Malaysia and Allah: Whose God?

In Malaysia there is growing tensions over the use of the word "Allah." Some Malaysian Muslims think non-Islamic religions have no right to use the word "Allah" in reference to God. Other Muslims have pointed out that Allah is an Arabic word simply meaning "God." In Arabic translations of the Bible the word Allah is used freely throughout the Old and New Testament. Even the most conservative Arab Muslims never question that Allah is the God of Jews and Christians. The only debate is the "proper" understanding of Allah. Why then is this an issue in Malaysia with Malaysian Muslims? In this Aljazeera YouTube, social activist Marina Mahathir and opposition MP Khalid Samad point out that the real problem is political and racial. Muslim is synonymous with Malaysian in the rhetoric of Malaysian nationalists. Allah has become not just a Muslim God but the exclusive deity of the Malay people. What initially appears to be Islamic intolerance of other faiths is something altogether different. Chinese, Indian, and indigenous peoples must be kept in their place by the majority Malay population.

Reading Film: Catherine Breillat's "Fat Girl"

Hot on the heels of completely creeping myself out by watching Lars Von Trier's latest offering The Antichrist, I've recently started on the films of French provocateur Catherine Breillat. Why? Because my girlfriend is out of town, I'm bored, and apparently I'm a masochist.

So far, I'm undecided on Breillat. Since the late 80's she's been widely known for her filmic explorations of sexuality, but I often can't tell to what extent these are intelligent. Watching interviews, one gets the impression that she's read a smattering of everything philosophical and literary, and tries to bring it all to her craft. The result is often kind of intellectually sloppy and weak, or at least leaves me wanting more - Cf. her 2004 film Anatomy of Hell, which is basically a creation myth via an unholy wedding of the ideas of Georges Bataille and Doris Lessing. Perhaps these jaded eyes have just seen too much by way of explicit genital closeups and menses play over pretentious, deconstructive-mythical dialogue. But that's another story; perhaps that's even another blog altogether. But I digress.

Poking fun aside, I do recommend Breillat's 2001 film Fat Girl. Not for the weak of heart, but quite an honest and well-executed depiction of adolescent sexuality and coming of age. Sisters Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and Anais (Anais Reboux) vacation with their parents in a summer villa. Elena is fifteen and gets the boys' attention, whereas Anais is thirteen and must look on jealously / judgingly. Anais is the family's "symptom bearer" - clearly there is dysfunction in the family at some level, and Anais takes it upon herself by overeating. Elena is seduced by another vacationer, a slick law student, and Anais is there to witness it all (in some particularly intense scenes, we see her pretending to sleep as her sister, in bed with the law student on the other side of the room, negotiates losing her virginity). One seduction scene in particular, masterfully acted, single-shot and several minutes long, will have virtually any male viewer scanning himself uncomfortably. Breillat is playing here, tongue in cheek, with the guilt of any man who has ever pulled such atrocious and transparently lame lines and tactics as Elena's suitor. Her brilliance is to do it in such a way that virtually any man might feel implicated.

The sisters make an unusual pair. Whereas Elena has idealistic illusions about where her first affair is going, Anais is quite depressive and coldly logical - one might say, French-existentialist - about the prospects of losing her virginity. As Breillat herself suggests, Anais eats to ward off such attentions as Elena receives, trying to preserve a protective bubble of authenticity. This builds up to the film's ending, which is uncompromisingly brutal and still, somehow, unexpected. I had to watch it twice just to make sure it had really happened.

The film leaves several questions hanging. But if you check out the director interviews on the Criterion Collection DVD, be forewarned. Breillat's explanations are only partly illuminating; the rest of the time they're actually obfuscating. Here we have something like the French, female answer to Von Trier - an enfant terrible whose pose as an artiste vacillates between irony and cringe-worthy earnestness.

Rethinking the Enlightenment: Colonial Voices

Today, human rights are as important a discursive tool as they were during the revolutions of the late 18th century. They serve as points of departure for virtually all major political arguments from gay marriage to toppling authoritarian regimes and notions of big brothers the world around. But when thinking about the enlightenment philosophers and their legacy the first thoughts most people will have is of some western European country or another. This historical imagining is not accurate. The limits of enlightenment have undergone significant changes in places outside of Europe which stretched and enhanced the idea of human rights. Laurent Dubois in A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation on the French Caribbean, 1787 – 1804, published by The University of Carolina Press in 2004, argues that the meaning of equality underwent major changes due to the words and actions of abolitionists and self emancipating slaves in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and other French possessions during the French Revolution.

Dubois explains that as the language of equality and brotherhood reached the colonial possessions of France during the early years of the Revolution it was adopted and understood differently than in Paris. In his words on page 4:

Central aspects of the universalism presented by imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as products of Europe’s intellectual heritage in fact originated in the colonial Caribbean. . . The challenges posed by the colonial insurgents in the Americas—the most revolutionary of them the enslaved rebels of the French Caribbean—created a democratic culture that was later presented as a gift from Europe and a justification for expanding imperialism.

A Colony of Citizens argues and demonstrates how the struggle for emancipation in the Caribbean in fact expanded and profoundly impacted the meaning of the political enlightenment of the period. The rebels in the Guadeloupe spoke in the language of Republicanism to forward their cause and deepened its meanings beyond the intentions of its authors.

Much of the book takes the form of a moving and passionate narrative about the events which unfolded in the islands as they watch Paris from across the Atlantic. The book refers back as far as the Code Noir issued by Royal fiat in 1685, which outlined the treatment and equality of freed slaves. Originally this document gave the former slaves of France equality with other Frenchmen, but this slowly changed with additional aristocratic limitations over time. As the revolution unfolded some slaves were emancipated, most common among them were the marital partners and children of slave holders. Due to large and furious slave revolts during the French Revolution, including a massive slave uprising in La Cap in Saint-Domingue took place in 1791 amidst fierce debates over the status of both slavery and the 'gens de couleur,' increased freedoms were given former slaves in 1792 and then full emancipation was given in 1794. Had there not remained continuous pressure in the form of armed insurrection royalist sympathizers and plantation owners might well have succeeded in retaining race based slavery. As the consequence of the reinvented language of the enlightenment coupled with the sustained violence of rebellion in the Antilles the meaning of equality was fundamentally altered and developed to a further extent. The book also outlines the decline of the first French Republic and the establishment of the Napoleonic Empire and his 1802 reinstatement of slavery. Dubois notes that it wasn’t until 1848 that the final emancipation was declared again but the book doesn’t include this later period within its scope.

The point of the book is to demonstrate through literature, correspondences, and the Philosophical treatises written in both Paris and the Antilles the reality that the understanding of enlightenment values was rebuilt in the colonies of France. Human equality as we receive it today was forged in the fires of rebellion in the former French colonies, as Dubois put it throughout this nuanced and detailed argumentative narrative.

Forthcoming: Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art

Continuum has added my book, Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, to their website. If you've noticed that my review output has lagged in the new year (I've got a stack of books I'd like to discuss...), it is because I have been revising my dissertation to turn it into a book. The initial revision process is now almost finished; I'm not writing any more content, just cleaning up whatever mistakes remain. I can't say that I'm not excited about seeing this through to press.

The New Left, What Now?

This week at The Notes Taken, I showed that once you scratch the surface of the goings-on at the Texas State Board of Education, that you discover a much larger political process controlled by right-wing political hacks, Jason reviewed James L. Hevia’s English Lessons: the Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, and we announced our first call for papers on 'The Futures of Sartre's Critique.'

The idea behind the CFP is searching out what futures Sartre's later work might have, premised on the anniversary of the publication of the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It turns out that it is also the quinquagenarian anniversary of The New Left Review, and that they have also been taking stock of their accomplishments and setting up goals in the face of the seemingly unstoppable locomotive of capitalism. Susan Watkins' editorial, "Shifting Sands," is a sober look at the situation (I strongly suggest reading the whole piece). She assesses the recent history of the economic crisis that surfaced in 2008, and compares it to the crises of 1873, 1907 and 1929. One of the primary actors missing in the post-2008 world is organized resistance to capitalism (this again raises the question of what the Tea Party protests are doing, but it's clear that they are often manipulated by the money of big interests, and it is even clearer that they offer no alternative political vision barring their general failure of political imagination in rehashing just about every conservative cliché possible). And unlike the previous crises it is unclear whether we are undergoing a hegemonic shift in global politics, from the US to China.

A principal reason for the continuing strength of American hegemony lies in the victories of the neo-liberal project, which always involved both an ideology and a programme. The first took a series of forms—monetarism, Thatcherism, free-market Third Way, triumphal globalization—now behind us. But the revolutionary effects of the programme remain. Social relations have been reconfigured across the globe: finance capital severed from national industry and integrated into global wealth circuits, decorated with new celebrity-media elites; the white-collar workforce, public or private, subjected to new market norms and compensated with small-scale financial assets; a two-tier working class, with most of its youth in the casualized sector, deprived of organizational reach and political project. Perhaps the most striking feature of the 2008 crisis so far has been its combination of economic turmoil and political stasis. After the bank and currency crashes of 1931, governments toppled across Europe—Britain, France, Spain, Germany; even in 1873, the Grant Administration was paralysed by corruption scandals after the railroad bust, and the Gladstone Ministry fell. The only political casualties of 2008 have been the Haarde regime in Iceland and the Cayman Islands authorities. As unemployment mounts and public-spending cuts are enforced, more determined protests will hopefully emerge; but to date, factory occupations or bossnappings have mostly been limited to demands for due redundancy pay. That neo-liberalism’s crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic, in contrast to the bitter battles over its installation, is a sobering measure of its triumph.

While the formative years of the NLR were shaped by immediate political movements, they've now retrenched for the longue durée. In the absence of a broad alternative to capitalism, to "attend to the development of actually existing capitalism remains a first duty for a journal like NLR." This, she notes, takes various forms, from the world systems analysis of Robert Brenner to Giovanni Arrighi, through theory (Zizek gets a nod), to work on local struggle against imperial hegemony.

The questions and problems that are outlined by Watkins, and that one would think align with those of the other contributors to the NLR, have also been on my mind lately. More specifically, how do world systems analysis, philosophy/theory and local struggles combine? I ask this question like this because the answer then becomes particularly tricky. I will keep it to an academic or intellectual level, because I just don't think I can answer from a 'local struggle' perspective. If "neo-liberalism’s crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic," what can we do? It seems to me that we need to reject the narrow confines of academic expertise to build a coherent 'cognitive map' (as Jameson might say) of contemporary capitalism. How to orient this map: that is the question.

Thus we contribute to (as professors and writers), and act within, a hegemonic ideological struggle, to establish a critique of contemporary capitalism while suggesting an alternative. But to work effectively this requires keeping capitalism as the center of critique, rather than nebulous concepts such as modernity, or culture, or secularization, or technology, or whatever academics propose that falls under the category of political critique that I call the ABC: 'anything but capitalism.' And, rather than propose resistance as the alternative, we need the concepts of solidarity, discipline and organization, where local struggle can confront oppression with its own structural fortitude.

CFP: The Futures of Sartre's Critique

In April 2010, The Notes Taken will be publishing a series of short reflections dedicated to the futures of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, to begin with the date of publication (for the first volume) given by Contat and Rybalka's Les écrits de Sartre, 6 April 1960. Being that we have a small set of dedicated writers, we have decided both to invite contributions and to extend a call for papers to our readership.

We are looking for contributions that focus on the later work of Sartre, including his work on colonialism, politics, Flaubert and, of course, the two volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The papers need not be formal, they need only to show clearly how Sartre's philosophy can contribute to rethinking radical and emancipatory politics.

The deadline is March 18th, 2010. March 24th, 2010.

Authors are invited to send short papers (of no more than 1500 words) or proposals to Devin Zane Shaw (here) or The Notes Taken Review (here) The links are to the bio pages, which contain the email addresses). Please include a short contributor's bio.

Stolen Art and the Epistemes of Imperialism

Recently, on December 16th 2009, in the New York Times an article by Andrew Jacobs entitled China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums repeatedly bashed the Chinese government for their assertion that certain cultural relics held in western museums were in fact stolen from the Summer Palace in 1860. In the article a professor of Chinese Studies at Duke University referred to China as “An adolescent who took too many steroids” and made other culturally insensitive and provocative statements. Kang’s statements are misguided at best. James L. Hevia’s English Lessons: the Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, published by Duke University Press in 2003, tells the story of the reterritorialization of China and the brutal rampaging and burning of the Chinese Summer Palace in 1860, largely for the purpose of insuring that China would be forced to accept the importation of Opium against the Emperor’s wishes in 1860, at the hands of western imperial powers. Intricately related to this process, both military exhibitions and the production of knowledge aided western powers in their remapping of China in an image suitable to western interests.

With the second Opium War’s conclusion in 1860 China was forced to change. After seeing first hand the power of western military technology the Qing government sought to acquire similar weapons and hire Westerners to train their armies to use them. China clearly wanted these technologies to protect themselves from the changes which the English sought to introduce. A stipulation of a tariff conference in the Tianjin Treaty led directly to the Shanghai Tariff Conference, which Hevia explained for westerns meant they could reorder the thinking of Qing officials in terms of how westerners preferred to be dealt with in future delegations. The very manner in which the negotiations took place reordered the manner of Chinese official dealings with outside sovereigns and international traders. Westerners keenly sought to train the Chinese in how to approach western powers: on the terms that western powers wanted.

Among other arguments that Hevia makes, he claims that western domination in Asia was maintained through the development of comprehensive knowledge about peoples under imperial rule. The production of knowledge about China had a significant impact beyond the humiliation by military conquest and its accompanying looting, which obviously played a significant role as well. The process of epistemological development participated in the remapping of China into the image of a western nation. China was forced to learn the interstate game by western rules of protocol and etiquette; for China this meant interacting with other sovereigns at all.

Through the standardization of information and the creation of new and novel ways of knowing China and indeed its inhabitants that western writers, cartographers, and other participants were able to contribute to the cause of remapping China into the international community. These producers of knowledge narrated the western agent as a victim of Chinese aggression, while it was the European who was an unwelcome force in China. The settlements allotted by the treaties signed in 1860 gave westerners the right to appropriate space for themselves. This space provided for further educational opportunities for the Europeans to teach the Qing court of their interests, namely that they ought to be those of Britain. Hevia’s is a thick book, which is immensely quotable. Along with military might the production of novel epistemes also remapped, literally also, the geography of China.

Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer was quoted in Jacob’s article as saying the “The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” with reference to the stolen art held in German, American, British, and French museums, all of these powers having actively participated in the looting of the palace and following lessons in western diplomatic etiquette. Michael Conforti, president of the Association of the Art Museum Director, recently made the claim that we now live in what he calls a “post-repatriation environment.” In spite of his claim to the contrary repatriation of stolen art and artifacts is still actively ongoing. Whereas he and other possessors of stolen art would like to hold onto these pieces, perhaps their rightful place is in the hands of those to whom they belong. In a way the possession of these pillaged art pieces represents the whole brutal mentality of colonialism. Maybe with their return some of the wounds of the imperial project could begin to mend.

The Texas Textbook Massacre

Not so long ago, we had some fun at the expense of the Texas State Board of Education, when we found out that they had confused our friend and comrade Bill Martin, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, with Bill Martin, Jr., the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? But we almost knew that this couldn't be the end of the story, just because now the T.S.B.E. would be on our radar.

So it happens that the Bill-Martin-mix-up is only one part of a much larger process. At the moment the Texas State Board of Education is rewriting the standards for their textbooks. The title of Mariah Blake's article summarizes the process: the 'Texas Education Board Is Trying to Infuse Schoolbooks with Ultraconservative Ideology.' This would be a laughing matter, except for the fact that Texas is one of the largest markets for textbooks, and as you can imagine, publishers are willing to rewrite history to make the cold, hard cash. California, of course, usually acts as a liberal balance to the Texas textbook massacre, but with the current budget woes of the Golden State, it won't be buying textbooks until at least 2014.

So what might kids in other states be learning, if their smaller market state buys the same books? Of course evolution is going to be omitted or eviscerated. What about history? Blake writes:

[David] Barton [former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party]'s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes -- if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as "ethical capitalism." They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project [Don] McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, "Read the latest on McCarthy -- He was basically vindicated."

Ethical Capitalism? No wonder they got in such a huff with Ethical Marxism. Call me cynical, but I'm sure they can come up with something crazier than that. Oh, wait. Here it is:

On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the "original war against Islamic Terrorism." What's more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant -- the most obvious example being their push to swap the term "democratic" for "republican" when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the "atrocious" treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, "it might be much more appropriate that demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government." He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans. [...] while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn't be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, "Only majorities can expand political rights in America's constitutional society." Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites -- in his view, mostly white Republican men.

Somebody should let the guy know that it's the Democratic Party, not the Democrat Party. But that's a minor point in the larger revisionism. It makes you wish that these people would just home school their kids and keep their hands off of our 'socialist' system of public education.

What is an Intellectual?

Not a bad week here at the Notes Taken, as Devin had a chance to satirize the Texas State Board of Education for its decision making process and the shoddy research skills of Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Matt had a chance to post our first 'reading' of a movie, which concerned Lars von Trier's The Antichrist.

We also had a chance to catch up with what is going on elsewhere on the net:

1. A friend of mine brought, through a very indirect way, a recent statement by the president of the MLA about dissertation monographs, in which she questions whether or not its current 'book-form' is outdated in a rapidly changing world. I don't want to sound cynical but inspirational passages such as "Future faculty ... will require flexible and improvisational habits and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition" doesn't make me think of new technologies and research skills; it makes me think of non-tenure track employment.

2. It seemed inevitable after J.D. Salinger's death that his letters would start turning up. This week his correspondence with E. Michael Mitchell, who designed the cover of Catcher in the Rye, has been made public. It also seemed inevitable that some wannabe would claim a correspondence that could not be produced (see here or here). That would be Taki Theodoracopulos, who said he exchanged hundreds of letter with Salinger, in which the recently deceased declared his hatred for Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and VS Naipaul. Reading the "excerpts" that Theodoracopulos produced on his site, should make it pretty obvious that it's a hoax.

3. Then, to return to topics related to the recently deceased, it appears that National Public Radio's obituary on Howard Zinn included rousing tributes from Noam Chomsky, Julian Bond and....wait for it...David Horowitz? I can understand the first two, friends and fellow travelers of Zinn's but so far as I can tell, the only reason that Horowitz was on the show was to 'balance' the reporting by contrasting the first two with a dissenting opinion. Here's some of Horowitz's comments that didn't make the cut (so, in case you are wondering, it is reproduced on his website; don't worry, that link right there is to Alternet, not Horowitz's site):

According to the account he published on his Web site, he told Keyes that Zinn was responsible for "helping Stalin" to "slaughter" and "enslave" Eastern Europe; that he "never flagged in his political commitment to freedom's enemies"; and that he "supported every enemy of the United States in every war...including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started."

Those remarks didn't make the cut because, of course, they are beyond ridiculous. Here's what made the show:

"There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," he explained. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."

N.P.R was rightly scolded for including this garbage. Not only is Horowitz a charlatan, but as far as I can tell his only expertise is self-aggrandizement at the cost of others. Here, it's no different, but it's a well paying shtick. Unfortunately.

4. We can't end on that note. If you've made it this far, you might as well watch this debate, from 1969, between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley (this is part one, I'm sure you can find part two).

Reading film: Lars von Trier's "The Antichrist"

To be clear, I am not recommending this film to anybody. Its climax takes sexualized violence to an excruciating level. Were I able to wash my eyes of some of it, I would. A few people walked out during the screening I attended.

Nonetheless, there is something incredible about this film. First, the acting is excellent; second, the images are arresting; third, and most importantly, the film opens onto thoughts and subject matters that one guesses transcend anything von Trier, who reportedly made the film to battle a long bout of depression, could have intended. Von Trier, who has admitted to compulsively making the same movie over and over, offers up yet another tale where a vulnerable woman is abused, slowly goes mad, and/or ends up dead. The difference here is crucial, however; whereas his previous heroines are undeniably martyrs of some kind, here the lines are uncomfortably blurrier, the lessons more closely integrated with the form and style of delivery.

"He" (Willem Dafoe) and "She" (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a married couple, make love in a highly stylized and visually stunning prologue. They don't notice their toddler son getting out of his crib and making his way towards an open window. They climax as he plummets to his death. The rest of the film involves He, a cognitive-behavioural therapist, trying to cure his wife of her grief. He throws out her meds and decides on immersion therapy, taking her to the place she fears most: "Eden", their cabin in the woods, where a year previously she had taken their son while she worked on a thesis on gynocide (studying in the woods with a one-year-old in tow is really conducive to grad school work, am I right?). In Eden he puts her through a series of arguably silly and hopeless exercises to confront her fear (which for most of the film is a formless dread). The woods around the cabin, however, seem to justify her fear: lichen grows on her husband's hand, a chick plummets from a nest and is devoured by a hawk, acorns pelt the cabin roof like hail, a doe with a dead fawn hanging out of it stands eerily still in a clearing, a fox devouring its own entrails seems to speak. After some progress with her fear, all goes terribly wrong when He starts to suspect her of misogyny, and of having abused their son; perhaps it is him all along, or men, that she really fears (and perhaps hates). Cue the orgy of sexual violence (if you can sit through it, you will be rewarded by a highly important and beautiful epilogue).

People have been sharply divided on this film. Some consider it misogynist, others point up its seeming gratuity and lack of overall meaning. Arguably there is some truth to these assessments, as the film comes precariously close to embodying the formless fear of its characters. I think however that it lends itself to fruitful analysis in some respects. Obviously the man, wife and child are an inversion of the Holy Family. Additionally, some reviewers have pointed out the arrogant humanist rationalism of He and how it conflicts with the deeper, arguably irrationalist wisdom of She. To the extent that death is a constant theme in the film, one might also read it as a meditation on death. I would suggest, however, that whatever else it might be, the film is a deep meditation on the deployment of reason against the horrors of life as such.

Georges Bataille, in the second volume of The Accursed Share, points out that life, in its silent, relentless, teeming chaos, is the truth of our fear of death. After all, when we die, our bodies crawl with insects and worms, fungus and bacteria. It is precisely by life that we die, and by life that our dead bodies are immolated. At one point in the film, She declares nature "Satan's church". Recall that Satan is Lucifer, the angel of light. If one had to characterize angels, one would have to admit that properly speaking, they do not live; their existence is a kind of cold light, an eternal death free of the sticky horrors of life (one is reminded here of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire). But Satan shows the earth with this very light; nature, life, are sanctified by it. The horror of life is a revelation; nature, the house of life, is the church of the evil that thus reveals.

Spinning things out in this way, The Antichrist becomes a generalized provocation. It takes aim at the falseness of our human goodness, a thin membrane which barely covers the real. Willem Dafoe's character is at first insensitive to the horrors of nature and of life, approaching his wife's grief with an arrogant, operational, and arguably contrived warmth and steadiness (at one point in the film she declares herself cured, and he merely stares back at her incredulously; arguably he wants to remain in control). As evil gradually reveals itself to him through the natural surroundings of the cabin, his own "goodness" becomes radically compromised; only once he gives himself over to evil entirely does nature begin to hold forth and nourish him (the eating of wild blackberries at the end of the film being, I think, highly meaningful). In a gross distortion of the Holy Family, the mother gives birth to her husband - who is, arguably, the antichrist.