Companero

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Compañero by David Brian Howard (from the Introduction to The Golgotha Hole: Allegory in the Age of the American Empire, Volume II.)

GESTAPO “I take as my starting point the small nonsensical hope.” (Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007: 71.)

“I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive…and witness their wax-laying and honeymaking, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur.” (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1838), quoted in William T. Vollmann, You Bright & Risen Angels. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1987: 623.)

“Yet the sight that met their eyes as they emerged on the road was terrifying. The massed black clouds were still mounting the twilight sky. High above them, at a vast height, a dreadfully vast height, bodiless black birds, more like skeletons of birds, were drifting. Snowstorms drove along the summit of Ixtaccihuatl, obscuring it, while its mass was shrouded by cumulus. But the whole precipitous bulk of Popocatepetl seemed to be coming towards them, travelling with the clouds, leaning forward over the valley on whose side, thrown into relief by the curious melancholy light, shone one little rebellious hilltop with a tiny cemetery.” (Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963: 324.)

“Suppose that there is in our soul an impressionable wax-tablet, in some more impressionable, in others less, purer in some, more impure in others, and in some harder and in some softer and in others yet a middle way…It is a gift, let us say, of the mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne: everything that we wish to conserve in our memories of what we have seen or heard or conceived is impressed in this wax that we present to sensations or conceptions. And of what is

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impressed we conserve the memory and the knowledge so long as the image (to eidolon) lasts. What is erased or does not succeed in impressing itself, we forget and have no knowledge of.” (Plato, Theatetus, quoted in Giorgio Agamben (Translated by Ronald L. Martinez), Stanzas: Words and Phantasm in Western Culture. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 75.)

“[…]—we all have eyes for our own Dark Angel, never other people’s Angels—at least I think so. I lived in his soul as if it were a palace that had been cleared out so that the most unworthy person in it would be you, that’s all. Ah, really, I used to depend on him terribly. But what did he want with my dull, my cowardly existence? He couldn’t improve me, though he never managed to kill me! I get so sad and disappointed; sometimes I say to him ‘I understand you.’ He just shrugs his shoulders.” (Arthur Rimbaud (Translated by Paul Schmidt), Complete Works. New York, London, and Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008: 230.)

“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition—to which the patients themselves were not invited—was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catharine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enameled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr. Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr. Austin…What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’” (J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1990: 9.)

“Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitered and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls [Aussenwerke]. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, cited in Elliot L. Jurist, Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture, and Agency. London and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000: 251.)

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“Lost city, lost child: what climax of suffering Lacks now? Have we not reached In a headlong plunge the abyss of pain?” . (Euripedes (Translated by Phillip Vellacott), “The Women of Troy,” in The Bacchae and Other Plays. New York and London: Penguin Classics, 1973: 116.)

“’I think we need to start at the beginning,” Doc said. “Let us start with your own family. How do you feel about your own family?’ […] ‘My family seems so unreal to me. And when I am with them, I am also not real. I am a character in some movie and someone else wrote the script. Doc, did you ever read Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities? In the opening piece a man walks into a movie theater, and there on the screen is the story of his parents’ lives. The story of how they met. He watches, amazed as he see his parents courtship projected before him. They walk along the Coney Island boardwalk. The’re young and in love. Finally, Schwartz can’t take it anymore. He leaps up from his seat in the dark and yells, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’ ‘Now […], I know that patients often reveal unconscious wishes in seemingly casual anecdotes. So tell me, if you imagined that your family was a movie, what would it look like? What would happen on the screen?’ ‘Well, Doc,” she said, “it would go something like this.’” (Sarah Schulman, Empathy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press 2006: 56-57.)

“BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS.” (Kathy Acker, Don Quixote: which was a dream. New York: Grove Press, 1986: 39.)

“When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous. It’s a drag-belly rat the size of a cat because this is a satisfying rhyme. There was a fair amount of rat lore in these streets when Nick Shay was growing up. Not that rats were frequently seen. They were heard in the walls and down the yards, indelible half fictions, running across rooftops in the moon. Enormous rats

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with rat-brown fur. There were rats in sewers and demolition sites and coal bins, a rustling in the flung garbage of empty lots. He got out of a taxi near the building where his mother lived. The building was not here thirty, forty years ago, a large brown structure, tall and broad and defined by a sense of fortification—fences and ramps, cameras angled from the brickwork.” (Don DeLillo, Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997: 194.)

“War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” (Gen. Carl Von Clausewitz (Translated by Colonel J.J. Graham), On War. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004: 3.)

Georges Seurat, Bathing at Asnieres, 1884. http://www.cord.edu/faculty/andersod/seurat_bathing.jpg

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“All are awaiting the birth of a new order of things, all ask themselves, some with misgiving, others with hope, what the morrow will bring forth. It will not come with empty hands….Industrial appliances, that by a single electric impulse make the same thought vibrate throughout five continents, have distanced by far our social morals, which are yet in many regards, the outcome of reciprocally hostile interests. The axis is displaced, the world must crack that its equilibrium may be restored.” (Elisée Reclus (1884) quoted in John G. Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France. Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1994:47.)

“I have entered the Falling Age, the neighbors sometimes ask if something has happened. I have fallen into a small grave and hit my head and wrenched my shoulders, everything has to heal before my next fall, and I must spend this time in the crypt, I’m already scared of the next fall, but I know it is a prophecy: I shall fall three times before I can rise again.” (Ingeborg Bachmann (Translated by Philip Boehm), Malina: A Novel. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1990: 149150.)

“An Angel came to me and said. O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career. I said. perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable […].” (William Blake, “A Memorable Fancy,” in William Blake (Edited by David V. Erdman), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Anchor Books, 1988: 41.)

“[…] becoming archaic the symbolic erupts…breaks through the web of signs and coherent discourse….in cries, interjections, exclamations, slips of the tongue….there are literally holes, craters in the semantic field, a volcanic landscape.” (Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everday Life: Volume II, quoted in Michael Sherringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 156.)

“[…] manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction which one dashes off, you know, to make money: it was a mad neurologist’s testament, a kind of Poisonous Opus as in that film. It had cost him, and would cost him, years of toil, but the thing was of course, an absolute secret. If she

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mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. She wished to be taken home or preferably to some cool quiet place with a clean bed and room service. She wore a strapless gown” (Vladimir Nabokov (Edited by Dimitri Nabokov), The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun): A novel in fragments. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008: 3.)

Plastic Toy Soldiers http://www.bizzia.com/2008/01/09/quick-tip-defend-your-organization-when-it-is-attacked/

“It will be awhile before you are ready to read this book, so fascinating is the sight of the endless variety of toys that its illustrated section unfolds before the reader. Battalions of soldiers, coaches, theaters, sedan chairs, sets of dishes—all in Lilliputian format. The time had to come when someone would assemble the family tree of rocking horses and lead soldiers, and write the archaeology of toyshops and dolls’ parlors. This has been done here in a scholarly and conscientious manner and without any archival pedantry in the book’s text, which stands on a par with the illustrations. The book is cast in a single mold, and the reader can detect nothing of the labor involved in producing it. Now that the book lies before us, it is hard to imagine how it could ever have been otherwise.” (Walter Benjamin, “Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work,” in Walter Benjamin (Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith; Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999: 116.)

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The original cover of The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss. New York: Random House, 1957. http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Cats/HatBook.htm

The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day.” “

(Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat: 1)

“Once I’d spotted this, other mementos popped out of the murk. The cover of a paperback lying open on the mattress, picturing a neat couple in an unruly embrace. The title was Peyton

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Place. Butting against a pile of cardboard tubes, trying to lift them with its bulbous forks of arm, was Robbie the Robot, whining with battery-powered frustration. David picked his way through the trash like he knew this room only too well—like it was his room; one narrow foot placed surely on a shiny, new copy of The Cat in the Hat, the second planted in the saucer of an upturned Frisbee. Bernie stayed standing by the door, his bullet-wound eyes wavering from David to me and back again, the grimace still splitting his toilet-brush beard. […] At the far side of the attic David reached a dwarfish door and pulled it open. This, I thought, must lead to some stinky kitchenette , or fouler bathroom. The boy beckoned to me to follow him—and I did.” (Will Self, How The Dead Live. New York: Gove Press, 2000: 289-290.)

“There is no way of understanding the crib if it is not first and foremost understood that the image of the world which it presents in miniature is a historical image. For what it shows us is the world of the fable precisely at the moment when it wakes from the enchantment to enter history. The fable had been able to separate itself from initiation rites only by abolishing the experience of the mystery which was at its centre, and transforming it into enchantment. The creature of the fable is subjected to the trials of initiation and the silence of mystery, but without experiencing them – in other words, by undergoing them by a spell. It is bewitchment rather than participation in secret knowledge that deprives it of speech; but this bewitchment is equally a disenchantment from the mystery and, as such, must be shattered and overcome.” (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London and New York: Verso, 2007: 141.)

Scene from the movie Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, 1956.

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http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2008/top10_1950s/top10_1950s_flying_saucers.jpg

“The breathless capitals Opened themselves to the cannon.” (Pierre Dupont, Le Chant des étudiants (Paris, 1849), quoted in Walter Benjamin (Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999: 120.)

“What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow.” (Walter Lippmann, quoted in David Simmons, The Anti-Hero in the American Novel. New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2008: 13.)

“At the end of the cold war, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding vanished. Political leaders, liberals, and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.” (Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Normalization of War”, quoted in Kenneth Christie, America’s War on Terrorism: The Revival of the Nation-State versus Universal Human Rights. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008: 70.)

“We might think that the U.S. had enough problems coping with Iraq, where the abuse of prisoners has given a spin of sexual perversion to its drive towards world domination…Selfdestructive urges [lurk] alongside the hamburger and comic-book culture we all admire. As the nation infantilizes itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned infant has nothing to do except break up its cot.” (J.G. Ballard, “Guardian, May 14, 2004,” quoted in (V. Vale and Mike Ryan editors), J.G. Ballard Quotes. San Francisco: RE/search Publications, 2004: 35.)

“The object opens itself to a monadological insistence, to a sense of the constellation in which it stands; the possibility of internal immersion in which it stands; the possibility of internal immersion requires that externality. But such an immanent generality of something individual is objective as sedimented history. This history is in the individual thing and outside it; it is

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something encompassing in which the individual has its place. Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it.” (Theodor W. Adorno (Translated by E.B. Ashton), Negative Dialectics. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979: 163.)

“[I]t seems to me that the elimination of the unsayable in language so that language attains the purity of crystal is the form given to us and most accessible to us in order to have an effect within language and, by this means, through language…My concept of a style and a writing at the same time objective and highly political is: to lead to what is refused to the word. Only where this opens itself up in the unspeakable pure power of wordlessness can the magical spark between word and motivated act leap across.” (Walter Benjamin (Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994: 80.)

“What is an author? What does it mean to think philosophical authorship? And finally, what is philosophy? Does this singularity still allow itself to be rigorously thought?” (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Monogrammes,” quoted in Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006: 11.)

“Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all. For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions. There are a number of objects in the room, and on each one a strip of white tape has been affixed to the surface, bearing a single word written out in block letters. On the bedside, for example, the word is TABLE. On the lamp, the word is LAMP. Even on the wall, which is not strictly speaking an object, there is a strip of tape that reads WALL. The old man looks up for a moment, sees the wall, see the strip of tape attached to the wall, and pronounces the word wall in a soft voice. What cannot be known at this point is whether he is reading the word on the strip of tape or simply referring to the wall itself. It could be that he has forgotten how to read but still recognizes things for what they are and can call them by their names, or, conversely, that he has lost the ability to recognize things for what they are but still knows how to read.” (Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium. New York: Picador, 2008: 1-2.)

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“Do you think there is a place for philosophy in today’s world? Of, course, but only if it is based on the current state of scientific knowledge and achievement…Philosophers cannot insulate themselves against science. Not only has it enlarged and transformed our vision of life and the universe enormously: it has also revolutionized the rules by which the intellect operates.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss (1988), quoted in E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus Books, 1995: 522.)

“I believe that it is not to be the great model of signs and language [la langue] that reference should be made, but to war and battle. The history which bears and determines us is war-like, not language-like. Relations of power, not relations of sense. History has no ‘sense’, which is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be able to be analyzed down to the slightest detail: but according to the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics.” (Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” quoted in Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History. Chicago and Manchester: University of Chicago Press and Manchester University Press, 1993: 121.)

“As we enter a fresh phase in the history of Modernity—seeking to humanize science and technology and reappropriate the aims of practical philosophy—we need to recover the idea of rationality that was current before Descartes. There are some substantial advantages in doing this. Rationally adequate thought or action cannot, in all cases equally, start by cleaning the slate, and building up a formal system: in practice, the rigor of theory is useful only up to a point, and in certain circumstances. Claims to certainty, for instance, are at home within abstract theories, and so open to consensus, abut all abstractions involves omission, turning a blind eye to elements in experience that do not lie within the scope of the given theory, and so guaranteeing the rigor of its formal implications. Unqualified agreement about these implications is possible, just because the theory itself is formulated in abstract terms. Supposing that we adopt the standpoint of Newton’s dynamics, for instance, it will follow necessarily that any “freely moving satellite” must trace an orbit of elliptical, hyperbolic, or parabolic shape. Once we move outside the theory’s formal scope, and ask questions about its relevance to the external demands of practice, however, we enter into a realm of legitimate uncertainty, ambiguity, and disagreement.” (Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992: 200.)

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“Desire is a scrambled text from the outset. The disguise does not result from the alleged deceiving intent of desire; the work itself is disguise because it is violence perpetrated on linguistic space. There is no need to imagine that the id has an idea at the back of its head. ‘The dream-work does not think.’ The mobility of the primary process is deceptive in itself; it is what deceives, what sends the ‘faculties’ using articulated language into a spin: the figural versus the mind.” (J. F. Lyotard, “The Dream-work Does not Think’, quoted in Jan Campbell, Arguing with the Phallus: feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, A Psychoanalytic Contribution. London and New York: Zed Books, 2000: 10.)

“…it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it.” (Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, quoted in Barker, The Culture of Violence: 209.)

“Indeed, what is at stake in both areas – in art as well as in social life and economic reality – is not some mere sense of change as such, a sense of things passing away and other things arising, a flow more characteristic of a time of decay and growth and more reminiscent of natural processes than of the new non-natural forms of production. It is rather that radical transformation of the world itself that spreads through the end of the nineteenth century, in Utopian and prophetic impulses of all kinds. This is then why the older ideologies of the modern have been misleading in their insistence on some ‘inward turn’ of the modern or on its increasing subjectivization of reality. At best, there stirs here everywhere an apocalyptic dissatisfaction with subjectivity itself and the older forms of the self.” (Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York: Verso, 2002: 135.)

“Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired conditions. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across the ceiling, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?” (William T. Vollmann, Europe Central. New York: Penguin Books, 2005: 27.)

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“…we were driven by a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen’s Land. By an observation, we found ourselves in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. Twelve of our crew were dead by immoderate labor and ill food; the rest were in very weak condition. […] We rowed, by my computation, about three leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labor while we were in the ship. We therefore trusted ourselves to the mercy of the waves, and in about half an hour the boat was overset by a sudden flurry from the north. What became of my companions in the boat, as well as of those who escaped on the rock, or were left on the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost.” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Barcelona: Mediasat Group, 2004: 16.)

“On a cold winter night in 2001, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police had hung live human heads in the trees of the yard. Jarvis knew the police did this when they meant to spy on people suspected of being meth cooks. The heads were informants, placed like demonic ornaments to look in the windows and through the walls.” (Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. New York, Berlin, London: Bloomsbury, 2009: 40.)

“The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head. And thus it plays the role of a fire in the house; the head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting, for, at the end of this erotic metamorphosis, the head has received the electric power of points. This great burning head is the image and the disagreeable light of the notion of expenditure, beyond the still empty notion as it is elaborated on the basis of methodical analysis. […] Existence no longer resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm.” (Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye,” quoted in Georges Bataille (Translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985:82.)

“Were this a movie, and in particular the sort of movie which makes people happy in wartime, it would have been set in the famous “white nights” of Leningrad, when Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Moreover, summer happens to

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be a season expressly reserved for Aryans, so this Russian story finds itself compelled to take place in winter, when the nights of Leningrad, like most days, are black, black, black! How about a compromise? We’ll tell our tale in grey.” (Vollmann, Europe Central: 746.)

“In a large and fortified chateau built on a rugged steep overlooking the Loire, not far from the town of Nantes, dwelt the last of her race, and the heiress of their fortunes, the young and beautiful Countess de Villeneuve. She had spent the preceding year in complete solitude in her secluded abode; and the mourning she wore for a father and two brothers, the victims of the civil wars, was a graceful and good reason why she did not appear at court, and mingle with its festivities. But the orphan countess inherited a high name and broad lands; and it was soon signified to her that the King, her guardian, desired that she should bestow them, together with her hand, upon some noble whose birth and accomplishments should entitle him to the gift. Constance, in reply, expressed her intention of taking vows, and retiring to a convent. The King earnestly and resolutely forbade this act, believing such an idea to be the result of sensibility overwrought by sorrow, and relying on the hope that, after a time, the genial spirit of youth would break through this cloud.” (Mary Shelley, The Pilgrims. London: Hesperus Press Limited, (First published in Keepsake, 1829-1837), 2008: 3334.)

“There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest, that abject defeat is somehow victory. Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying. As observers as diverse as Aldous Huxley and John Keegan have pointed out, to write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of machine–gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immortality: the idea that when hit, soldiers simply go to sleep, rather than are shredded, that generals order impersonal battalions and companies of automatons into the heat of battle, rather than screaming nineteen-year-olds into clouds of gas and sheets of lead bullets, or that a putrid corpse has little to do with larger approaches to science and culture. Euphemism in battle narratives or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian. It is no accident that gifted writers of war—from Homer, Thucydides, Caesar, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy to Stephen Runciman, James Jones, and Stephen Ambrose—equate tactics with blood, strategy with corpses. How can we write of larger

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cultural issues that surround war without describing the way in which young men kill and die, without remembering how many thousands are robbed of their youth, their robust physiques turned to goo in a few minutes on the battlefield.” (Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Anchor Books, 2002: 7-8.)

“Truth is suspended and frail, due to its temporal substance; Benjamin sharply criticized Gottfried Keller’s arch-bourgeois dictum that the truth can’t run away from us. Philosophy must do without the consolation that truth cannot be lost. A truth that cannot plunge into the abyss which the metaphysical fundamentalists prate about—it is not the abyss of agile sophistry, but that of madness—will at the bidding of its certainty principle turn analytical, a potential tautology. Only thoughts that go the limit are facing up to the omnipotence of certain accord; only a cerebral acrobatics keeps relating to the matter, for which, according to the fable convenu, it has nothing but disdain for the sake of its self-satisfaction. No unreflected banality can remain true as an imprint of the wrong life.” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 34-35.)

Scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur”. http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1118/1291277603_1443434a7a.jpg?v=0

“Willie Garza: Thought you were off the liquor. Liquor is bad. Weakens your character. How can a man like me trust a liar like you? I can't.”

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(Dialogue from The Naked City, quoted from 1MDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040636/quotes)

“Once the possibility of signifying truth is a thing of the past, another style is necessary….It is not a matter of stylistic effects or ornaments of discourse, but of what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations. It is a matter of the praxis of thought, its writing in the sense of the assumption of a responsibility for and to this excess.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le Sens du monde,” quoted in Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006: 64.)

CLOV (looking): Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause. Still louder.)

GRRAY! (Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.) HAMM (starting): Gray! Did I here you say gray? CLOV: Light black. From pole to pole. HAMM: You exaggerate. (Pause.) Don’t stay there, you give me the shivers. (Clov returns to his place beside the chair.) (Samuel Beckett, Endgame: a play. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1958: 31-32.)

“Throw down your arms,” said the captive; “throw down your arms, you have no need of them.” The invaders who had taken up their positions on the shore, dividing into two bodies, were rapidly climbing the sides of the promontory, to the right and left; so that in a few minutes the carpenter and his companions were surrounded by an innumerable crowd, which penetrating the mass of the fugitives, separated them into small parties and took position of the few weapons which had been retained by some of their number.

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The strangers laughed, skipped, and leaned their bows on the breasts of the inhabitants of the valley in token of good will. Thus some hundreds of the natives went down towards the river surrounded by their new guests. They were compelled to get into the boats, and they went back to their houses, which had been completely pillaged. Many of the huts remained vacant, and the new-comers took possession of them, without troubling themselves much respecting the inhabitants and what had become of them.” (E. Villet-Le-Duc, Annals of a Fortress: Twenty-Two Centuries of Siege Warfare. London: Greenhill Books, 2000: 10.)

“The little boy became conscious very early of this leakage and tried to plug the hole by which his reality was being lost in the imaginary. This new revolution might have saved him at least some of the stress that would later make him the Artist if certain considerations, which we shall have to discuss, had not prevented him from taking his attempt to its conclusion. We shall deal with the revolution first, for despite its failure, it played a leading part in Gustave’s personalization. For the first time the child takes a global view of the situation and seeks to circumvent the difficulty with the means at hand: between the ages of eight and ten he internalizes the criticisms leveled at him and takes them as the basis of a new conviction: that he is an actor.” (Jean-Paul Sartre (Translated by Carol Cosman), The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857: Volume 2. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987: 118.)

“The means employed by nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.” (Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of the Faculties,” quoted in Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980: 146.)

“This is why, at this very point when the crib is about to become an obsolete custom and seems even to have stopped speaking to the childhood which, as eternal guardian of what merits survival, had held it in safekeeping up to our time, together with play and fairy tale […] for us, citizens of this extreme, threadbare fringe of a century of history. For the striking feature in the work of the anonymous survivors of Spaccanapoli is the infinite discrepancy between the figuring of man – whose lineaments are as if blurred between the figuring of man – and the delirious, loving impulse that shapes the displays of tomatoes, aubergines, cabbages, pumpkins, carrots, mullet, crayfish, octopus, mussels and lemons that lie in violet, red and iridescent mounds on the market stalls among baskets, scales, knives and earthenware pots. Are we to see

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in this discrepancy, the sign that nature is once more about to enter the fairy tale, that once more it asks history which, for him, again assumes the dark outline of destiny – is struck dumb by a spell? Until one night, in the shadow-light where a new crib will light up figures and colours yet unknown, nature will once again be immured in its silent language, the fable will awaken in history, and man will emerge, with his lips unsealed, from mystery to speech.” (Agamben, Infancy and History: 146.)

WAR. — Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful. In favor of war it may be said that it barbarizes in both its above-named results, and thereby makes more natural; it is the sleep or the winter period of culture; man emerges from it with greater strength for good and evil.” (Friedrich Nietzsche (Translated by Hal Zimmerman and Paul V. Cohen), Human, All-Too-Human, Parts One and Two. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009: 218.)

“Can war serve as an effective analyzer of power relations?” (Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” quoted in Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2000: 103.)

“TRUE WAR FIRST APPEARS IN THE ART OF SIEGES In the art of sieges we first perceive a certain degree of guidance of the combat, something of the action of the intellectual faculties upon the material forces placed under their control, but generally only so far that it very soon embodied itself again in new material forms, such as approaches, trenches, counter-approaches, batteries, &c., and every step which this action of the higher faculties took was marked by some such result; it was the only thread that was required on which to string these material inventions in order. As the intellect can hardly manifest itself in this kind of War, except in such things, so therefore nearly all that was necessary was done in that way.” (Clausewitz, On War: 77-78.)

“Our ancestors have walls and towns laid level with the dust.” (Homer (translated by George Chapman), The Iliad. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2003: 64.)

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“What a dreary way to begin a story he said to himself upon reviewing his long introduction. Not only is there no “grounded-situation,” but the prose style is heavy and somewhat oldfashioned, like an English translation of Thomas Mann, and the so-called “vehicle” itself is at least questionable: self-conscious, vertiginously arch, fashionably solipsistic, unoriginal — in fact a convention of twentieth-century literature. […] Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own process? That doesn’t continually proclaim “Don’t forget I’m an artifice!” That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa!”? Though his critics sympathetic and otherwise described his own word as avant-garde, in his heart of hearts he disliked literature of an experimental, self-despising, or overtly metaphysical character, like Samuel Beckett’s, Marian Cutler’s, Jorge Borge’s. The logical fantasies of Lewis Carroll pleased him less than straightforward tales of adventure, subtly sentimental romances, even densely circumstantial realisms like Tolstoy’s. His favorite contemporary authors were John Updike, Georges Simenon, Nicole Riboud. He had no use for the theatre of absurdity, for “black humor,” for allegory in any form, for apocalyptic preachments meretriciously tricked out in dramatic garb.” (John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Anchor Books, 1988: 117-118.)

“As I study this age which is so close to us and so remote, I compare myself to a surgeon operating with local anesthetic: I work in areas that are numb, dead—yet the patient is alive and can still talk.” (Paul Morand, 1900, quoted in Walter Benjamin (Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999: 462.)

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Flies Caught in Fly Paper. http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:iWfMYr5qVE2fM:http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/uploads/image/sticky%20fly%20trap.jpg

“How glorious is the wisdom and goodness of the great Creator of the World! in thus retraining these seraphic OUTCASTS from the power of assuming human or organic bodies! which could they do, invigorating them with the supernatural Powers, which, as Seraphs and Angels, they now possess and might exert, they would be able even to fright mankind from the face of the Earth, destroy and confound God’s Creation; nay, even as they are, were not their power limited, they might destroy the Creation itself, reverse and over-turn nature, and put the World into a general conflagration: But were those immortal Spirits embodied, tho’ they were not permitted to confound nature, they would be able to harass poor, weak and defenseless man out of his wits, and render him perfectly useless, either to his Maker or himself.” (Daniel Defoe (edited by Irving N. Rothman and R. Michael Bowerman), The Political History of the Devil. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2003: 40.)

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“I must have dozed off – being in the Sticky Zone makes you tired – because I was dreaming about Amanda. She was walking towards me in her khaki outfit through a wide field of dry grass with many white bones in it. There were vultures flying over her head. But she saw me dreaming her, and she smiled and waved at me, and I woke up.” (Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood. New York: Random House, 2009: 200.)

“Angels The cage where he ate and slept Was furnished with gems and flesh So he would not bruise when he fell Or his vision ever grow dull. Garnets are brighter than angels, He sang as he made his poems. Garnets are brighter than angels, He sang as he crushed his loins. But how he loved the golden feathers Which fluttered through the cage; How he loved the golden shadows When they covered up his face.” (Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth. New York: Bantam Books, 1968: 40.)

“Dante says that midway through the journey of our life he suddenly became conscious of himself, and realized that he had lost his way. I had decidedly regained my consciousness of myself; I was alive, but only as an aching body that happened to be lost, all right.” (William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere. New York: Harper Collins, 2008:43.)

“Flaubert écrit pour se débarrasser des homes et des choses. Sa phrase cerne l’objet, l’attrape, l’immobilise et lui casse les reins, se referme sur lui, se change et lui casse les reins se referme sur lui, se change en pierre et leur pétrifie avec elle. Elle est aveugle et sourde, sans artères; pas un soufflé de vie, un silence profond la sépare de la phrase qui suit; elle tombe dans le vide, éternellement, et entraîne sa proie dans cette chute infinie.

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Flaubert writes in order to get rid of people and things. His sentence moves in on the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, envelops it, turns into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, bloodless—not a breath of life; a deep silence separates it from the sentence that follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along in that infinite fall.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la literature? quoted in Vaheed K. Ramazani, The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988” 111.)

“What’s the modern novel […] doing now? Once more it’s a narrative in search of its own coherence. Once more it’s the impossible ordering of disparate fragments whose blurred outlines don’t fit together. And once more there’s the desperate temptation to create a fabric as solid as bronze….Yes, but what’s happening in this fabric, the text, is that it has itself become a battlefield and stake. Instead of advancing like some blind justice obeying a divine law, deliberately ignoring all the problems that the traditional novel disguises and denies (the present moment, for instance), the text is determined on the contrary to expose publicly and stage accurately the multiple impossibilities with which it is contending and of which it is constructed.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet (Translated by Jo Levy), Ghosts in the Mirror. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991: 21.)

Photo of Paris Commune Barricade, May 18, 1871. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Barricade18March1871.jpg

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“This [the Commune] was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.” (Karl Marx, “First Draft of ‘The Civil War in France,’” quoted in Gerald Raunig (Translated by Aileen Derieg), Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. London and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007: 9190.)

“Theory of culture, theory of society, symbolic systems in general – art, religion, family, language – it is all developed while bringing the same scheme to light. And the movement whereby each opposition is set up to make sense is the movement through which the couple is destroyed. A universal battlefield. Each time, a war is let loose. Death is always at work.” (Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, quoted in Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous, A Politics of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1991: 7.)

“Contemporary theories of allegory thus grasp this structure as the intersection of two principles: that of autonomy, or complete isolation and non-dependence of their items (which are in that sense not fragments), and at the same time as the marking of those items as conceptually incomplete, as relational terms in a larger signifying structure. Both of these features are then combined in the self-designation of allegory as a process rather than any achieved structure or substance. Allegory thus looks back to hallucination as a perceptual isolation of its objects, and forward to the “part object” as the exemplification of a larger drive that can never be fully satisfied.” (Frederic Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London and New York: Verso: 2010: 126.)

“359 Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.” (David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010: 121.)

“TO THE BOURGEOIS:

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YOU are the majority—in number and intelligence; therefore you are the force—which is justice. Some are scholars, others are owners; a glorious day will come when the scholars shall be owners and the owners scholars. Then your power will be complete, and no man will protest against it. Until that supreme harmony is achieved, it is just that those who are but owners should aspire to become scholars; for knowledge is no less of an enjoyment than ownership. […] When you have given to society your knowledge, your industry, your labour and your money, you claim back your payment in enjoyments of the body, the reason and the imagination. If you recover the amount of enjoyments which is needed to establish the equilibrium of all parts of your being, then you are happy, satisfied and well-disposed, as society will be satisfied, happy and well-disposed when it has found its own general and absolute equilibrium. And so it is to you, the bourgeois, that this book is naturally dedicated; for any book which is not addressed to the majority—in number and intelligence—is a stupid book.” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846”, quoted in Jonathan Mayne (Translated & Edited), Baudelaire: Art In Paris, 1845-1862. London and New York: Phaidon, 1965: 44-45.)

“Presently the word pelado began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh’s word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief – yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them was close. But someone had called him compañero too, which was better, much better. It made him happy.” (Lowry, Under the Volcano: 374.)

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Paul Klee, The Angelus Novus, 1920 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. http://www.imj.org.il/images/corridor/bezalel/imj%20book%202005/klee,%20paul,%20an gelus%20novus,%201920.jpg

“Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit Ich kehrte gern zurück Denn blieb’ ich auch lebedige Zeit Ich hätte wenig Glück

(My wing is ready for a flight, I’m all for turning back;

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For, even staying timeless time, I’d have but little luck.) Gerhard Scholem, ‘Greetings from the Angelus’ There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm.” (Walter Benjamin cited in Michael Löwy (Translated by Chris Turner), Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History.’ London: Verson, 2006: 60-62.)

“Monstrous mouth, forsaken by its first words, O gaping hole, pit of oblivion.” (Edmund Jabès, “To Enlarge the Horizons of the Word,” quoted in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001: 680.)

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