, on the contrary, the time when time’s emptiness is experienced. This is not innocence rediscovered, but bottomless guilt. If carnival is a “gap” in the fabric of society, if it is a celebration of the “gaps and holes” in both the individual and the social body, does one celebrate these holes by filling them in, by plugging them up? – Can the celebration of a gap as gap result in plenitude? Bataille’s Acephalus does not merely represent a grotesque celebration of upside downs and bottoms up, but the more abysmal image of a topless bottom. The concept of heterology, a neologism invented by Bataille, does not simply indicate a warm, euphoric relationship to otherness. Otherness, in other words, is not simply a matter of pleasure and enjoyment. There is no carnival without loss. No Luna Park without a slaughterhouse.

Mitchell & Webb – “Football, Football, Football”

the Sonderkommando and the football match

Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1999. 25-26:

The extreme figure of the “gray zone” is the Sonderkommando. The SS used the euphemism “special team” to refer to this group of deportees responsible for managing the gas chambers and crematoria. Their task was to lead naked prisoners to their death in the gas chambers and maintain order among them; they then had to drag out the corpses, stained pink and green by the cyanotic acid, and wash them with water; make sure that no valuable objects were hidden in the origices of the bodies; extract gold teeth from the corpses’ jaws; cut the women’s hair and wash it with ammonia chloride; bring the corpses into the crematoria and oversee their incineration; and, finally, empty out the ovens of the ash that remained. Levi writes:

‘Concerning these squads, vague and mangled rumors already circulated among us during our imprisonment and were confirmed afterward…. But the intrinsic horror of this human condition has imposed a sort of reserve on all the testimony, so that even today it is difficult to conjure up an image of “what it meant” to be forced to exercise this trade for months…. One of them declared: “Doing this work, either one goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.” Another, though: “Certainly, I could have killed myself or got myself killed; but I wanted to survive, to avenge myself and bear witness. You mustn’t think that we are monsters; we are the same as you, only much more unhappy.”… One cannot expect from men who have known such extreme destitution a deposition in the juridical sense, but something that is at once a lament, a curse, an expiation, an attempt to justify and rehabilitate oneself…. Conceiving and organizing the squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime.’

And yet Levi recalls that a witness, Miklos Nyszli, one of the very few who survived the last “special team” of Auschwitz, recounted that during a “work” break he took part in a soccer match between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkommando. “Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green.”

This match might strike someone as a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite horror. I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp. For we can perhaps think that the massacres are over – even if here and there they are repeated, not so far away from us. But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the “gray zone,” which knows no time and is in every place. Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors, “the anguish inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-bohu,’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God but from which the Spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished.” But also hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope.

two citations

Grant, Iain Hamilton. “ ‘At the Mountains of Madness’: The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming.” Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Smith, Jonathan. “The Gnostic Baudrillard: A Philosophy of Terrorism Seeking Pure Appearance.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004).

thoughts on genre

If a (cinematic, literary) genre in the strict sense is organized around a specific principle (imagine that it is a principle, rather than the mere confluence of features), then the repetitive production that characterizes the output of a genre is necessarily a productive repetition. Why? Because in reworking the principle ad nauseam, in generating tokens of the genre type, it introduces differences that allow the underlying principle to take shape, to develop, and to mature. Taken as a whole, then, any genre forms an unintentional argument that emerges over time.

A concern or question that animates the foregoing is whether or not the relationship between genre and text is more like the popular understanding of the relationship between a Platonic form and its instantiations, or more like the relationship between an Aristotelian essence and its distribution. However, consider the possibility that the relationship in question (genre/text) is, at different times, like both.

The aggregation of initially disaggregated instances assembles a genre over time (that is to say, distributions of essence are identified sequentially until the fact that each distributed instance belongs to a “higher” category becomes apparent). After a genre has taken shape, it begins to refine itself through the production of further, different instances. When a sufficient number of instances exist, then the principle which underlies the genre can be identified. In other words, after a certain point, it is productive to conceive genre as structurally similar to a Platonic form, a form which given instances embody or abjure (through deformation, deviation, etc.).

Not belonging to a genre is no blight.

Most texts probably do not belong to a genre in the sense given here, or else they belong to a “genre” of the most makeshift variety.