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.

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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.

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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!

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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.