[A]ll historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification; it is due to man’s fear that he may forget and to his striving for something which is even more than remembrance. […] [T]o write history for purposes of destruction is somehow a contradiction in terms.
— Hannah Arendt, “A Reply”
Là, il m’est très difficile d’en parler. En parler comme cela, c’est pratiquer l’affirmation massue. Vous le démontrer, cela impliquerait (ce que je voulais faire) une autre batterie de cours à la fin.
— Michel Foucault, « Il faut défendre la société », March 17, 1976
Things of which, words which one cannot speak without damage to them, these are better left in silence, usually: unheard they will remain intact. Or in their stead a silence can be inserted. Yet if, concern aroused, one speaks (against) them, by their recapitulation in discourse, far from being destroyed, they may emerge more potent than before. – Then the challenge is both ethical and practical: just think of the task it could impose.
When the recapitulating takes the written shape of narration – and where is the genre of historiography which does not narrate or at least imply a narrative? – the result conserves the items narrated, how ever much the writer did want to destroy them or their potency. Then, even from the separate elements, if in the telling the history has been dismantled or dismembered, a perverse future may succeed in assembling some monster unanticipated and terrible, possibly an entire construct built or life-form born of them. Caution in speaking and writing, therefore, might represent a virtue in the case of historians whose aims are forthrightly destructive.
Cautious handling of the pieces into which such a writer breaks the historical record, may require adjustment to the manner of his persuasion – for history as a literary genre, also when its goal is to smash its object, cannot divorce itself from persuasiveness. To some degree its presentation must remain agreeable. (Even the scraps of old histories one may chance upon as debris on the seashore, if attention is to be accorded them, have to look just a bit persuasive, right then and there.)
Perhaps more crucial than questions of style, or even the matter of persuasion’s role in appealing to readers’ imaginations that these also help to foster their better understanding of the history and its meaning, is the shocking realisation that the ideal of impartiality, which never was absent from earlier ages’ histories whether monumental, critical, or antiquarian, no less than the array of categories that serious thinking about politics has inherited or the very parameters of judgement outside of which no misdeed could ever adequately be punished or pardoned, also emerged gravely injured from totalitarianism’s conducting of experiments upon human nature to ascertain how far it could be altered (or obliterated). – Were an impartial historiography brought to bear upon this history, with ease it could itself become an accessory after the fact of unprecedented crimes.
Partiality (though not the role of partisan) to whose literary presentation the tones of sarcasm, indignation, and sadness are no strangers, seems the better choice for historians who quite rightfully seek to dissect and to destroy the horrible object of their researches. For here the ethical and practical goal is to denature the elements into which that object is analysed, in order to counteract in advance any force of adhesion they might one day again emit. In the best case, they will be rendered barren: never again could they be either used or enjoyed, by anyone of good will at least, those who do take whatever care they can not to let themselves be dupes.
Analysis like this, met with in a work of history, whether book, essay, or lecture, may imply that problems raised by totalitarian governments – the poisonous bequests not only of the German – wherever unmentioned as being an explicit concern of the author, nonetheless weighed on his mind while composing the text. As was the related question of how to get the attendant sense of urgency most persuasively into words.
Historiography which aims to destroy its object of study, tries to extricate some of its elements from the conglomerate in which they have crystallised. Within the scope of a work of history, one may also call this compaction a “context,” and both intellectual dexterity and interpretive force are required to wrench them out of it: the questions the historian directs at the documentary material are implements of extraction. Hence a modicum of violence, though only in a figurative sense of the word, may need to be exerted, all the more as these objects did not somehow cohere all by themselves. (How ever would a result so accidental have occurred?) On the contrary, any such only came into existence in the first place under a high degree of pressure applied to compress its various constituents together.
Need I underscore how strong the professional temptation has become amongst the ranks of historians to proceed in such a manner over against objects which do not warrant destruction, crushing them by means of what originally were ad hoc techniques, transforming the latter through this fallacious exercise into “methods”? (Tiny personal dramas evidently also add reservoirs of strength to the temptation, in the case of numerous academics; but it suffices simply to mention this factor.) As the quantity of these published results increased over the course of recent decades, the decline in quality spread as though by a contagion. – How few in number now are the historians from whose works one would actually learn anything new?
Tigersprung – a word this pretentious pseudo-historiography has appropriated: but by their works the practitioners do show themselves to be anything but tigers.
Today the initial motive for a destructive history-writing often is forgotten, and thus the results obtained falsified in advance. Moreover, in consequence of the mis-application of the practice, insensitivity to the phenomena, never exactly slight amongst the professors and literati, nestles ever deeper in their character, a dull indifference overspreads all they do and write, and this in historical “contexts” where judicious exactitude ought to have been most zealously guarded! – By now the threat of destruction, since last October so noxious in the universities, comes to confront a much wider set of things than the objects of historiographical research.
Speaking here for myself, and for my interest in music, sonic phenomena, and the dimensions of the audible, I neither claim it is specifically historiographical, nor aver anything analogous of the quality of the resultant findings, such as they are; though moments of analysis do occur throughout the texts in which my inquiries are written up, and passages of narration too. As for the earlier goal of destructive historiography, prior to its academic afterlife, the iterations, popularisations, and vulgarisations it has undergone in the humanities departments in the universities and like institutions elsewhere – namely, to denature the elements it separates out from the objects it examines: at times it has been akin to mine, for especially as regards the earlier twentieth century and the whole nineteenth century, through whose musical life I have strayed more than once, frequently the items chanced upon appear to me to be sonically significant, and for this reason worthy of being extracted from the unpalatable “context.” Their significance, most often discursive, sometimes lyrical or poetic, and on a few occasions painterly in nature, I strive to construe under the aspect of its sound or as if it were sonic: sonority emphasised, these items are removed from the contexts in which they were ensconced (on the page, the screen, the wall, etc.), in order to listen better to them on their own. Not infrequently they then, once become elements, begin to extrude audible qualities of which previously I had had merely an inkling, or even no awareness at all.*
* A fuller statement about my researches during the interval when this website lay dormant, is given in the text with which its “second round” was inaugurated.
Now, going further than what I’ve mulled over before, let me specify. Any such new acoustic facet, raised into perceptibility by testing performed on an element suitably isolated, becomes an item to be notated, in order to discern the appeal that resonates forth from it towards a recipient or rather the cares that move him, which once reached arouse concern for it on his part. In short: the matter I seek to fathom, more and more often, is to whom this significant element could sing, how it would do so, and what the response in turn might be – while at the same time, whenever needful, thinking of how to render it and its efficacy inert, if the simple act of letting out its potential sound will not suffice to neuter it.
Such a potency, should its treatment by thought not render it inert (denaturing it), will continue to prove an obstacle in a second respect. For then also hindered, is the vital aim of fostering a better distinction between audition and understanding. Come to such an impasse, an end is put to the effort both theoretical and practical to extricate a mind from the condition wherein it hears only what it understands already and vice versa – an incurious puerility or senescence whereby both these mental powers are trapped together within identical limits.
Those chains to whose imposition one succumbs, everyone really ought to cast off, thus heartening both these powers of the mind to take wing on its own, to show freely what each can do. How much better might everything blossom if only one could hear what one does not or does not yet understand and understand things whose sound one as yet fails to hear (or else to which one with good reason simply cares not to lend one’s ears). To speak of this venturesome ideal as though it were a fait accompli: when the acoustic aptitude is ripened or rejuvenated, regardless of anyone’s age or youth, then horizons are broadened perhaps as best they may be.
Here, addressing forthrightly a sonic item whose noise has disconcerted me since last October, I find myself wondering what assent it could possibly elicit from those whom it does appear to persuade. Namely, the twin slanders aimed at the state of Israel and by implication at the Jewish people of “racism” and “genocide,” terms launched by enemies upon whose own attitudes and intentions they do rebound: for, pretences aside, it is themselves whom they describe with these duplicitous words, which on this very account should neither be heard nor understood as being simply accusation. But what are they then, what do they signify? By seeking a plausible answer, perhaps the secret of their appeal elsewhere upon third parties will be disclosed, the pull of attraction which has become so strong throughout academic institutions and comparable locales in Western countries. – At this juncture, let me say it again: the objective of this inquiry is indeed to destroy its object, and add: though in the undertaking failure seems likely, nonetheless I shall try to fail as best I can. – Nor in all of this do I want to forget the musical question. Music’s future, so I’ve begun to surmise, will be shaped by the issue of the present conflict: perhaps, if war does not roll over everything, an occasion will soon come to delve into it as it deserves.
That the third parties who now fulminate against Israel very often know nearly nothing about the whole history, is a point I have no need to belabour: anyone who has followed developments in the universities in the United States, to mention only the most obvious venues of ignorance, will have noticed this (though openly to admit such an astonishing fact, of course, is another matter), and moreover, in a recent text I’ve delved into this broader “context.” Nor shall I digress to consider the steps now being weighed by certain governments and international political bodies. My point of departure remains the conjunction of those two words.
Alleging “racism” and “genocide” in an instance where neither term applies, does diminish the efficacy of the charge, for as with all epithets used promiscuously these too loose some part of their earlier force, and the forfeiture itself may be the result intended. Then, on one side, amongst observers both acute and impartial (one really hopes their numbers have not shrunk) such mendacious stratagems probably begin to induce wariness, or already began to do so months ago, while on another, their constant misuse may have surcharged the feeling noticeable from the outset last October of excitement in the groupings of Western sympathisers with “Palestine.” Those groups burgeoned when the absurd people who make a show of their “virtue” found its next locus; at which point the nihilist craving that generally seems to propel the “woke”* Westerners did positively beg to be gratified, and how better to feed it than by rendering the most serious concepts frivolous?
* This neologism I greatly abhor and do usually avoid. – Well, not for a second do I take the posturing it describes at face-value: to my mind such displays convey the vacuity and senselessness of those who resort to them, as if acknowledging despite themselves how behind the affectations of virtue there just is – nothing.
Devaluation of these two terrible words (in several languages) by their polemical abuse, fits well with the stated programme of the sworn enemies of Israel, whether these armies of political religion are sited in its proximity or further afield: namely, to destroy the country and its Jewish citizenry, and the Jewish people elsewhere too, as often enough they add in their zeal. Moreover, the linguistic procedure also suits some of the third parties in Western countries who, to judge by what they say, wittingly or otherwise, now advocate much the same annihilation. Yet with them the need to obfuscate is even larger: if only because, beyond their attitudes in the matter of Israel, they themselves regard all questions under the aspect of race, not exclusively, of course, but centrally.* Above their other obsessions it is “race” which haunts them: in effect they could not live without it, and in practice the fixation has led to an embrace of racism, all pro forma coquetry with the prosthetic or cosmetic “anti-” notwithstanding. – To summarise the commonality: deploying the two words as a barrage of missiles, massively resorted to since October, works to heighten confusion and distraction amongst the targets, while also helping to shield themselves against the incoming scrutiny.
* As a very minor thought-experiment, think what would remain of the unstable conceptual edifice, “intersectionality,” were the category of race ripped from its centre. – Some of the distant sources from which today’s nonsense has trickled down, for instance the elaborate accounts of hegemony some strategised about during theory’s decade, the 1980s, are coherence and solidity itself by comparison.
Currently, the claims of “racism” are very often meant to deflect attention from the profiles of those who utter them – this point there is no need to belabour further. As for the “genocide,” the word’s repetition describes an aim which those who falsely bewail it themselves want to accomplish or to see accomplished – for the brute fact of this duplicity, suffice it to say, the evidence also accumulates. Now, so it seems to me, while neither epithet by itself would achieve much in the public square or on the university campus, main fora where persuasive speech could be found in its higher expressions, spoken together they allude to an idea which, just because it is kept implicit, begins to exert a force of attraction, an appeal beyond the ranks of the usual suspects and the useful idiots in many Western countries – excepting Israel itself by and large, obviously.
Around this carefully half-hidden idea shimmers an inkling of the forbidden, some crepuscular quality that may lend further notes of charm to it. But apart from that nimbus, the idea itself is as though calculated to send a frisson up the spines (or whatever this bunch has replaced them with) of all those Westerners who now acquiesce before the prospect of the civilisation’s incipient ending. Thus are they given something to look forward to, after all! An adumbration of collective murder carried out upon one people that through this very act another might be born: from this imagined atrocity, even when merely hinted at, an appeal issues forth and manages to thrill and obtain the approval of a large number of its many addressees. Moreover, even in the cases of those from whom it does not elicit the sense of agreement, somehow it does correspond to their anticipation of an event now likely to happen sooner or later. – Or of a succession of such events: although in this dark premonition the Jewish people is first in line to be done away with, it would not be the last.
For my part, I do hope that this furtive messaging has also been noted by others with shock and concern, whose ears, like mine, have heard that a signal is being sent, though none has yet really understood what it might mean at its worst: may that pass never be come to!
Spectral as may be the idea now resonant, that the birth of one people requires the murder of another, its provenance is not obscure. It derives from the preface to the last work of Frantz Fanon contributed by Jean-Paul Sartre.* Even though he outlines a clash between a single coloniser and a single subjugated native in a French territory, and resolves it by not one but in effect two murders, the reference is to entire groups of people. So, when the oppressed proceeds to kill his oppressor and also his old self, thus enfranchising another in its stead, indeed giving birth to a new free man, the vivid physicality of the act also transfers over. Collectivities are bodies too, and this basis of their existence should not be forgotten when lessons get extrapolated from a mortal combat between two individuals to the conflict between an entire extant people, on one side, and an emergent one, on another. The latter’s insurgency and victory, then, is a commencement much like being born (or perhaps being born afresh), an event which takes its start once two collective corpses are left behind it and no sooner. Only thus will a break with the subjugations of the past be effected and proper room be made for a young nation.
* Remarkably, in later editions it was removed at the insistence of Fanon’s widow, by reason of Sartre’s support for Israel in the Six-Day War. (This she states in the interview in the Appendix of Christian Filostrat, Negritude Agonistes.)
How great the distance is between his studied literary words and the sordid poses of the present, I cannot delve into.* Most likely this sketch of 1961 has become a vague reminiscence in people’s minds: unsurprising that a loss of precision would have overtaken it, if the secret of its appeal is the frisson delivered again and again (like in some horror film?) by the basic idea. What the latter comprises, such that it holds up under repetition, accordingly, I now need to specify further.
* Nor into whatever variance there might be between the preface and the book, between espousal of violence in the one and assessment of its efficacy in a more measured way in the other, let alone the divergence from the ideas of violence in the œuvres of Georges Sorel or Karl Marx. For my purposes, it’s enough to cite the differences.
Although this Sartrean scenario had as its protagonists nations or peoples newly born, considerable attention was given to the eminence amidst the revolutionary conditions in the colonies of virtues like camaraderie, bravery, loyalty – traits of character relating to service of a military kind in the popular insurrections, typical of young men. Such manifestations aroused great enthusiasm in the preface, and so, re-reading these passages in 2024, one could begin to think the writer’s main concern to have centred not on those new collectivities per se, nor on the growth under colonial conditions of the working class, but rather on the first formation of something like a race, that is, a group in which and for which a free decision has been made to devote itself to the breeding of its own human nature.* – A striking intuition! As if the main urge of this iteration of existentialism is to say that an upsurge of freedom in the world goes hand in hand with an unveiling of virility.
* That with this, Nietzschean or even Heideggerian motifs, albeit in idiosyncratic permutations, supplant the Hegelian and Marxian ones more often found in the author’s writings, arouses some curiosity, which one day an opportunity may come to sate; but the matter will have to rest until then.
If that is so, would it not lend a rather unexpected complexion to the current vogue for the idea deriving from this same preface, which begins to resound when those two polemical words are conjoined, as they so often have been since October?
The young virile quality inherent in a people-qua-race which will be born by killing off another of quite another character, one thought to be superannuated, or even one whose particular longevity is deemed an injustice – and annihilating whatever it itself had been before – perhaps this dual execution describes more precisely the idea which covertly exerts a strong appeal upon the Westerners who now join in against Israel in such numbers and with such vehemence.
A couple of distinctions should be emphasised. The ideal sketched out by the 1961 preface of a new race, and as an implicit corollary, also the “racisme” guiding its endeavours, differ from the ideas and the actions of these Westerners, which are patently racist in the usual sense of the term. And yet the race-obsessions of the latter have, as now is terribly obvious, readied them and their ears for the appeal and its message, the not-so-covert statement of intent signalled by bombarding Israel with the two exclamations “Racism!” and “Genocide!” Yes, for their part, those polemical words* in conjunction also seem to announce that the birth of a new race of people requires a double murder; then the event’s thunder thrills these prospective allies in the West, winning their adherence to the cause.
* Here I reach for the Sartrean phrase and venture to call these slogans of today fascist blabbering (bavardages fascistes). – How the older National Socialism lives on in the warfare against Israel, is recounted at some length in a previous essay.
Whatever may be the inner melodramas which lead them to these espousals, is not my concern. The incoherence of the resulting “intersections” is curious enough on its own, regarded as a brute fact. Then a small thought-experiment proposes itself. Many who scream the loudest lies on behalf of “Palestine” would quickly end their lives with a whimper, had “they” the misfortune to reside there. Pronouns and other stigmata on which useful idiots of this grade pride “themselves,” would sign “their” own death-warrants, whenever the propaganda-value conferred by “them” evaporated, expiration-dates which the coldest of calculations would determine. So, idiotic as this lot is, surely it gives some thought to the fate which would consume it, sooner rather than later? Ah, but just this may have propelled the undertaking to begin with (with the rest being done by mimetic instinct). Such prospects never worry this bunch, probably; far rather they and their advance from a future into the present are the very thing sought. For it does confer the highest – disinterested – æsthetic pleasure that people in this state still could feel, after the treatment they bestow on themselves. – Call it toxic performativity.
We need not look very far back into European history to see what happens when people acquiesce to the very behaviours that sow their own downfall.
– Danny Driver, petition (May 15, 2024)
Shades of the 1930s: mark the music. That now the decade’s best insights commend themselves anew, once again words of caution, as if ninety years were nothing, delivers an unanswerable indictment. Will the shame of it outlive us?
At bottom, the “woke” testify despite themselves to their own exhaustion, while imagining that entire polities and even Western civilisation altogether partake of the same weakness. (Such humility!) Well, to speak for myself, after ploughing through these fatal heaps of ill-will and nonsense, as I’ve tried to do, it seems likely to me that their sense of depletion, dressed up by them into “virtues” they preen with, might actually be akin to viruses and contagious. If that is so, it would yield a further reason to maximise one’s distance from them and their profuse vacuity.
Ne gâchez pas votre pourriture
– street slogan, Université Nanterre, ca. 1970
So, I leave them to conserve their own rot as best they can, and turn to nullify what actually does concern me, though my attempts will likely fail.
The notion that the birth of a race, or of a people conceived mainly in such terms, necessitates a double murder, offers me a starting-point for an analysis of older materials where that notion of race or/and some variation of it is involved, albeit inconspicuously. From these contexts quotations will be lifted, to concretise the political experiences and historical events correlate to the notion. Tones otherwise indistinct may become audible: an aim of some importance, because the “race” which is the topic, insofar as it requires work upon human nature, the breeding which seeks to alter and improve a person’s character, prowess, and virtues, exerts an attraction via the ears, more than the eyes. Its main avenue goes through the inner capacities of listening and understanding; seeing and knowing are perhaps not even side-streets. Thus the notion’s theatre of operations seems to me, at least at the outset; what I want to comprehend, at times to destroy, if I can, is this appeal.
Already before 1600, competition in Europe of the largest and strongest states for power, had begun to supplant varieties of struggle in which a higher ideal indeed had the first and the last word. While this incipient power-politics adorned itself with phrases which led the unwary to mistake what it actually was about, sharper observers pierced easily through the verbiage; though putting what they noticed into words, whether in reproof or in description, needed a dextrous quill. How to convey both the sense and the senselessness of the rivalries amongst states where it seemed as though each strove to provoke all the others in order ultimately to ascertain which one would prove itself to be most “Machiavellian” and “amoral” – writing it up with a subtlety that would save one’s own neck – not surprisingly, an exemplary answer was given by Machiavelli himself in the Principe. Mixed through the guidebook as which it might be understood on first reading, there is a satirical undertone, but these notes the Florentine did not add; rather, he discerned how the thing in fact satirises itself, and gave the humour of this situation a place on the page; on the assumption that only his better readers would hear the joke.
Discreet laughter at the follies of smaller states hungering after power, however, gradually gave way to bewilderment in the course of the sixteenth century, as their larger counterparts began to pursue it fervently: of this set more than one turned to reform the agreements, institutions, organisations within the polity, and even moved to transform the constitution of its body politic itself: at that point, in those states keener observers started to wonder earnestly, to worry what would be the results of this qualitatively new power-politics.
Towards the end of the century, war between Spain and England flamed up, and the hostilities offer an early illustration of the pursuit of power extending itself on a larger scale and with a vaster array of means than previously. Now, although this chapter of Spanish history amongst others is of great interest to me, not only as an intellectual pastime, and while maintaining a due impartiality I do not pass over the history of the country’s body politic without taking note of what was done to it at crucial points,* even so, my current purpose is best served by restricting myself to English conditions of the Elizabethan era and afterwards. Thus, in a text that, albeit implicitly, reckons with the consequences of the state’s pursuit of power, one finds a passage in which, though the term itself did not occur, the resonance of a notion of race may be detected between the lines.
* Concerning the “limpieza de sangre,” see Albert Sicroff, Les Controverses des statuts de « pureté de sang » en Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos en España y América, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism. – Steps to keep the body politic’s bloodlines “pure,” ran parallel to the care given to breeding and pedigree in other fields: perhaps this is a topic for further reflection? – Yes, the entry “Raza” in the Tesoro de la lengva castellana, o española, compiled by Sebastian de Cobarruvias Orozco in the seventeenth century, seems thought-worthy; notable too, quite wide-ranging, are the collections and the commentary in the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda.
When the statement is extracted from its context, perhaps this sound will be amplified. Let me quote the following, integrally (with one minor excision), from “Of Innouations,” first published in 1625 by Francis Bacon.
As the Births of Liuing Creatures, at first, are ill shapen: So are all Innouations, which are the Births of Time. Yet notwithstanding, as Those that first bring Honour into their Family, are commonly more worthy, then most that succeed: So the first President (if it be good) is seldome attained by Imitation. For Ill, to Mans Nature, as it stands peruerted, hath a Naturall Motion, strongest in Continuance: But Good, as a Forced Motion, strongest at first. Surely euery Medicine is an Innouation; And he that will not apply New Remedies, must expect New Euils: For Time is the greatest Innouatour. And if Time, of course, alter Things to the worse, and Wisdome, and Counsell shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the End? It is true, that what is setled by Custome, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit. And those Things, which haue long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselues: Whereas New Things peece not so well; But though they helpe by their vtility, yet they trouble, by their Inconformity. Besides, they are like Strangers; more Admired, and lesse Fauored. All this is true, if Time stood still; which contrariwise moueth so round, that a Froward Retention of Custome, is as turbulent a Thing, as an Innouation: And they that Reuerence too much Old Times, are but a Scorne to the New. It were good therefore, that Men in their Innouations, would follow the Example of Time it selfe; which indeed Innouateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees, scarce to be perceiued […]. It is good also, not to try Experiments in States; Except the Necessity be Vrgent, or the vtility Euident: And well to beware, that it be the Reformation, that draweth on the Change; And not the desire of Change, that pretendeth the Reformation.*
* The Essayes or Covnsels, xxiiii
Caution advises against too quick a reading of this passage. Quite apart from the author’s style and syntax – it is an English remote from anything now common – there is the specific difficulty posed by words whose meanings have changed over the centuries, without today’s reader being able to define easily how far they’ve shifted: uncertainty about the sense of some of the clauses is the result, not least because it is the verbs which seem elusive, as in the final quoted sentence.
The sense a reader should construe tentatively – letting out its sound likewise.
England’s rivalry with other states similarly given to the pursuit of power, was the essay’s implicit point of departure. Innovations became a pressing matter in this context; although for any such change a great need might arise domestically, yet the challenges of foreign policy set the limits of error in its implementation.
Implicit, too, is the main object of political innovations: the populace itself. From it, and not as earlier mainly from the ranks of the well-born, came some large number of the military forces without which the state’s pursuit of power could not have been undertaken. Hence the state did have a vital interest in fostering the inclinations amongst the common people commensurate with this requirement: a more martial disposition generally. Due account taken of the realities of human nature, that is, individuals’ propensity to imitate and their difficulty in carrying through anything new once started, it would have to work both continuously and subtly upon them. Then, for the better description of its operations, the practice and the theory of medicine will offer a fund of analogies. To foster the military fitness of the body politic against the dissolutions wrought by time, the state must resort dextrously to remedies, if it is to match its rivals in power-politics at all.
At this juncture, suddenly the essay takes a turn for which it did not prepare the reader. Previously everything was outlined as if all conditions were stationary; but now time is said to move in a circuit. In some sense of the verb it revolves.
This point I should like to press, that one notice the author’s bewilderment. For why would time – specifically historical time – circle around as he intimates it does? As a result of the states’ rivalries in their more and more intent pursuit of power. And to what would this kind of time recur? To the wreckage of the polities that in ages past had launched out in the same direction. Such a fate would furnish a cautionary tale, some manner of call to desist: but their power-hunger ensured that the states could neither receive nor listen to the message.
Yet the essay did espy a way out of this circular ruin, a possibility of commencing time again, from a new starting-point, as a linear motion.
One who by forceful action initiates something worthy and new and sustains it as he can, against the vortex of a circular time, evinces a quality of strength which brings honour to him and his kind: the kernel of a beginning is formed, and from this a linear time might take its start.
If, beyond the impasse to which history, and not only as a genre of literature, was brought as states turned to power-politics, a path opened up, why should I not call those who might together have ventured out on it a “race” – a select group whose character would be heroic, free, new? And, not least important for my purposes, owing nothing of its stature to murder.
Would such a young “race” prove to be more than short-lived – setting out on anything other than a quick race to an end, in fact? How ever might it perpetuate itself? Perhaps later a way could be found. Or is evanescence its very raison d’être?
In any case, its possibility resonates only briefly once in the essay. Yet the appeal caught my ear; perhaps from what I’ve pointed out, others may hear it too.
Most likely the essayist was wise to shield it as he had. Amidst the surroundings its very freshness could be a provocation. The pursuit of power for its own sake, was met in this or that guise throughout the state, often as a calculative cast of mind in no respect youthful. – But at least its claims for itself would not take him in.
These times are the ancient times when the world is ancient, & not those which we count antient Ordine retrogrado, by a computacion backward from our selues.*
* Of the proficience and aduancement of Learning, bk. i
Though readers might incline to dismiss this perspectival reversal as a mere piece of wit, it does harbour a more serious criticism.
Self-conceited counting in reverse, and history’s better recounting, mixed badly. – That instruction in history as a sourcebook of practical lessons was in abeyance, had a cause in the suborning of the educational institutions, especially the higher ones, to the state and its requirements. Prudence of that kind was taught less and less often; frequently obsequiousness appeared to supplant it. In these precincts, could a resolute act move to defy the times in the manner the essayist had lauded?
Probably not. Power sought for its own sake, by the states themselves and by an increasing number of their members, tended to breed quite other types of people.
The tendency appeared with especial clarity in the sphere of education.
In how slight esteem an independence of mind was held amongst the educated and their patrons early in the century, a contemporary of Bacon, the dissector of the Anatomy of melancholy, Robert Burton, did decry in one remark.
Rich men keepe these Lecturers and fawning Parasites like so many Dogges at their tables, and filling their hungry guts with the offauls of their meate, they abuse them at their pleasure, and make them say what they please.
Nor was the care taken with learning in the university of much higher a quality.
[W]ee that are Vniversity men, like so many hide-bound Calues in a pasture, tarry out our time, & wither away as a flower vngathered in a garden, and never vsed: or as so many candles illuminate our selues alone, obscuring one anothers light, and are not discerned here at all, the least of which translated to some darke roome, or to some country benefice, where it might shine apart, would giue a faire light, and be seene over all.*
* pt. 1, sec. 2, memb. 3, subsec. 15
Indifference beset these scholars, but also, less distinctly yet of more importance, the humanist culture with its roots in the Roman practice of humane cultivation, itself an outgrowth of the agricultural inheritance imbued with a deeper sense of use and enjoyment conjoined (the Latin verb “frui” bespeaks it): this dimension of all their endeavours had gone into decay, in consequence of the reforming of the educational institutions under the state’s purview.
Awareness of the futility of scholarly undertakings had begun to envelop them.
The story of Rome is replete with decline and decadence, also in its literary life: but the drawing of lessons particularly from these chapters was neglected at just the moment when they might have done some good. – This was a quandary whose resonance one can hear now and again while perusing his long digressive book.
Sentiment that his tribe’s undertakings were done to no purpose and amounted at best to an exercise in higher senselessness, in a world where, the pretences apart, all sought power first and foremost: at one point amidst his digressions, this very awareness revealed itself as a source of insight in its own right. Precisely here a notion of “race” is audible – its sound gives some comfort – a conception for the few who might prove themselves superior to its origin under the sway of Saturn, whose spirit could raise them above melancholy’s fatal character, and who might thereby be taken beyond the horizons wherein otherwise they would be caught.
For this turning in the author’s line of thought a remark gleaned from Petrarch provided the occasion. A soul’s state of health profits greatly by illness of the body (multi ad salutem animæ profuit corporis ægritudo),* the poet had observed; this was put in the margin, while the sentence was created anew, put quite liberally and omitting the “body” from the transaction. – The passage is the following.
* De remediis utriusque fortunæ, bk. ii, dialogue iii
Sicknesse, diseases trouble many, but without a cause, It may be ’tis for the good of their Soules. Pars fati fuit, the flesh rebels against the spirit, that which hurts the one, must needs help the other. Sicknesse is the mother of modesty, and putteth vs in mind of our mortality, and when we are in the full careere of worldly pompe and iollity, shee pulleth vs by the eare, and maketh vs knowe our selues.*
* pt. 2, sec. 3, memb. 2 (without the note)
The discursive flow of his words, if one slows its speed down in listening to it, then discloses an idea of conditions affecting the human being seemingly without cause. But how could this be? Precisely when the pursuit of power becomes the foremost aim at all levels of the world, the causes of some effects no longer are identifiable. Which effects? Those that express dissatisfaction with, dissent from the new course of everything as a whole. So the author addressed not only sickness and disease, whatever be their nature, but the mind’s sentiment of uneasiness. Then he said of all these afflictions: though without cause, a purpose they may yet well have, if only anyone they haunt resolves himself to acknowledge it. Namely: through their travails his self, or, in other words, the unique “who” that he could be, may affirm itself and its finitude. This affirmation, however, results when they are treated so as to foster their tendency to turn against themselves, thus holding themselves in check, all in all; otherwise too great a quantum of one’s finite store of energy would have to go towards dealing with them and their clamorous striving for power, akin to the world’s own. Even if they continue to tug at it, one’s inner ear should concern itself with other sounds than their noises; when care is taken that with the least effort these nuisances neutralise themselves, singly and together, it will be for the best, as regards the “who” which one is and its proper well-being.
Much as with Bacon, so too here with Burton, this mode of action directed both inwards and outwards might constitute the kernel of a “race,” one few in number and most likely of a reflective bent, but nonetheless the kind of group whose overarching aim will be the breeding of its own human nature, distinguishing itself as fully as it could from the sheer pursuit of power wherever the latter were found. And here too the longevity of this new “race” would have been in doubt. – Moreover, as in the other case, its possibility is borne on an appeal which issues suddenly from out of a text and fades away whence it came nearly as rapidly.
With respect to both these authors, quite uncommon notions of “race” were drawn out of their texts, admittedly with some confabulation along the way, for two main reasons. Firstly, I wished to counterpose something to racism and the attitudes it enshrines, especially in the ranks of those who one might have hoped would know better, if only by virtue of the early chapters in the history of the movements to which nominally they belong: namely, the “left” of today, whether it acts on its own behalf or loans itself out to other powers. And secondly, I wanted to practice a bit with a type of analysis whose goal is not destructive, because my main aim is to probe into the notion’s multifarious appeal, destroying it to the extent that I can.
In the case of the author to whom I now turn, selecting a very few passages in his writings in order to draw attention to the part which race, as reality and as notion, played in the arrangements of political life he described so incisively and presciently, the goal is indeed to destroy that appeal.
Thomas Hobbes observed how commercial society, in its emergence within and between the large states of his time, made manifest much as they did a pursuit of power for its own sake. Volatile, turbulent, and dangerous the relations amongst them all could be: this was the abiding concern throughout his main works.
Limits which earlier had restrained the hunger for power, whether in the domain of the economy, by the moderation in use and enjoyment which the language of cultivation itself did encourage (an inheritance from Rome), or in the practice and even the theory of religion, by the reluctance to importune one’s deity out of low motives (a vital Hebraic bequest), were surpassed. Nowhere, then, did one not encounter the pursuit of sheer power; even the meanings of the relevant words began to ring with it. – Listen to these definitions given boldly by Hobbes.
Cultus signifieth properly, and constantly, that labour which a man bestowes on any thing, with a purpose to make benefit by it.
Later in the chapter. – The End of Worship amongst men, is Power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerfull, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his Power greater. But God has no Ends: the worship we do him, proceeds from our duty, and is directed according to our capacity, by those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of dammage, or in thankfulnesse for good already received from them.*
* Leviathan, pt. ii, ch. xxxi
With limits such as those demolished, power could be more openly pursued.
Power, sought for its own sake by the states or within commercial society, gave a new prominence to necessity as a force in human life, and especially so when all of these power-pursuits became a challenge to the others, singly and together, as was patent in English affairs during his time.
Sempiternum autem Bellum quam parum idonea res sit ad conservationem vel humani generis, vel unius cujuscumque hominis, facile judicatur. At suâ naturâ sempiternum est, quod præ certantium æqualitate victoriâ nullâ potest finiri; in eo enim ipsis victoribus periculum semper adeò imminet, ut pro miraculo haberi debeat si quis, quamquam fortissimus, annis & senectute conficiendus sit.
— Elementa philosophica de cive, pt. i, ch. i, xiii
And, along with necessity, war. Yes, the latter was known as a force which, once it flamed up, would tend of itself to continue (wisely then one prepared for it in order to avoid its outbreak): but thenceforth, at home, in the colonies, and abroad, war’s clamour became interminable.
Whether as a threatening undertone or an outright roar, its sound pervaded all relations once power was acknowledged with any degree of openness as the aim of every endeavour. For, while laws, civil and even natural, were often said to be impediments to war’s outbreak, and limitations upon its fury if it did erupt, the claim was meant to obscure, perhaps to the detriment of the unwary, the reality that law neither banished nor neutralised nor even regulated war, but rather (which is quite a different proposition) helped to circulate its energies throughout both the state and commercial society, subdued into a more or less accepted degree of animosity everywhere, as an indispensable motive force. Law’s contributions to this end, of course, were at times rendered imperfectly, and then the war could escape from the channels through which it flowed, exploding into the hostilities of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). With the resort to arms the laws themselves would fall silent (inter arma silere leges), while the state of mere nature (status naturæ meræ) does recur, not only in the colonies or abroad, even though with the wars of nations a measure of self-restraint had commonly been observed (quamquam in bello nationis contra nationem modus quidam custodiri solebat), but by then the prudence of moderation was largely forgotten and foregone.*
* Elementa philosophica, pt. ii, ch. v, ii
If the laws can amount to duplicity, what then is the character of the obligation to observe them? – Entirely conditional, as, again boldly, was granted by Hobbes.
The Lawes of Nature oblige in foro interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place: but in foro externo; that is, to the putting them in act, not alwayes. For he that should be modest, and tractable, and performe all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man els should do so, should but make himselfe a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruine, contrary to the ground of all Lawes of Nature, which tend to Natures preservation. And again, he that having sufficient Security, that others shall observe the same Lawes towards him, observes them not himself, seeketh not Peace, but War; & consequently the destruction of his Nature by Violence.
And whatsoever Lawes bind in foro interno, may be broken, not onely by a fact contrary to the Law, but also by a fact according to it, in case a man think it contrary. For though his Action in this case, be according to the Law; yet his Purpose was against the Law; which where the Obligation is in foro interno, is a breach.*
* Leviathan, pt. i, ch. xv
Yes, here the laws of nature are in question; yet much the same inference can be drawn about the civil laws, if what he wrote elsewhere of them and the character of the citizens is recalled. Anyone’s grasp of those others’ aims, or whether there be “sufficient Security, that others shall observe the same Lawes towards him,” would then weigh heavily in a decision to heed or not to heed the conditional obligation.
Pursuit of power for its own sake in commercial society – and not only by states – would very likely conduce to bring forth people whose intentions, due to the roughness of their minds (præ ingenii asperitate) and their obstinacy of sentiment (præ affectuum contumacia), should not be assessed as other than dubious in the best case. Even if public virtues might be conjured from their private vices, still, to anyone so troublesome and annoying (incommodus molestusque) goodwill could not readily be attributed.* Just as little as with someone who was but a child with a child’s mind in a man’s body (puer robustus, vel vir animo puerili)** – and his sort too were often engendered. Hence, by this route the obligation would be left without strong support by the observable facts.
* Elementa philosophica, pt. i, ch. iii, ix
** Præfatio ad lectores
Yet further difficulties stand in the way of any assessments of what others intend, interpretations that would move one to accept the obligation to obey the civil laws.
There is, first of all, the notation both practical and hermeneutic with which his main work is introduced.
[T]hough by mens actions wee do discover their designe sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to decypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himself a good or evil man.
But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him onely with his acquaintance, which are but few.*
* Leviathan, pt. i, The Introduction
To read the intentions of others satisfactorily, therefore, will usually be a daunting task; under the circumstances of everyday life this would verge on the impossible. In the civil state, whether there ever is an assurance of reciprocity, accordingly, cannot be properly ascertained at all. Then a difficult quandary arises, and only the unwary proceed as though they really believe it warranted to follow the laws. Whereas for the others, obligation does always entail a leap.
Secondly, a remark with consequences just as if not more weighty.
[I]t is impossible to make Covenant with those living Creatures, of whose wils we have no sufficient signe, for want of common language.*
* De Corpore Politico, pt. i, ch. ii, 11
Even apart from the fact of a common language (as an assumption itself more of a pitfall than it might at first appear), how could that “sufficient signe” be given on the one side and received on the other? As before, the dilemma arises whenever the insufficiency of reciprocal guarantees is noticed; but this time in a manner still harder to resolve satisfactorily.
And thirdly, an odd yet not very surprising admission pertaining to the law itself (the term already bares the sound of a misnomer).
[T]he punishment foreknown, if not great enough to deterre men from the action, is an invitement to it: because when men compare the benefit of their Injustice, with the harm of their punishment, by necessity of Nature they choose that which appeareth best for themselves: and therefore when they are punished more than the Law had formerly determined, or more than others were punished for the same Crime; it is the Law that tempted, and deceiveth them.*
* Leviathan, pt. ii, ch. xxvii
Listen to these lines slowly. The set of offenders whom the law positively did not deter, and then punished beyond what it had prescribed, comprised those who were invited by deception into ranks upon which a selective process began to work. How then not to intuit that a deliberate aim guided this proceeding? And surmise from observation that during all this what the law wanted – if one could assign to it any aim apart from the obvious goal of justifying its own continued existence – was to propose to these recalcitrants a course of action to take upon their release from prison. Thus were they prompted to band together as a breed of criminals, forming possibly the beginning of some new race of men, an energetic and “amoral” cohort, perhaps even a body intent on power for its own sake.*
* On this and many other points, the philosopher of Malmesbury is as least as modern as our contemporary theoreticians. – What hasn’t been pilfered from him?
Needless to remark (but I’ll say it anyway) how the appeal issuing from an outlaw “race,” as a reality and even more as a desire, lives on today. What have Western “leftists” done since last October, but capitalise on the strength of that appeal, its primitive accumulations of energy? (Barbarous brigandage for the iPhone age.)
Why should this “law” be called that at all and not given a name more apt? – one begins to wonder.
A statement of law’s own purpose was provided. – Law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to limit the naturall liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and joyn together against a common Enemy.*
* Leviathan, pt. ii, ch. xxvi, 4
This suggests how the implausibilities of law could be, not entirely abolished in theory, but alleviated substantially in practice. Were a “common Enemy” found, then a state on one side, commercial society on the other, each devoted to the pursuit of power for its own sake, could strike a balance amongst themselves, whereas before their relations had obviously been inimical and imperilled. Once this arrangement solidified enough, then the difficulty of convincing anyone why an obligation to follow the laws was not at most weakly conditional, and their own duplicity as the actual instigators of crime, might be muted or more easily ignored.
Note that this raison d’être, as stated, had a reality more hypothetical than actual. Or if by it the community was described implicitly as a theatre of war, in that figure of speech neither term was neglected.
So: identifying a “common Enemy” or more than one, would also have entailed imparting a common character to the citizens, if not to all then to a plurality of them. To impress upon each individual, there was the stamp of a nation or even, given the enmity or enmities around its birth, of a race, in some sense of the word. And, in a civil state, so long as it was not supplanted by hostilities openly waged, this typical commonality might have abetted a rapprochement to the pursuit of power for its own sake on the part of those whose own aims continued to differ: were they to reconcile themselves to the fact of it, they would have had ready at hand something like an excuse, should one be necessary.
How would that tacit rapprochement be encouraged, more concretely? Within a civil state, over against a “common Enemy,” the commonality of nation or race could provide a point of reference and thus be a help in establishing standards of value (or other quanta), which in turn would assist in the establishment of viable and ostensibly peaceable relations, political and commercial transactions included, between those whose aim was power and those with other goals.
Though such a standard is not mentioned explicitly, still the following remarks seem as though they alluded to it.
The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another.
And the idea was prolonged a few lines later.
[A]s in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price. For let a man (as most men do,) rate themselves at the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.
The manifestation of the Value we set on one another, is that which is commonly called Honouring, and Dishonouring. To Value a man at a high rate, is to Honour him; at a low rate, is to Dishonour him. But high, and low, in this case, is to be understood by comparison to the rate that each man setteth on himselfe.
If a standard were established, any “seller” of his own “power” (which might also be his labour-power) would be shielded against the depredations of the “buyers” to some extent. The safeguard extended beyond the economic realm or the emergent labour-market: in many kinds of relations within the civil state, mutual agreement to such a convention would have lessened the risk of devolving into open warfare. War, however, in its disguised form continued to haunt all these arrangements, and the idea of a “common Enemy” could not as if by magic abolish the underlying hostilities within the state, let alone within commercial society. Indeed, in both, the semblances of peaceful rapports did remain at risk of imperilment by one human propensity in particular; when it appeared, the standards themselves tended to fall silent, and thus those involved were brought one step nearer the calamitous point where the mask would be removed.
Where intentions could not sufficiently be ascertained, the calibrated stability of these relations would suffer, and acts of imitation did prove especially hard to read; they may have been meant to signify approval, or the opposite of it, or most likely some mixture of both: the conventional standards, otherwise useful, would have availed little in the interpretation. Thus the difficulty of assessment could itself have brought back to mind the hostility never fully expunged from the civil state, and in so doing refreshed it, cleared a path for it to erupt, even from out of a relation otherwise amicable, for none had ever been completely of such a kind.
A few paragraphs later, words to the wise about the danger were put into one lapidary remark. – To imitate, is to Honour; for it is vehemently to approve. To imitate ones Enemy, is to Dishonour.* – With an ambiguous act of imitation amidst the relations in the civil state, standards of interpretation would cease to speak, bringing on the great danger: then the commonality which had underwritten them, that is, the shared character stamped on all or many of these citizens, no longer could be relied on.
* Leviathan, pt. i, ch. x
Provoked by a small gesture the latent animosities can burst forth, and in extremis even the bellum omnium contra omnes: this furnishes a cautionary tale. Consider again the slogans that bombard Israel and, in other Western countries,* their own Jewish citizens; as accusations “Racism!” and “Genocide!” are slanderous, yes, but behind these mendacious claims as they have been voiced in third countries since October, indications of the desires of those who hurl them often seem to be veiled, as though to publicise less blatantly the plans that the most proximate foes of Israel avow quite openly.** From this zone of the near future they wish for, spring the figments of imagination with which these ranks contend in their present, hellish fictions now infiltrating other people’s presents as well, alas!*** If that in fact is what they do, though they may not know it, then the belligerent double-talk of these Western allies of “Palestine” does indeed serve to “imitate” and “dishonour,” in the Hobbesian terms, their enemies as they imagine them to be, at home and abroad. And thus is the war the civil state otherwise contains incited into the open.
* To repeat a point I’ve made before: the West is a civilisation owed to the best of antiquity, Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome together, and so it should also distinguish countries not called “Western” in the geopolitical sense. ** One does well neither to overstate nor understate the difference. *** Around the image of an enemy (Feindbild) this bunch deals in, there wafts an aroma from which a note of the old mythic motifs is not absent. An odious bouquet!
Volubly defaming the state of Israel (and its allies actual or supposed), and less loudly calling for its (and their) extinction, provides broad sectors of the Western “left” with an alibi for their peculiar situation in general. By embracing this very particular cause as they do, attention might be diverted away from the disparity between their rote professions of contempt and hatred for today’s society,* on the one side, and on the other the evident fact that they delight in living in its midst and could flourish in no other way than by means of the amenities, experiences, and instruments it has given them.** Of course they do not acknowledge this fact explicitly, most likely not even to themselves; an inner detachment would shield them from any such admission. Indirectly, however, their moral preening and especially their obsession with race discloses it: precisely here they align with the modus operandi of relations that are specifically social, pervaded as the latter are by so much pretence, opportunism, and conformity. To all of it they do not object, but usually go right along, as was shown when they largely agreed to the measures imposed during the Corona hysteria: they proved to be anything but rebels.*** The vehemence and at times violence of their stance since October betokens no change in the basic attitude, but now manifests simply the inverse of their acquiescence. In inaction or in action, society’s expectations guide them with an invisible hand. – Spirited independence of thought and action has a different face, an other sound.
* This “left” retains but a vague memory of the economic questions that concerned its better forerunners. Why bother with the challenges of industrial production when there is performativity to play with ad libitum? ** In older parlance the disparity would be addressed as a self-contradiction, and the nihilism running through it seems patent: but to expect consistency from those who take pronouns for gods while setting fire to grammar, is itself absurd. *** That many now tend to forget the specifics of the whole era, demonstrates a lack of awareness frightening in its own right, even apart from the practical considerations of how to hinder anything similar from being forced through at some future moment.
Antipathy to the society of today does not free anyone from the servitude to it he inflicts upon himself by a predilection for its paraphernalia, social media above all. As it happens, voluble disdain can furnish an excuse for remaining amongst the prisoners of the here and now (gevangenen van het hier en nu), to cite some recent words by a none too agile figure on the political left-wing in the Netherlands, who aimed them at his opponents and struck only his own cohorts.* Or, indeed, an alibi for joining the provocateurs without prospects. (Provocateurs without prospects! – that is, without any prospects apart from phantasmata whose possibility appeals to them, as being the ones they were waiting for, and which the provocateurs then summon into the present as best or worst they can.) Worldly caution, however, if asked, would counsel against any such choice, tugging the undecided by the ear, lest they accede to the thrill of violence and soon enough be left in an indifferent, bored, or borné state, even more than before.
* Frans Timmermans, Tweet, May 27, 2024
For this and other reasons I need not further belabour, it is a temptation to avoid.