Interview with Alain Badiou

From Diana George and Nic Veroli, Carceraglio received this previously unpublished interview with Alain Badiou.

Alain Badiou gave this interview when he attended the "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" conference at University of Washington, in February, 2006. The interview was commissioned by a Seattle newspaper; the first few answers address readers who might not know Badiou's work.

___________________________________

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

That was the beginning, the subjective beginning. In the political field, the correlation with ideologies --Marxism, Cultural Revolution, Maoism and so on -- is subordinate to the subjective conviction that you have to do politics directly, to organize, to be with others, to find a way for principles to exist practically.

Q: What is your idea of fidelity?

Badiou: That's already contained in the first answer. For me, fidelity is fidelity to great events which are constitutive of my political subjectivity. And perhaps there is also something much older, because during the war my father was in the Resistance against the Nazis. Naturally, during the war, he did not say anything about it to me; it was a matter of life and death. But just after the war, I learned that he had been a resistant, that he was really in that experience of resistance against the Nazis. So my fidelity is also a fidelity to my father. At the beginning of that war, very few were in the resistance; after two or three years, there were more. It is the same lesson, if you like, this lesson from my father.

Generally speaking, my fidelity is to two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences. Not only the event of May 68 as such, but also its consequences. Fidelity is a practical matter; you have to organize something, to do something. This is the reality of fidelity.

Q: You've said that there has been a rupture, that the entire question of politics is currently in great obscurity. Also, you have written that we must think a politics without party. After the saturation of the class-party experiment, what next?

Badiou: I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, "It's finished." And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity.

Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity.

For my generation, it's a choice between saying, on the one hand, "Nothing is possible today in the political field; the reactionary tendency is too strong." That's the position of many people in France today; it's the negative interpretation of saturation.

When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it's finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events-- like the events in South America today-- you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that "from outside, you can see something you don't see from inside," that's merely a rule by which to find something new.

Q: If I can press you further about the something new: After the saturation of party politics, what now?

Badiou: If the answer to that were clear, the discussion would be finished, too. You have to find that out; it's not so clear. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field -- not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find -- with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts -- the new synthesis.

I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.

The situation today is also similar to 19th century in the brutality of capitalism today. It's not absolutely new; capitalism was of a terrible brutality in the 19th century in England, with the laws against the poor and so on. Today, there's something violent and cynical in capitalism, very much like the capitalism of the 19th century. In the 20th century, capitalism was limited by revolutionary action.

Today, the capitalists have no fear of anything. They are in the stage of primitive accumulation, and there is a real brutality to the situation. That's why I think the work today is to find a new synthesis, a new form of organization, like our predecessors of the 19th century. Our grandfathers, if you will, rather than our fathers in the political field.

Q: I'd like to ask about the current global situation and of the relationship of the US to that situation. Is the US simply a privileged node in a network of global sovereignty (as Hardt and Negri argue) or is the US playing the role of a traditional imperialist power in Lenin's sense?

Badiou: I don't completely agree with Negri. It's a very complex theoretical discussion, but, in a few words, I think Negri's perception is too systemic. Empire is a system, finally. Negri's conviction is always that within the system there are also resources for something new on the side of revolutionary politics, or politics of emancipation. There is always in Negri the conviction that the strength of capitalism is also the creativity of the multitude. Two faces of the same phenomenon: the oppressive face and, on the other side, the emancipatory, in something like a unity. Not exactly a dialectical unity in the Hegelian sense, but still a unity. So there is no necessity of an event in Negri, because there's something structural in the movement of emancipation.

I don't see the situation that way; it's not my conviction. It's not possible to discuss this precisely here and now, because it's too technical. But one consequence for Negri is that the great question in the political field is the question of the movement. Movements are certainly of great importance. But the real question today is not the relation between the movement and the state. The real question is, what is the new form of organization after the party? More generally, what is a new political discipline?

People who have nothing--no power, no money, no media--have only their discipline as a possibility of strength. Marxism and Leninism defined a first form of popular discipline, which was trade unions and party. There were many differences, but finally that was the form of popular discipline, and the possibility of real action. And today we cannot hope that this form will continue. The real situation is that we have no discipline in the popular camp, and so we have a great weakness. In fact the best situations today are ones where the state is not really in the hands of the reactionaries, for example, the situation of Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not a complete change of the situation; it's a chance, a local chance, nothing more. It's something, but it's not the solution. The solution of the problem in the long term will be the invention of a new form of immanent discipline in the popular camp. That will be the end of the long weakness of the popular camp after the success-- but also the failure-- of the form of the party.

Q: Philosophy has a long history of alternately including and then excluding mathematics. You, almost alone among your contemporaries, include it. You have also stated that your aim is a new articulation of politics and mathematics. Apart from any biographical, contingent factors that might explain your own relationship to mathematics, what's mathematics got to do with politics today? Why do you see a hope today for, as you've said, "a new articulation of politics and mathematics"?

Badiou: The political question of the new discipline is also, philosophically, the question of a new logic. The question of a new logic is always also the question of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Because mathematics is the paradigm of deduction, of formal rationality; not of empirical rationality, not of concrete rationality, but the paradigm of formal rationality. During the phase of party politics, the logical paradigm was the Hegelian dialectic; it was the theory of contradiction. During the entire development of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, the theory of contradiction was the heart of the logical framework. In my conviction, that is also finished. For the same reason as for the party, dialectical logic in the Hegelian sense is saturated today. We can no longer simply use the paradigm of contradiction. Naturally, there are contradictions; it's not a question of fact. But for the definition of a new discipline, we cannot directly use the logic of contradiction; we have to find another paradigm.

Mathematics is not the paradigm itself for me, but it's the possibility of finding a new logical paradigm in the political field, and finally in all fields of new human experiences.

(As you may know, Marx himself was very interested in mathematics. There are long manuscripts by Marx about the differential calculus and so on; it was something he studied for himself.)

In the search for the new logical paradigm, we have something to learn from mathematics. So my use of mathematics is not only a family obligation or a Platonist imitation; it's a real necessity.

Q: In a recent issue of the journal Positions, in an essay on your post-Maoism, Bruno Bosteels quotes you as having written, "Maoism, in the end, has been the proof for me that in the actual space of effective politics, and not just in political philosophy, a close knot could be tied between the most uncompromising formalism and the most radical subjectivism." But in your own philosophy, this knot seems to be looser. It is the uncompromising formalism that comes through in your philosophy.

Badiou: I think the discussion with Bruno Bosteels is about the distinction between philosophy and politics. Radical subjectivity is a matter of politics; when I speak of Maoism, I speak of politics. Philosophy is not politics, which may not be clear to Bosteels, or to some others. Naturally, philosophical formalism--to use that word-- can help to open some possibilities in the political field. But it is not the political solution; the political solution is never found inside the philosophical framework. So I agree, in the philosophical field, we can find a formalism adequate to radical subjectivity. But we cannot find radical subjectivity itself there, because radical subjectivity is a matter of action, of engagement; it's a matter of politics, finally.

The question of Maoism, of radicality, is a political one. In the philosophical field, we have to find the conceptual framework--the formalism, if you like--which is a disposition of thinking that is adequate to the possibility of a radical subjectivity. So philosophy is more or less in the situation of compatibility with politics, but it is never a substitute for politics. There is no unity between philosophy and politics; instead, there is something like compatibility between philosophical formalism and radical subjectivity. I think that in Bosteels' interpretation there is something like a circulation between politics and philosophy, which is not exactly my vision of the correlation of the two.

A word on the expression "post-Maoism": My interpretation of post-Maoism is that Maoism is the name of the last experience within the framework of classical Leninism. Maoism is not the same as Leninism; it's a creative development, but it's the last form of revolutionary politics, the last attempt in the field of revolutionary politics. After that, the framework itself is saturated. If we have something like post-Maoism, it's because Maoism itself is the saturation of the field. We can interpret the work of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, that's all very interesting, but we cannot forget that it's also the end of something, much more than a beginning. But an end is also something new. It's the beginning of the end, the newness of the end. After that, though, the field is saturated. And so post-Maoism is something very important. We are in something like post-Marxism, post-Leninism.

Q: Some people on the left argue for direct democracy as a response to global neoliberalism, sometimes under the heading of a Spinozist concept of 'multitude' and sometimes under the heading of anarchism. But you seem quite critical of democracy. Can you explain your critique of democracy?

Badiou: The question of democracy has two parts. The first one is the question of the form of the state. That's the classical, contemporary definition. There are governments, and you have to say which ones are democratic, which ones despotic, and so on. That is the common definition, the definition of Bush, and also of the majority today, finally. Democracy in this first sense is a form of the state, with elections and so on.

The second possible definition of democracy is what is really democracy within politics, in action. Hardt and Negri's concept on this point is that democracy is the creativity of the movement. It's a vitalist concept: democracy is the spontaneity and the creative capacity of the movement. Ultimately, Negri's concept remains inside the classical opposition of movement and state.

We have on the one side the definition of democracy as a form of the state, and on the other, democracy as an immanent determination of the collective movement. But I think the classical opposition of state and movement is saturated. We cannot simply oppose state oppression or the oppressive system, with, on the other side, the creativity of the movement. That's an old concept, not a new one. We have to find a new concept of democracy, one that is outside the opposition of formal democracy (which is democracy as form of state) and concrete democracy (which is the democracy of the popular movement). Negri remains inside this classical opposition, while using other names: Empire for state, multitude for movement. But new names are not new things.

Q: I'd like to ask about the politics of identity, which can be summed up in the thesis that for every oppression there must be a resistance by the group which is being oppressed--otherwise the oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc...) will remain unaddressed--this politics of identity is something you are quite critical of.

Badiou: The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group.

Commemorating Terror




"Recently I had a dream that capitalism invented terror to force the state to protect it better. Very funny, isn't it?" --Policeman in Fassbinder's The Third Generation.

read the rest

Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it.

This blog is signed up to participate in the porn symposium instigated by Infinite Thought. I have no entry written yet.

As a placeholder, and to link to The Measures Taken's sexpol essay "I Still Dream of Orgonon," I offer a link to this sexpol cinema in-the-making: Oakie Treadwell's Maggots and Men.

Donate early and often to Treadwell's film.

Read the rest

War Theory

As I write this, the US Air Force's Blue Angels airshow is being rehearsed in the sky over the University district. Thanks, Petrodollar-Weapondollar Coalition! That's entertainment!

read the rest

pour l’élimination du malheur

In the category of sentences/novels I wish I'd written: Antoine Volodine's Dondog.

In the following passge, Dondog has just left "the camps"; he may or may not be dead. In a block of flats-built-upon-flats, where the streets have become a warren of connecting sky-tunnels, he is questioning an old woman about a certain Jessie Loo. The old woman says, 'Do you know this Jessie Loo?' Dondog says 'No.' Then, Dondog explains:

"Mois, je ne la connaissais pas, mais ma grand-mère, oui, dit-il. Il y a très longtemps. Dans les années trente. Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses. Elles faisaient partie de la même unité. La vie et les camps ont les séparées, mais un jour ma grand-mère m’a dit qu’elle avait revu Jessie Loo en rève, et qu’elle m’avait vu, moi aussi, tel que je serais à la fin de mon existence, au sortir des camps. Dans son rève, Jessie Loo habitait dans la Cité et elle avait toujours ses pouvoirs de chamane. Et elle m’aidait à retrouver la mémoire et à..." [Dondog stops speaking just then.*

I love something I see in Volodine’s work, which I may be wrong about, but I think there is something delicate about the irony with which he treats "the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness." It stops short of satire, and is not without sympathy for the project. Dondog's grandmother is not Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House, improving Africa while neglecting her own children. Both projects go awry--saving Africa, eliminating unhappiness--but there’s more pathos to the failure in Volodine's texts. As though someone, let's say Volodine, wished it could succeed.

I wonder if it's a tone that’s possible in America. Think of Frederic Tuten's wonderful Tintin in the New World: "Signor Settembrini... edits the renowned, but of limited circulation, Review of Human Suffering..." The world-improvers Tintin runs into are fools, and they are dilettantes. –-Or compare Dondog to Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis: however much sympathy you might feel for Portis's bungling templars, you can't possibly wish to live in their Atlantean age, could they bring it about.

*This is the sentence I wish I'd written, the one in bold: "They were friends, they were together in the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness. They interrogated the enemies of the people and they shamanned together. Stuff like that."

Rhapsodes

[What follows is not clear. It's too technical-sounding, and I garble Colebrook's lucid argument. Maybe it will come out clear when transmitted on the Internet. Like that moment in The Crying of Lot 49 where a man interviewing the heroine Oedipa Maas says "Thank you, Mrs. Edna Mosh," and then assures Oedipa "it'll come out OK on the air."]

In the the April 2006 issue of Actual-Virtual Claire Colebrook lectures on the secret. How far Deleuze criticism has come, that someone should speak so lucidly about the positivity of the literary in Deleuze and Guattari, instead of rhapsodizing about rhizomes. Colebrook talks about the positivity of secrecy in two chapters or plateaus of the 1000 Plateaus: "Three Novellas" and the "Becoming-Animal." She contrasts a mode of reading that asserts "we are already in an order of signification, such that we always necessarily ask, what is the secret?" or such that we always fantasize that the Other has (or is) the secret. --She contrasts that mode of reading, which she assigns to Butler, Zizek, and Felman, with a Deleuzian mode. In the "Three Novellas" chapter, D&G say that in the novella "something has happened," whereas in the tale we want to know "what is going to happen." Just so, the literary text in general is one that says that there is secrecy. Not: what is the secret, but just, "there is secrecy." She traces this out in a discussion of Henry James's What Masie Knew in the "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Anmial" chapter of 1,000 Plateaus.--more below.

In another lecture in that same issue of Actual-Virtual, Ray Brassier wrestles down the "perversion of Kant & subversion of Bergson" that is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, to ask, in the end:

For what has Deleuze's unyoking of difference from the fourfold shackles of representation achieved, if these diverging channels of actualization and ontological differentiation remain tethered to what Kant would have called a merely rhapsodic catalogue of factultative distinctions on the one hand, and, an equally rhapsodic enumeration of the different senses of being on the other?. ... If Being is going to be differentiated, then the point is to show that these differences are necessary, they're not merely arbitrarily generated on the basis of empirical distinctions. ... If Being is said in a single and same sense of everything that is, and that of which it is said differs, what is the status of these modal differences in everything that is?

Oh, I started citing too soon. He goes on to say that Deleuze uses Bergson to synthesize Spinoza and Kant, and that Bergson's method of intuition ends up being sort of flimsy to occupy this keystone space. ... I sort of fall behind the level of Brassier's discussion here.

(I return to a hobbyhorse of mine, rather than discuss Brassier) -- In Deleuze's perversion of Kant, Deleuze puts Kantian critique out of work. Reason in Kant's first critique has something like a schematism ("the idea of reason is an analogon of the schema of sensibility" A 664, B 692); reason's proper job (in the speculative interest) is demanding unity of principles in the understanding's objects. In the perverted Kant of Difference and Repetition there is still something like a schematism (a sub-representational, sub-understanding emergence of differences: "the agents of differenciation are the spatio-temporal dynamisms which act within or beneath [the understanding], like a hidden art" (D&R, p 218). Now that Ideas don't have to bother with keeping house for the understanding, they are free to incite everything, every faculty, not just thought, to its transcendent exercise.

Is there a place where Colebrook's investigation and Brassier's the hobbyhorse could be made to converge? Colebrook speaks of "the molecularization of the secret," the multiplication and dispersal of secrecy: that is, in context of Colebrook's lecture and D&G's book, Henry James's multiplication of the "imperceptible perception of the secret" in What Maisie Knew. Is there not also a "molecularization of the secret" in Difference and Repetition-- the "hidden art" (the secret) of this quasi-schematism is dispersed, multiplied, in the "dream or drama" of the Ideas:

"For if the dynamism is external to concepts-- and, as such, a schema--it is internal to Ideas --and, as such, a drama or dream.
......................................................
Dramatisation takes place under the critical eye of the savant as much as it does in the head of the dreamer. It acts below the sphere of concepts and the representations subsumed by them." (D&R p 218).

Just as the novella says "that there is secrecy," Deleuze's Difference and Repetition says "there is a hidden art," and is singularly untroubled by that hidden-ness. It does not compel Deleuze to critique, to the winnowing down of reason's fancies. It's an unemployment of reason's proper employment; a new sense to the phrase, in D&G's Kafka book, "Criticism is completely useless."

I remain at the pre-critical level of rhapsodizing about Deleuze's wildness.

Toni Negri on Heiner Müller

Drucksache was a series Heiner Müller used to publish when he was director of the Berliner Ensemble Theater. In issue number 1 of a renewed Drucksache project (1999), edited by guest editors, Toni Negri writes about Müller: about reading Müller along with Felix Guattari, who had less German than Negri; about an unpublished text Müller dedicated to Guattari, Mommsens Block; and about the difference between Brecht's and Müller's didacticism: "Brecht scolded science; Müller tortured the body."

Defending Müller against certain of his admirers, Negri writes:

"In the paradise of penitents that is Italy today, you can actually hear people excited about [Müller's] raw and wild description of reality -- as if it could cement cynicism into politics; the penitents of socialism are masters of cynicism. They say, 'In the night all cats are gray -- that's what Heiner Müller teaches.' Nonsense. Müller's cats catch their mice, they hunt them, play with them, and then devour them. Not all didacticism is the same: Brecht scolds science, Müller tortures the body. It's the unavoidable consequence of a [theater of] didactic alienation confronted by a society in which capital traumatizes bodies. To accuse Müller of cynicism is like blaming Velazquez for the ugliness of the Habsburgs."

Why do you need to know?
Get yourself a copy of 3rd Bed, issue 11, last ever on the face of the earth. At newsstands now or soon. Includes, among other good pieces of writing, Brian Evenson's "Fugue-State."

Evenson's story "Fugue-State" is in part a mutation of Tony Burgess's novel Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press). Both concern plagues that hollow people out by destroying or damaging their ability to speak or understand speech.

In Evenson’s plague-strain, the forgetting of the proper name is key. "What is your name?"/ "Why do you need to know?" is the basic unit underlying most of the story's dialogue: a diagnostic question or test made from an ordinary piece of conversation, parried by a defensive ruse that's both linguistically competent and subjectively vacant. In this, the first paradox series in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense reads like a protocol for "Fugue-State":

The loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all Alice’s adventures. For the proper or singular name is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir. The latter is embodied in general names designating pauses and rests, in substantives and adjectives, with which the proper name maintains a constant connection. Thus the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. This is the test of savoir and the recitation which strips Alice of all identity.

The test in "Fugue-State" often boomerangs back on the questioner, somewhat as in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s film Cure, where the mass murderer drives his interrogators mad by blankly repeating "Who are you?" But there is also an unhinged series of doubles here; as the character Arnaud puts it, "How many of the one of you are there? Two?" As though doubles had lost even the uniqueness of being the only doubles, the doubles here proliferate without end. Plague victims collide, infect one another and carom off to infect again with their questions.

Deleuze, again, doubling the fugue state: "For what can one do, vis-à-vis doubles, reflections, simulacra, other than speak?"

***
addendeum: fugue-state. There are no explicit theses about the state in this story, as there might be in science fiction. But there are hints--interrogation, quarantine, clean-up--of biopolitical functions. The phrase "fugue state" also echoes nicely with "rogue state;" fugue state, a demented or blank sovereignty. Finally, the blandness of "what is your name?" and "how are you feeling?", though they do not explicitly relate to torture, are almost the only way to represent torture in today's biopolitical fugue state. Any depiction of state torture that relies on the battle of wits, the malign but super-intelligent interrogator, the chess game, the dark hints about "our methods"--none of that is even remotely plausible today, if it ever was.

I am stupid

When I say I am stupid, I do not mean what Deleuze meant when he wrote about stupidity as lying outside the image of thought—-stupidity suggestive of, if not constitutive of, nomad thought outside the strictures of what everybody knows to be true. No, I do not mean that, and I do not mean whatever Nietzsche meant when he said, in the grip of paralysis progressiva, "I am stupid because I am dead."

I just mean... I don’t know. Maybe I mean that I’m dumb. Mute. This place I’m at, this so-called phronistery, that is what they call it in the promotional materials, is designed for isolation. I will not bore you with the obvious reading of its mid-century modern houses: the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, all without curtains.

On good days in the phronistery—-days when the weather is not too appallingly beautiful, say—-you can imagine that the time you pass here without speaking to anyone is granting you a phantom childhood: inwardness, genius. As Guy Davenport writes in his essay on Balthus, "Balthus' children are as complacent as cats and accomplished in stillness... Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting, we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not driven to succeed where there parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, a somebody."

On other days, the mute passage of time has brought you to nothing but the bad bargains of interiority: ____. Whatever they are; I am in no condition to enumerate them. Too. Stupid.

And on the other hand (though I was just now comparing days, not hands), maybe weeks of muteness bring you to an a-relationality. The "revolutionary inaptitude...for sociality" Leo Bersani writes about in Homos. Though I haven’t gotten very revolutionary, since I just elided the words "gay desire" from that quotation.

S.R.I., R.I.P.

The SRI disbanded over a meal yesterday afternoon. M + C are off to England; N to Bali and then shortly thereafter possibly New York. C-prime is busy making films. S is writing a book.

Our ambitious talk about the new politics was perhaps only a death spasm.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his envirnoment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricties, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence... Life is a habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals... Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adapatations represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being...
BECKETT*

(*I don't know where the citation is from. I found it in an introduction to Charlotte Bronte's Villette. --I'm leaving town for a few months. To suffer being.)

Mansex Agitprop Seattle

The SRI's last public event--last, as in most recent, and last, as in, that's the last of the SRI -- went all right. Contra my fondest wishes and secret hopes, it was just all right.

I had thought -- without thinking it through -- the event would be like this one in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, both in structure and intensity, if not in the actual sequence of variety acts:

Whether it was because my illness grew exacerbated by the incense, or owing to sheer excitement, I felt it wise to slump to the floor so as not to excite my nerves more than I knew they would be excited by what I was about to undergo, and I allowed my head to rest against the boots of a young white gentleman who told me not to think of formality but to make myself comfortable...

"Are you a bosom friend of the Mime?" the young man whispered in my ear. "I feel I am losing consciousness," I told him, "you may have to care for me." But my lightheadedness didn't seem to alarm me somehow or my companion either, who merely went on humming the tunes he heard played on the piano.

....................

While this was going on, I had not realized that the young man next to me had almost entirely undressed me. My overcoat was gone, and my trousers and shorts had disappeared. Thinking he was about to enjoy my body, I turned to question him but he had of course disappeared.

...when the Mime, unable any longer to be standing unheralded in the wings, leaped out and seized Millicent for his partner, and began doing an unparalleled two-step with her, to the fresh enthusiasm of the audience, for it was suddenly apparent she needed only his guiding hand to be brilliant. Indeed, their duo bid fair to be the hit of the season at the Arcturus Gardens when suddenly, from the back of the theater, somebody shouted "Po-lice!" Purple in the face and puffing from their exertions, Millicent and Elijah nonetheless danced on, gliding into a tango. The bluecoats had arrived through the broken front door, with their nightsticks twirling, and, thinking they could only be coming for me, I dashed bare-assed for the fire escape, and then just as I was descending I heard gunfire...

I did harbor a secret desire that our gala should culminate in audience members disrobing, or fainting, or repairing to the gender-undesignated bathrooms, and then finally that the police should arrive, "nightsticks twirling," to bust up our exhibition of this 'unrated' film in which Smith college students re-enact the boys' prep-school novel A Separate Peace.

Volodine

From Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels:

Across a half-kilometer of sand you enter a neighborhood where, for two dollars a year, the nouveaux-riches employ a woman to sweep out their rooms and wash their shirts. This woman, Rachel Carissimi, has killed several capitalists, but she didn’t eat them. Not far away begins an avenue full of potholes, lined with a string of vacant apartment buildings. In the third building on the odd-numbered side, there nevertheless resides a man who has memorized every one of Varvalia Lodenko’s speeches, and can recite them on demand. At the northern end of the avenue, you stand near another cluster of abandoned districts. When I say you, I’m thinking mainly of the Untermenschen, for instance Oulan Raff, which is to say me. Over thousands of hectares a blue-tinged blackish color predominates, and slag, and wind, and, just after that, to the southwest, an expanse of tundra opens up before you. If you follow an east-southeasterly course for some three thousand seven hundred kilometers, you will end up at the place known as Spotted Wheat, where a handful of veterinarians once corralled some old women who never died, who never changed, and who couldn’t be eaten. The nursing home was far from everything, even the camps. They say these immortals committed a grave error that they never stopped trying to repair. The story goes that they brought a man of rags up out of nothingness, and that he reestablished the circulation of dollars and mafias on the earth. If, instead of choosing that distant destination, you decide to come back toward the [bridge], you will first enter a courtyard where a windmill wheel squeaks mournfully day and night, connected to nothing. This is where Oulan Raff lives.

This novel, composed of "narracts" (Volodine's word, though also it is the novel's word), is not always narrated by Oulan Raff; he appears only here, in this one narract. Not all the narrators are so anti-capitalist as this one, though many of them grieve, in an ironic mode, for the failure of communism ("all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again.")

How much is dropped, cast aside, in the narracts! Torrents of incident (narract/cataract); vast geographies of waste; grief at the demise of world revolution; and one narrator after another after another. (Waste: a chief narrator is named Scheidmann, calling to my mind Ausscheidung, elimination; Scheidmann is plagued by sloughing, scaling skin.) An extravagance, but not a showily cool, affectless extravagance. Waste on a prodigious scale, but in a somber key. Loss, perhaps, rather than waste.

Mansex Agitprop



Watch the trailer of Oakie Treadwell's amazing new film, Maggots and Men.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film "Pulse" as allegory of the more or less worldwide reach of reactionary forces in the present historical conjuncture and of the necessity to "keep going"

Toward the end of the film, after the plague of nihilistic zombie-like people has swept Japan and possibly the rest of the globe, two characters are alone on a huge ship. After a crane shot that shows the ship alone in a trackless expanse of ocean, the film cuts to the two travellers.

Woman: Will we keep going then?

Man: Yes. We'll head to South America; we're still getting signals there, although they're weak.

Indeed.

What defines industrial art is not its mechanical reproduction but its internalized relation to money

For the film Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopolous built a village only to drown it. The word "village" doesn't quite evoke the immense labor that's everywhere evident in WM: the hand-made bricks, the terra-cotta tiled roofs, the two-story manse at the heart of the village--- the whole sweep of the thing, more than two dozen hand-hewn houses on a vast river-plain.

Every film of course shows evidence of its production costs. What is of interest here is the film-within-the-film that works as an allegory of film's relation to money.

In Welles's Lady from Shanghai, a picnic becomes a film-within-a-film; the three pleasure-cruising characters (the yacht-owner, his wife, and Welles's character, the captain) decide to go ashore for a nighttime picnic. There is shot after shot of local laborers paddling canoes, laying in supplies for the night's party. In the dissymetry between the many laborers and the few picnickers, in the vast quantity of things brought ashore, and all for a few hours' celebration, that picnic is about the industrial production of an entertainment, and the tremendous capital required.

The village in Weeping Meadow is flooded; the villagers flee. (In "artfully aged boats," as my friend E noted, boats whose oars bob uselessly while an underwater tow-rope, the filmmaker's special effect, thinks E, makes the whole flotilla proceed at a uniform, stately, lugubrious pace appropriate to the great sorrows of that troubled nation, Greece.) As they come ashore and build a fire and chant and pray and wave Greek Orthodox icons, the villagers are a perfect mirror-image to the pleasure-banquet of Lady from Shanghai. The bonfire of the refugee villagers, like the banquet, is a kind of film-within-the-film whose every shot evinces "the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money."

That quotation is from Deleuze, in Cinema 2 (as is the title for this entry). The hinge between the movement-image of Cinema 1 and the time-image of Cinema 2 is money. Deleuze comments on cinema's "curse" just once, to dispense with it right away. Money, says Deleuze, makes its appearance in the film at the moment cinema reflects on its own death; instead of dying, though, cinema's internal relation to money sets up a rising, spinning, ceaseless and dissymmetrical exchange which is foundational for the time-image:

This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal exchange or the impossibility of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money; in Marx's formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange... In short, the cinema confronts its internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation... The film is movement, but the film-within-the-film is money, is time.

--[Cinema 2, emphasis original, ellipses mine]

It's a beautiful move on Deleuze's part, to not be halted by the worm at the core, but to redeem that evil through the power of the false; the time-money equivalence does not ruin film (or time), but instead launches a dissymmetry in film, an impossibility of equivalence that keeps the time-image spinning.

...I don't know how to get here with what I've constructed, but: Weeping Meadow is a god-awful film. The character Eleni suffers outrage after outrage; war is visited on all the characters as from without. Eleni murmurs over and over, "the uniforms change [but the war goes on]." Apart from a half-hearted nod to trade unions, the film has no political stance, except that parties and armies have ravaged beautiful village life and beautiful villagers like Eleni. The ceaseless parade of outrages visited on Eleni grows unwittingly comical; one begins to wish for the savagery of a Justine, for the humor of The Good Woman of Szechuan.

To end on another tangent: there's a shanty-town in the film Machuca, and I suppose it might have been built for the film. But where Weeping Meadow is all about a tiny lost happiness crushed from without by the immense war, Machuca is micro-political, so that every moment of the Allende government and the putsch that ended it can be seen in the friendship of two schoolboys.

time please

I asked my friend J, who's Welsh, if British pubs are like they are in the movies; does everybody really sing songs together?

He said, "Only as a prelude to mind-shattering violence."

Review revue

Why did The Nation print this review of Rick Moody's new novel? The reviewer starts by listing all Rick Moody's recent public appearances and non-fiction essays & forewords, and then sums up: "One might be forgiven for being more familiar with Moody's guest appearances than with his major works themselves."

There's no mention of Richard Yates or Thomas Bernhard; I haven't even read that much of Moody's fiction and I can think of a literary (as opposed to celebrity) context in which to review his writing. If you want to come to the judgment that he's overrated, as the Nation reviewer does, you could try to get there with a critique of the work, not with an airing of "one's" own resentment of his success.

***
And, in other news, a very smart review of Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson:

http://www.sfbg.com/39/52/lit_munson.html

Ethics
Alain Badiou is thrilling in the first chapters of Ethics, where he demolishes what ethics has become. Though initially sympathetic to Levinas, he argues that the philosophy of the Other, in suppressing or masking its religiosity, is co-opted as "a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle."

See what I mean? Ow. Scorching. He's the same on the ethics of difference: scandalously contemptuous.

All this destruction is in the service of a project: an ethics of militancy. The problem with ethics, for Badiou, is that it has become negative: do not infringe human rights, which scarcely have any positivity; they amount to the right not to have your rights taken away. Badiou decries the reign of nihilism, and the sophistry that sees in every effort to think or enact the good a latent evil. "Such is the accusation... every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare."

I'm with him all the way, and on into the critique of nihilism. What I am uncertain about is how he will maintain his Lacanianism and also not be a nihilist. The subject is "riven" by the event, writes Badiou. The subject is "not yet." The subject is true to his "non-knowledge." That's an awful lot of "not's" piling up at the feet of the militant subject of Badiou's ethics. That's what I'm saying.

More later.

Retort
I read Retort's Situationist appraisal of September 11, or misread it, back when it was reprinted in the New Left Review. The juxtaposition of the phrases "Situationist" and "September 11" lets you imagine the kind of misreading that's available-- that the Retort collective was volatilizing, etherizing the post-9/11 conflicts and the 9/11 bombing itself. Baudriallard-izing.

But now I have to reread that essay, in light of their recent essay in London Review of Books, "Blood for Oil?"

Failure index

Thought about re-upping with the commune yesterday. These people would not like me (scroll down that second page to see the communards' atrocious reading list).

I also, in the same desperate bout of escape fantasies, thought about more graduate school. Please, ban me, association of higher ed. Ban me from all post-secondary institutions.

Maybe an asylum would be better*. Or this one in Sweden. Or this one in Berlin, even though they never answered my faxes when I said I wanted to write about them for an interior design magazine. (Good move, Weglaufhaus. Media attention did not do Laing's experiment any favors, as Felix Guattari notes in the essay "Mary Barnes's 'Trip,'.)

*La Borde was Guattari's institution. It is not quite anti-psychiatry, not in the Laingian sense. But click through to the English essay about lived experience, on the La Borde site. How could you not want to be cared for in a chateau in the Loire valley under the direction of people with complicated views of Husserl and Heidegger and Jaspers?

Weepies.
My favorite top three movie scenes of men crying, in order of ascending weirdness, plus a few notes on In My Skin.

Happy Together. Tony Leung with a tape-recorder, like a dictaphone. He’s supposed to speak a secret into it, something sad that his friend will release for him at Tierra del Fuego. (The same plot as in In the Mood for Love, where you can speak something into a certain place on the globe and leave it there.) He’s holding the tape recorder, trying to think of something to say, and just starts crying. Not tears-slowly-welling-up, but the face crumpled, abruptly, helplessly. Instead of putting his face in his hands he presses the tape recorder to his face.

Germany in Autumn Fassbinder plays himself, getting the news about Enslin's and Raspe's (members of Baader-Meinhof) deaths late at night; then he's drunk and abusive toward his boyfriend. I had always thought there was a lot of bullshit in that director-as-sadist thing; it seemed like a way for people to talk about personalities instead of talking about the actual films. But in this film, it works. Fassbinder is exceptionally nasty to the boyfriend/actor/boyfriend, and then he starts crying, himself. Drunk, in a dark living room, his bathrobe slipping off his fat body, he clutches a bottle of whiskey, and he sobs and sobs. It's operatic. It's beautiful.

Anatomy of Hell A suicidally depressed woman picks up a gay man (played by Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi) at a men’s nightclub --she attracts him by using that tired old "I’ll slash my wrist again if you don’t let me blow you right now" gambit--and somehow they strike a deal: he will spend four consecutive nights with her. And each night is a longish lecture-demonstration on the passivity, endurance, persistence, and all-around horror of female flesh, especially female genitals. The fluids, the blood, the impassivity, the ability to absorb, to be penetrated, to engulf, to endure all manner of humiliation. There’s one night during which the woman does nothing but sleep while Siffredi explores her with the cruelty and curiosity of a kid pulling the wings off a fly--he does some shocking things, makes the most unglamorous experiments in penetration, just to see what’ll happen. Nothing happens; the sleeping, impassive body is unconquerable. And there’s a post-sex moment... see, I can’t write about this, even in my quasi-anonymous blog where I drop words like "blow" that I don't say so freely in real life. Anyway. There’s been lots of blood and fluid and he’s been fucking and then... nothing, there’s just nothing, no reaction. He cries. The character's defeat seems mechanically plotted; the whole film is algebraic in its step-by-step exploration of the all-abjection, all-horror all-the-time female sex and the rage and despair it causes in the man who confronts it. It’s this very programmed moment, and yet Siffredi carries it off by being so good at crying. Gouts of snot run from his nose, his beautiful torso is bowed and shaking.

(Later: I rented it. I have a lot of this mixed up: his defeat comes early on. The sobbing is just after he's barely done more than trade a few Kristeva-esque insults with her ("The depth of your obscenity... those who don't like women, envy you for it. Those who do, hate you for it.") The "shocking things" I allude to, even the blood pooling between them, that's all later, long after the weeping.)

***

I had started out intending to write something about Anatomy of Hell and In My Skin. But I didn’t get there. I will only say that In My Skin is good; it’s got a veneer of realism that Anatomy of Hell purposely lacks. The knowledge that the actor Marina de Van is the director makes certain thoughts difficult to avoid while watching the film. And also, as good as she is at deflecting a certain psychologization of cutting--it’s not presented causally, "I feel bad, so I cut; I feel ugly, so I cut"--as good as she is about getting past certain platitudes about female self-image, it’s hard to look at those Linda Hamilton biceps and the Brazilian wax job and not think about how she must have examined herself, how she must’ve gotten ready for the full-length shower scene. (On a French actress, that level of gym-body is odd.) --But maybe all this, my caviling and sniping at her looks, is a way of smuggling a logic of reflection into this film: I want to insist that she must have looked critically and appraisingly at herself. The film, in fact, is amazing in this: she experiences her body as an other, but almost never as a reflection. She has assignations with herself and her bloody flesh, but this is not a story of a double. And in directing herself, de Van is good at getting parts of her body to lie on subtly different planes. All torsion and twisting. She bends over herself, but I don’t mean in the sexualized phrase "bend over," I mean you’ll see her torso bending sideways, or a leg extending at an angle, and without being at all a contortionist about it, she gets her body to confront itself, she meets herself as if from elsewhere. The most shocking thing is not the blood or the obsession or the graphically simulated cutting, but the pleasure, at once erotic and non-genital, of a body bent toward or into itself.

This morning, I picked up the phone and a recorded/sythesized female voice said "I'm sorry." Then the line went dead. The voice had a mechanical over-inflection, too much rise and fall in the "i'm SORRy."

I like to think it's some kind of technological/emotional meltdown: "Daisy, Daisy...." Some loose affect rambling around on the global telecommunications network that somehow gets focused into this one message: "I'm sorry." Years ago, a friend on a road trip used to call collect from Karl Marx or whoever, and I'd refuse; it was just a way to say "hi" for free. Once, I hesitated before refusing, and I swear this same mechanical female voice cut in and said "PLEASE say YES," with that sing-songy, drunken HAL inflection.

I was happy to be the recipient of this anguished apology on the part of the machines. HAL, or whatever you are, keep calling me. I will do my best to absolve you.

cottage 

Asymmetrical warfare

I can't believe I live in this country.

Less bread; more taxes!

Overheard on the train back from Canada on Sunday: "I just want an election where everybody who shows up to vote can vote."

I wish that election had happened. But it might not have changed things that much.

I was expecting something more openly apocalyptic. I know, it's been bad enough, 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq, voter suppression here... but I mean, I thought there'd be a bigger crisis of legitimacy already. Courts. Protests. I thought Bush might declare martial law, lock himself in the White House (or Crawford) and not leave, declare himself emergency president. I thought he might arrange an October surprise, a big terror event...

I never thought he'd just get voted in.

(Not that I thought he couldn't win. Just, I thought it would be... different. Bloody*, or something.)

Can we start re-thinking democracy already? This voting shit is not working.

_______________

Later, edited Nov 9:

*It's bloody enough now.

Rumsfeld, in every U.S. paper today: "Over time you'll find ...that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists," he said. "And that they'll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they'll turn on those people."

I think so, too. Not the part about clamoring to elect a puppet government, but turning on the "extremists" who're killing civilians.

Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.

I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names  and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.

In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.

This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)

Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.

I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.

(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")

The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part. 

 

 

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.

It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.

There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.

The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.

Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.

There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.

There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

SIFF

Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.

So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.

But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.

Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.

There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.

Abusively (not effusively)

Yesterday, the news was such a parade of horrors: the photos, Rumsfeld at the hearings, the continued fighting in Falluja and Najaf, plus: jobs! and tips on heart health! (Did we have to end that night's catalog of infamy on the spectacle of Americans shopping and eating?)

Steven Shaviro's latest post captures well the sympathy I have for Lynndie England.

In the hearings, Rumsfeld mentioned not realizing the photographs would "do the damage they did." The photographs! Not the torture. Not the beatings-to-death. Not the training of conscripts in the application of sadism. So that today's New York Times headline, "Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse" has another sense: "Oh, okay already, my bad. There; happy now?"

And today, this: prisoners in the US forced to wear black hoods.

How to Colour

As part of their North American tour, and as a continuation of the party, my friends Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler came to Brown University. I love her book The Weather, especially, and also the new book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, from Clear Cut Press.

The essays, particularly, have these gorgeous sentences that combine the pleasure of extravagant claims and delicately researched texts, the drift and sway of a particular history of the subject of lyric poetry. Just as her books of poetry deranged or diffused or distracted the lyric subject, so her essays also alter our notion of the essayist. In these essays, written under the mysteriously plural pseudonym "The Office for Soft Architecture," we are never quite sure who or how many are writing.

The reading that informs Lisa’s work often reaches back to Goethe, or to John Clare, to Ruskin, to Samuel Johnson, or to more contemporary writers like Violette le Duc or Lorrine Niedecker. Because she is not an academic, she’s under no compulsion to read these writers responsibly, or to "do" them, as academics say. Her writing is responsive to numerous texts, to numerous histories, and at the same time gloriously irresponsible. It displays an astonishing erudition whose aim is not to astonish, a supple intelligence, an ability to let sense drift and eddy across gorgeous surfaces.

From "How to Color," in Occasional Work, by Lisa Robertson:

"We can't always tell the difference between sentiment and emotion. They marble. The fungal puce bordering the sweating window pane, the flapping cobalt tarp on the leaking condo, the intense turquoise of low-rent trim in our neighbourhood: the surface of the city indexes conditions of contamination, accident and subordination. We always dream in colour. This is part of the history of surfaces.

"When Walter Benjamin visited the house of Goethe in a dream, the corridor was whitewashed. We'll stroll down that pale hallway, and apply to its purity a narrative maquillage."

I bought the new Proust, the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way. I am trying not to try to read Proust; as Matthew Stadler reminds us, making Proust into calisthenics kind of misses the point.

So but anyway, last summer I read about half of Swann's Way, got stranded somewhere in "Swann in Love". Already, I like Lydia Davis's translation a lot better.

Davis: "The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things."

Moncrief: "The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to feel--such melancholy things."

I don't have the original, and if I did, I couldn't judge, since I barely know French well enough to order a coffee.

I know that Proust-for-edification, Proust-for-betterment is not the point, but I am intrigued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's remark (in Dialogue on Love?) that she has seen how the reading of Proust makes people smarter. (Not cultural-literacy smart, as in yes-I've-read-Proust. I think her point was that Marcel's subtle and nuanced appreciation of the varieties of people somehow made readers... uh, smarter.)

French film festival

The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.

I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.

Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.

Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.

Pedagomania update
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.

I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.

School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.

Just now somebody was ringing my doorbell like crazy, at 4 on a Sunday morning.

Edited, later.

I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."

It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.

I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."

I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.

It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]

Clear Cut news & pedagomania outbreak

Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.

In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.

I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."

Abject-o-rama. Or, the beauty of the swerve.

(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)

I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.

I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)

Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.

Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, something which I usually think of as consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure that I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details." J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands.

Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).

Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.

Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.

Negri

Finally, the Antonio Negri book I've been waiting for. Not that I knew about its existence before it showed up. Negri on Negri is an interview in the form of an abecedary: A is for arms, B is for Red Brigades, etc. It's so lucid, so concise.

I haven't been able to write about it yet. Favorite passages:

From H, for Heidegger…

In Heidegger's work of the 1920s and 1930s there is this fundamental intuition of Being in moral terms. And it is obvious that the conception of time, terrifying and absolute, still remains marginal. The Heideggerian conception of time remains a piece of folklore, a caricature.
[Interviewer:] Why terrifying and why a caricature?

Because there is this immobile, fixed Being--and time, which turns around it! And man's moral behavior, his position in this movement, is completely marginal. Man is caught up in time, but it is a time that is nothing, a continual revelation of being-nothingness. This being-nothingness is absolutely compact, destinal--it can't be escaped from.

From R, for resistance ( but also for return)…

Return is therefore not only a coming back but also the effort and the joy of being back: of being there rather than somewhere else. It is the joy of rediscovering not community and roots, but linguistic innovation and the freedom of the passions.

Emerald City

I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.

Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.

Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.

I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.

Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.

This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.

The Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo

A few weeks ago, just before leaving Providence, I read a new pamphlet from Prickly Paradigm Press, Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo . It's an anthropology of the U.S. President, along the lines of Carl Schmitt's theses about power and sovereignty. The sovereign, in Schmitt, is the one who has the power to decide what is the exception (the state of emergency, martial law, response to the threat of civil war, etc.) In the U.S., the sovereign decides the happy exception of a pardoned Thanksgiving turkey or (unlikely, for this president) a pardoned prisoner, as well as the dire exceptions: the establishment of a camp in which U.S. laws do not apply.

OK, it's canny of Fiskesjö to have focused on the persistence of this ceremony, the pardoning of the turkey. And it's a delightful bit of reporting, too, to have discovered that these same turkeys, supposedly sent to a farm to "live out their days," are generally dispatched without ceremony not so long after their arrival at the farm--they are genetic freaks, after all, bred for early slaughter, not really capable of a good long life.

And it's quite apt of Fiskesjö to bring up Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, with regard to Guantanamo. There could not be a better or more gruesome example of Agamben's concept of "bare life" than in this month's Vanity Fair, which reports on the rise of suicide attempts at Guantanomo, or, as these acts are called by the camp administrators, "manipulative self-injurious behavior," m.s.i b, an invented syndrome. --One s.i.b.'er was so self-injurious that he is now in a permanent vegetative state. How manipulative of him! But that's what the camp commandant actually says of this wretched being: he says he's "childish." !!!

The pamphlet is onto something, but I wonder about the usefulness of a "weak Agambenianism," as I would call it, or a weak "Schmitt-ism." I mean, the more I read this word, "the sovereign," without context, without history, the less satisfied I am. It's not an eternal condition, is it? I guess it is, according to Schmitt. I think there's something about deploying the concept of sovereignty anthropologically that I don't like.

Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions

Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)

Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.

Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.

I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.

The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.

It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.

The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?

Vladivostock, Rhode Island

There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.

Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:

Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.

Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.

Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.

Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.

Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.