Ill-treated as the political lexicon has been, would any linguistic remedy clear away the problems that result or only serve to palliate them? A prescription might require something more than words alone, in the case of the divergence of those main terms, “people” and “race,” as between them there remains overlap enough for present-day obscurantism, demagoguery, and attention-seeking to enter in, laying hold of some plausible excuse in order to speak of the one when in fact they refer to and mean the other, and vice versa. Even so, most likely the nimbleness of mice is unneeded if a keen-eared observer wants to note how they vary, as an essential preliminary for a worthwhile corrective. – So clever these traps are not.
Since race as both a concept and a reality does seem to exert more than covert appeal wherever barbarians are once again in fashion, most noticeably amidst today’s conditions in the West, though there “anti-racists” deny its role pro forma while submissively they ally themselves to a movement comporting itself as one, a ferocious confraternity whose aims are colonial and imperial, how if not why such a duplicitously enticing idea has possessed so many minds, is a topic I’ve recurred to and likely shall circle around later, as circumstances permit. Now, however, the other term needs some thought. Yes, what a people could be, if better understood, might point out at least one avenue to evade the impasses of racial thinking, for those whom they repel, especially in a period when, ever more rapidly, the day’s bulletins confirm the sad fact that those dead-ends are proliferating everywhere.
Absence of the generic features such as a single language, a definite territory, even a specific ethnicity, the characteristics by which its existence is usually recognised, paired with very great longevity, do mark out what nonetheless, under the large challenges of dispersal, a people could be. Here the story of the Jews does offer perhaps a superlative example. Their commonality sited high above mere nature, namely, attachment to a book, orientated them towards the condition of literacy nearly from the start. The Jew is a man who has been reading for forever (le Juif est un homme qui lit depuis toujours).* Steadfast awareness of this ideal which never was lost, an observer does well to itemise amongst the strongest of the affiliations between people who to the eyes of others have often appeared so very strange – contrarily, disputatiously, stubbornly as at times they seem to act first and foremost in their relations with each other. Should observers not grant that this collective modus vivendi can elicit perplexity, especially when guidance through unfamiliar matters is wanting? But perhaps those manners stem from the whole gamut of that readerly effort itself. Predilection towards reading, would be a persistent attitude which, also because its many applications remain at variance, continues to help situate, to set out the horizons, the defining boundaries of the historical experience this one people shares. The mote in so many eyes, this people’s status apart, that stance of its supposed “particularism” so often demeaned and yet so ill-understood, might provide a key. Perhaps these pronounced distanciations, each separately and all together, underlining as they do the long existence of this people, pertain to its quintessential bookishness. Particularity may be second nature to those who are born readers, and indeed not only to any such person singly. Beyond individuals it could typify a people that altogether is nothing if not a bookworm. So that epithet, meant to object or insult, might be written over again, taken in a quite different sense. Why should it not bespeak, even affirm a set of arrangements as exist both within and around this people? Ponder how those distances are exemplary just because they are particular. Pages from this book can teach what a people may be.
* Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne” (N. R. F., no. 70)
Initiation of an experiment in affranchissement de soi, that by some free decision the breeding of a new group’s human nature may be begun – this does, so I tend to hypothesise, describe the mode of activity of an incipient race as many today, all too many in their ennui imagine it. Frissons delivered as they picture its fruition relieve them of boredom largely because that collective project of self-fashioning goes not a step beyond the physical, let alone ever leaps above its plane, while the horizontal delights conferred remain short-lived for much the same reason. Thrills like theirs need frequent repeating, since the function is euphoric; while the dosing of the repetitions shows how illusory, even hallucinatory such pursuits in fact are.* Sounds no more than brief will echo there. And yet the fictions that result do work to raise the force of the thing’s appeal: some play-acting or performativity may also augment the yearnings for that most bloody birth, tinctures of the forbidden mix other spices into the brew.** How mistakenly is it classified as a discourse, when instead its efficacy acts upon the recipients as a drug, over-stimulating something in them while lulling to sleep much of the remainder. Indeed it operates by speech, but if these words do convey an illocutionary force in the ears of the audiences, it is by imbuing the latter with cravings they begin to require, much as happens during the onset of an addiction. Blood-thirst is gratified for a while by the spectacle (real, imaginary, or recollected) of violent death inflicted on one extant group of people by another now emerging which stands poised to enter into being by dint of the murder itself; but then the excitement of it wears off and the next dose is needed. Soon the anticipation of the experiment’s results, the very thing which had caught their attention to begin with, the observers start to demote in importance. But even as their focus shifts, the element they had found most appealing about it, the sheer newness, the novelty in the nascent race’s efforts to breed its own human nature, remains prominent. Left exposed it can be probed, perhaps further than before.
* Transcribe their content into the form of propositions, and just look at the results!
** Though where the bien pensants assemble only prohibition is really interdicted.
That prospect of collective self-breeding is born by violence, in the fictive scenario of enfranchisement that draws the gaze of the sympathisers, those who did regard it at first as a help since they, rather similarly, aimed to catalyse themselves from the usual deadly boredom; while on their side, because they come to rely on the kick that same prospect gives, dosed at semi-foreseeable, semi-regular intervals, administered to feed an incipient habit, it is also borne by violence. – Yes, always ahead of them it hovers, a mirage of free creation at once tantalising and taunting. Their first pursuit of it does introduce them to conditions of unfreedom, quickly inflicting on themselves an inner servitude and abandonment to the spectacle, soon eventuating in the dependency of addicts. Hence this insidious pastime of self-violation marks how far away from those many unfortunates that figment of a new breed is, even while it permits them to bear the distance, for the time being.
If indeed the Western allies of today’s leading death cult possess souls over which even superficial dissection might allow a cross-light to flicker, any glimpse like the foregoing at their inner structures must remain a work of conjecture. Granted. And yet the attraction which enthrals them plays out within the perceptible zone where desires and/or needs obtain unsatisfying satisfactions, much as happens with the idea which propels those many actions intérieurs, that eager vision of a new race’s decision to commence the breeding of its own human nature, a project which will hardly ascend above a merely physical plane. Novelties the mirage promises may look beautiful in advance, but prove treacherous to embrace. Those who attempt it habitually nonetheless, soon enough end by fighting for their own slavery as though it will save them (pro servitio, tanquam pro salute pugnent),* since the condition of inward subjugation was one they themselves largely had wrought, and then some force in them commands imperiously that their earlier misstep must be defended.
* Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, Præfatio
Newness, how ever much an illusion and a torment the quality soon will prove, at first bestows a considerable magnetism upon the project of self-breeding of which an incipient race is supposed capable. Compared to such a beguiling undertaking, an extant people in the continuity of its history has nothing comparable to offer, whenever the moment comes to profile itself in the world-arenas of opinion, and especially so when that historical span is very lengthy. How then could it ever be expected still to harbour any novelties that might attract the public’s roving eye? For by now, conceivably, a quarter of the twenty-first century gone, the age of peoples is over, the questions they did pose a matter of ancient history, their look threadbare like museum-pieces, while today, pro forma lies ignored, what draws the notice given things imminent, is race. – What sadness this finish would bring.
But here a people which differs from the others and from itself may again set an example. If it has remained knit together by an enduring attachment to the book, so that despite everything bookishness became a shared characteristic even as the usual criteria of peoplehood no longer were met, throughout the long dispersal, then the conditions have varied enough along the way that whenever its stories are properly told it could evince several new qualities (neue Eigenschaften). Neither in recounting what the people once was nor in anticipating what it will soon be, is its share of possibilities exhausted – much as those who let themselves become mad (sich irre machen lassen) by dallying too often with old idées fixes, and the ranks of such an envenomed counter-movement (eine giftträgerische Gegenbewegung)* are not thinning, would greatly like to witness that ending. So, perhaps, the potent advantage that accrues to a race in its envisioned debut, the thrills delivered in advance by the numerous massacres which are supposed necessary for its birth to occur, could be defused by the force of a different kind of appeal, in the particular case of this people. Between the point of commonality and the divergences which continue to mark the people although its dispersion is now to some degree past, there remains distance sufficient that the unforeseen can still take place, new developments in the people’s character may still transpire and show what even a very old people could be. And, more than that, expressing its aptitude in a pointed manner, since these will be changes in something quite other than a group’s own human nature, whose breeding as a result of its collective decision is much rather a prerogative specific to a racial formation born of militarism and murder. Quite otherwise with those alterations in character for which even an ancient people distinguishes itself as still in some ways young and even new enough. They take place on a level above the merely natural: moreover, to the degree that in them a considerable artifice and skill does participate, their plane will be sited yet higher.
* Friedrich Nietzsche, notebook, fall 1887 (9, 109)
Self-cultivation on the part of a people that reads, how ever nettlesome at times the readings and the readers may begin to sound or seem, works first and foremost upon something understood as long extant amidst the conditions of its dispersal, a cast of mind. Nearly by definition, therefore, such activity has a locus beyond or above the physical plane. Not that its objects are the minds of the self-cultivators themselves, as though in each instance its operations were grammatically speaking reflexive. Rather different will be the mind’s efforts of concentration, readerly acts that pull itself together and focus its energies such that alterations are also brought about in it, in more felicitous cases, when from out of its interior the unexpected becomes prominent. Profound surprises if not also novelties it may still conceive.
Fostered over so long a stretch of time by reading, such changes bespeak selectivity and particularity, and those penchants the people will not (one ventures to guess) forget even when the dispersal is properly overcome. And forgetfulness would be still less likely, since an incipient race now runs rampant in Western Europe, the Antipodes, and elsewhere, while excuses made for abdicating before these new conquerers call to mind earlier moments in history, if only by way of comparison.
Wariness amidst today’s worsening conditions, may apply a strong readerly power to weigh the likenesses drawn from the historical record (perhaps while listening for its possible rhymes). And to counter the falsifications inflicted on it, qua text and even qua score, is another main task. Pleasures these falsities confer, should be neutered. – In the Western Europe where prospects are dire, not only are the nineteen-thirties and the present brought into alignment by an implacable cohort numbered in the millions, but also, throughout the European Union’s institutions, precincts thick with aggressive dwarves, more and more often mindful observers do find themselves detouring nine decades into the past and back again, uncanny similarities in hand. The latter formations, in Brussels and elsewhere, rather than exhibit the status of a new class or caste, evince the bearing of a would-be race, draped in hauteur to cover the void of assurance they feel themselves to lack, and so their self-conceptions differ in content from those held by the advance-guard of the successor societies to come, they who will fight on fronts which now can flash up suddenly on this or that flimsy pretext anywhere – even though on each side race-thinking is legibly at work. While as a feature common to both, moreover, one does well to note their great aggressiveness. Probably it bolsters amongst them an alliance of more than mere convenience, whose aims include transforming the remnants of comity between European peoples, the nexus which both linked and separated them, tenuously, until the twentieth century did really commence. For now, a ways into the next, what remains of those relations could halt any grand project being built upon or from their ruins, whether super-state or caliphate.
Most noticeably in Western Europe, better endeavours for interrelations between peoples, giving a place also to the intermediacy of ones which are spread amongst the others, asphyxiate as machinations erect supranational structures or those that pass themselves off as such. Breathing-room for attention to the matter dwindles where the very air stinks,* the public realm fouled from above by all the lying utilised as means to an overarching end. A reign of deceit incites ideas about politics that already were cynical, quickening the vehemence of their expression. How curtly they now are spoken, may well be taken to indicate an unsettling trait of public opinion generally in these parts of the European Union and across the Channel. On the major questions of the day it wants and does not want to be lied to, both at once: just think of its mixed response to the bellicose declarations of support for the Ukraine’s nationhood issuing from Berlin, London, Paris, etc., officialdoms which do all they can to destroy that same principle back at home. Awareness of an inconsistency so fateful, abetted further by irritation at the degree of its own acquiescence, foment in it an explosive mélange of a mood which must then find vents, through no matter what portals. Hence the ever rawer sounds heard on this one topic throughout Western Europe – and on others, since the hypothesis, it seems to me, applies more broadly. Think of how the public-health measures of a few years ago, often even then patently nonsensical (and that on a charitable reading of their aims) considered as responses to the viral emergency, were frequently implemented under false pretences, and that on so large a scale, with such devastating results everywhere, that one did really expect a forceful rejection from the intended “beneficiaries.” Alas, this organised deceit which many in the public could have recognised but opted not to, they preferred to accept instead; while now the opposite inclination, the wish not to be lied to, can assert itself only within quite narrow bounds, if the earlier credulity is not to face sharp self-examination and soul-searching. In lieu of that honesty, unaddressed directly the episode continues from below to rankle, and the undercurrents of irritation with themselves swell into anger they let out verbally or otherwise. In exchanges of ugly words that are jolting but not stimulating (déchirant sans être énergique), their noisy illocutions of aggression throw themselves at one another and attack third parties too, or else with the sheer pleasure of disruption they are fired off like a pistol shot in the midst of a concert (un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert),** by brawlers or vandals aiming to flay or smash to bits whatever counterparts they chance upon. Nor do these illocutionary forces always desist from yet worse strife. Whether public opinion in general will collect itself to save the day, therefore, now admits of serious doubt.
* Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, act i
** Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, vol. ii, ch. xxii
Such dangers, heralded in the onrush of politics narrowly speaking, keep pace in acceleration with the specific cruelty that October 7, 2023 woke again from its fitful slumbers to make a show of itself in the social domain broadly defined, often even on the slightest non-pretexts. Wherever relations amongst individuals are made into arenas for the ostentatious seeking out of enemies and allies – society exists most fully there, being an immense aggregate of all those little spectacles, and as such it has become, especially in Western Europe these last years, another theatre for hostilities waged against the Jews, fought with the proverbial other means, but no less cruelly. Which instruments are deployed in an organized and calculated assault upon every single individual of Jewish origin, is demonstrated in the realm of musical life, that singular human pursuit one hoped would have been spared all such incursions. More and more frequently are concerts beleaguered outside or interrupted inside; invitations to perform attached to the result of inquiries into the invitees’ stances, even regarding their willingness to abjure them; and advance notice of intent to boycott given, so that the organisers of the events are put before a hard choice of an either-or. Around the Western European institutions of music such occurrences have begun to manifest an aura of the routine. Of course, to guard the hypocrites against having to own what effectively they are doing, these actions come larded with the obvious excuses: that the targets are Israeli citizens generally or connected with the country’s armed forces, and hence they somehow deserve the exclusion. The dishonesty of such rationalisations is already bad in itself, but peeping through the deniability and suggesting that in fact it is meant to admit rather than to allay suspicion about its bona fides, one may espy an implicit threat, issued in the direction of Jews individually and collectively. Marked out for the role of enemy, thus they are positioned to serve as focal points of the animosity in social relations which already is inclined towards aggression. And even before any such threatening passage à l’acte, a signal is also sent out to the pliable and perceptive that they do well to reckon with the arrival of the next political order. Suggested to them for their own sakes is the task of aligning themselves socially in accord with it, and this message is being received in Western Europe. As further pressures are applied, they move to heed it with alacrity, and so from one day to the next, amidst social contexts participants may discover to their shock, and bystanders note to their surprise, how the “associates” become inimical where before they did seem amiable. There indeed the air does begin to stink. Yet since these spectacles of betrayal are not without precedent, what their changes might betoken is anticipated by works which describe the role played in political strife by social factors. Such description, generally speaking, is what poets or novelists best provide, for their more penetrating and passionate force can discern hidden under the surface of events something which is never perceived by the historian* – words like theirs pinpoint the nerve-center of a social attitude.** Precision which becomes especially vital when, as now seems and sounds to be the case, from those centres an epidemic of more than mere isolated moments of cruelty is engendered socially.
* Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part One, ch. 3, iii
** George Steiner, “The Mandarin of the Hour”
Regarding those streams of cruelty and their social origin, how should anyone tell the story plausibly, even persuasively, and to whom, its political matrix conveyed by a deft touch of remembrance? Novelist or poet at heart one might actually need to be, graced finely with the historian’s factuality, which remains essential, though everyone may not say it. – A brief search happens to recall a few works in which such a thing is done. From this better readers can glean much; if only they think over the flashes of actuality which strike them on the way. Avanti! If the risks have any use at all, it is that eyes and ears are made to become keener, more wary. For not only do their own anticipations serve them as guides; they must be guided too.
Delving into a select number of novels, poems, or works by those other inspired auteurs the cinéastes, abandoning at their behest some illusions about the present and its prospects, and returning if not better instructed at least a bit wiser, what then could one say? Yes, where aggression rears up through the vector of a social attitude, cruel acts trail not far behind – provisionally it seems true enough. But the idea requires a little narrowing (especially if particularity is esteemed a virtue). Statement more specific is called for. Thus, à propos today’s bleakness, one could propose, tentatively, that people and peoples envision how amongst themselves the social relations typical of vice and crime will soon prevail, and accept the outcome in advance. Already the signs are many. Currents of aggressiveness heightening into brutality, earlier compunctions will be shattered, older limits profaned. Then they must justify all of it: how else to do so than to harp on the evil, how ever real or much more likely merely imagined, of those now marked socially as enemies.
Social relations once taken to that extreme, contributing to abet the thoroughgoing destruction of the comity between peoples in Europe – it all figures in two books of the nineteen-forties by a particular and even Proustophile author which seem to invite very careful reading, namely, Curzio Malaparte (Kaputt, La pelle).
Perhaps next year an opportunity will come to read and reflect on them properly.