Earlier this year Russia Today (in English) showed a debate on the politcal use of the Holocaust. In the debate, Norman Finkelstein's opponent constantly accuses him of being "impolite" and overly aggressive. Israel W. Charny from the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide continuously deflects Finkelstein's comments by way of this accusation. I think it is interesting that demeanor and decorum are supposed to validate an argument. After watching many debates over the years, I really do think being overly polite is an attempt to use manners as a ruse. In any case, no one debates as clearly and powerfully as Norman Finkelstein.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Yukio Mishima, "The Decay of the Angel"
(Vintage, 1990)
The Decay of the Angel is the final book of Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy. You'll recall that the series follows the life of Honda, a dry legal type born in Japan in the last decade of the 19th century. Throughout the cycle Honda encounters successive reincarnations of a school friend who dies at the end of the first novel. Here we find him pushing eighty, adopting a teenager named Toru whom he suspects is the latest reincarnation. His goal is to teach Toru, who embodies for him a rare nature incapable of lasting in this world, how to join the stream of the everyday, and thereby survive longer than his predecessors. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that Toru is either a fraud, or a corrupt shadow version of Honda's school friend. Where Kiyoaki, Isao and Ying Chan embodied ardour, purity and physical beauty, Toru is a vulgar, detached and narrow-minded spectator who becomes a vulgar, psychopathic self-maximizer under Honda's well-meaning tutelage.
The title of the novel refers to Buddhist and Hindu traditions enumerating the signs of an angel's decay (angels are superhuman, but still caught in the karmic cycle and thereby mortal). The closing episode concerning Toru offers a chilling tableau of these signs. More generally, the themes of old age and the latency of decay in even the most youthful, thriving beauty are driven home throughout the novel. If I had to zero in on one theme of prime interpretive importance (this being typical Mishima fare, and therefore bursting with half-finished ideas and blind alleys), I would draw attention to the role played by the perceiving mind/subject. You'll recall that I flagged this as an important theme in the novel's predecessor, The Temple of Dawn. Here Honda, having long since become a voyeur, will come to terms with the vanity of even his voyeuristic detachment. Toru, moreover, will embody this transition in a violent, disturbing manner.
Mishima sent the novel to his publisher in 1970, the day he committed ritual suicide following an abortive, bizarrely staged ultranationalist coup. For this reason it's tempting to read the book as his testament. I'm not convinced, however, that it provides a coherent key to its author's actions (the novel is strangely divorced from politics, for instance), though it does distill nicely some of his most important concerns. One imagines Mishima ending his life at the onset of much-feared decay, yet at the same time waxing strangely ironical about his gesture. To read The Decay of the Angel is to immerse oneself in supreme bitterness, on the strength of the remotest possibility of letting it go.
The Decay of the Angel is the final book of Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy. You'll recall that the series follows the life of Honda, a dry legal type born in Japan in the last decade of the 19th century. Throughout the cycle Honda encounters successive reincarnations of a school friend who dies at the end of the first novel. Here we find him pushing eighty, adopting a teenager named Toru whom he suspects is the latest reincarnation. His goal is to teach Toru, who embodies for him a rare nature incapable of lasting in this world, how to join the stream of the everyday, and thereby survive longer than his predecessors. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that Toru is either a fraud, or a corrupt shadow version of Honda's school friend. Where Kiyoaki, Isao and Ying Chan embodied ardour, purity and physical beauty, Toru is a vulgar, detached and narrow-minded spectator who becomes a vulgar, psychopathic self-maximizer under Honda's well-meaning tutelage.
The title of the novel refers to Buddhist and Hindu traditions enumerating the signs of an angel's decay (angels are superhuman, but still caught in the karmic cycle and thereby mortal). The closing episode concerning Toru offers a chilling tableau of these signs. More generally, the themes of old age and the latency of decay in even the most youthful, thriving beauty are driven home throughout the novel. If I had to zero in on one theme of prime interpretive importance (this being typical Mishima fare, and therefore bursting with half-finished ideas and blind alleys), I would draw attention to the role played by the perceiving mind/subject. You'll recall that I flagged this as an important theme in the novel's predecessor, The Temple of Dawn. Here Honda, having long since become a voyeur, will come to terms with the vanity of even his voyeuristic detachment. Toru, moreover, will embody this transition in a violent, disturbing manner.
Mishima sent the novel to his publisher in 1970, the day he committed ritual suicide following an abortive, bizarrely staged ultranationalist coup. For this reason it's tempting to read the book as his testament. I'm not convinced, however, that it provides a coherent key to its author's actions (the novel is strangely divorced from politics, for instance), though it does distill nicely some of his most important concerns. One imagines Mishima ending his life at the onset of much-feared decay, yet at the same time waxing strangely ironical about his gesture. To read The Decay of the Angel is to immerse oneself in supreme bitterness, on the strength of the remotest possibility of letting it go.
Tariq Ali Profiled in the Guardian
On The Notes Taken, our references to Tariq Ali have discussed his critique of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, more recently, his book The Idea of Communism. I've read several of his more recent books on politics (and Joshua has a hard to find title in which Ali praises Boris Yeltsin...), but none of his fiction. The reason is simple: I have been interested in his Islamic Quintet, but as a completist kind of reader, reading one volume requires reading all five, which is a serious time commitment when I've got so many other projects going. I had been mulling all this over while I wrote the review of The Idea of Communism, which is why I found the Guardian's recent profile of Ali's 'life in writing' interesting. James Campbell gives an overview of Ali's Islamic Quintet on the occasion of the publication of the final volume, the Night of the Golden Butterfly. A few highlights:
[Ali claims] "the first criticism of Obama in a work of fiction. It just came to me at the time the drone attacks were taking place against Pakistan. I thought: I want to be the first." His gleeful laugh belies a long opposition to American foreign policy, which has not been mitigated by the election of a [...] hope-and-change president.
It is also mentioned that the Rolling Stone's wrote "Street Fighting Man" for Ali, who in turn titled his autobiography Street Fighting Years. I thought a few of my friends would like this:
In Street Fighting Years, Ali describes how he asked Jagger to write out the words of "Street Fighting Man", to be printed in facsimile in the Black Dwarf. "He agreed immediately. We photographed the sheet of paper and I threw the original into the wastepaper basket. No one in the office thought this was sacrilegious. The cult of the individual is always a substitute for collective action."
However, there's no mention of Ali's The Idea of Communism, or the series "What was Communism?" We're currently planning on reviewing the other three volumes in the series: Piero Gleijeses's The Cuban Drumbeat, Boris Kagarlitsky's Back in the USSR, and Slavenka Drakulic's Two Underdogs and a Cat: Three Reflections on Communism.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Cindy Milstein, "Anarchism and its Aspirations"
(AK Press / Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2010)
I first met Cindy in Washington DC, at the since-defunct National Conference on Organized Resistance in 2008. I've since run into her a few times at the anarchist book fair in Montreal. Each time she was tabling for Black Sheep Books, the infoshop in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Cindy is an intellectual by temperment and by training, but she's also affable, down to earth and not afraid to roll up her sleeves to do thankless, unglamourous work. She was a participant in the late Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology, and now sits on the board of the US-based Institute for Anarchist Studies. Cindy is something of a rising star of North American anarchism, and her 2010 overview of anarchist praxis is already being hailed as a classic in some circles.
Anarchism and its Aspirations is a concise, easily readable look at anarchism which portrays the latter as an ideology of action, in action. Cindy's take on anarchism emphasizes the interlocking themes of utopia, revolutionary ethics and pre-figurative practice. She argues that anarchism is utopian to the extent that it tries to create a better world; ethically centred, to the extent that its practice must harmonize with its egalitarian, utopian aims; and finally, prefigurative, in the sense that anarchism does not wait for "the revolution" to come, but rather attempts to build alternative, ethically sound institutions in the here and now (paraphrasing the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchism attempts to build a new society in the shell of the old). The interlocking nature of its main themes helps to disarm criticisms that because it is utopian, anarchism is an unrealistic, irresponsible political position - to quote Lenin, an "infantile disorder". Rather, anarchism as Cindy portrays it is an eminently realistic position: it does not entertain illusions about revolutionary vanguards, capitalism, or the state. Anarchism is, rather, a tough slog towards a better world which entails constant self-critique and the perpetual development of its utopian assumptions against a background of real developments and concrete engagement.
I should warn prospective readers that Cindy is not saying anything essentially new in her book; Gustav Landauer aready said as much 90 years ago. What makes her contribution valuable is that she has situated contemporary anarchism in a proud historical continuum that puts it at the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle; she has also condensed a number of complex ideas into an easily understandable argument that dodges the anachronistic, frankly antiquated pitfalls of the bulk of anarchist literature. I am willing to entertain the idea that her book is a contender for the best contemporary anarchist primer out there.
No doubt certain insurrectionary/green factions will find Cindy's statement a bit toothless; arguably, however, her anarchism is tougher-minded, more serious and more appealing than that of the more "spectacular" anarchist factions that would find her position objectionable. The global anticapitalist movement, as well as the wider, heterogeneous "movement of movements" needs people like Cindy on its side - for her integrity, her realistic but hopeful appraisal of the contemporary conjuncture, and her willingness to turn intellectual tools to good use in the critique of social institutions and the advancement of viable alternatives.
I first met Cindy in Washington DC, at the since-defunct National Conference on Organized Resistance in 2008. I've since run into her a few times at the anarchist book fair in Montreal. Each time she was tabling for Black Sheep Books, the infoshop in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Cindy is an intellectual by temperment and by training, but she's also affable, down to earth and not afraid to roll up her sleeves to do thankless, unglamourous work. She was a participant in the late Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology, and now sits on the board of the US-based Institute for Anarchist Studies. Cindy is something of a rising star of North American anarchism, and her 2010 overview of anarchist praxis is already being hailed as a classic in some circles.
Anarchism and its Aspirations is a concise, easily readable look at anarchism which portrays the latter as an ideology of action, in action. Cindy's take on anarchism emphasizes the interlocking themes of utopia, revolutionary ethics and pre-figurative practice. She argues that anarchism is utopian to the extent that it tries to create a better world; ethically centred, to the extent that its practice must harmonize with its egalitarian, utopian aims; and finally, prefigurative, in the sense that anarchism does not wait for "the revolution" to come, but rather attempts to build alternative, ethically sound institutions in the here and now (paraphrasing the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchism attempts to build a new society in the shell of the old). The interlocking nature of its main themes helps to disarm criticisms that because it is utopian, anarchism is an unrealistic, irresponsible political position - to quote Lenin, an "infantile disorder". Rather, anarchism as Cindy portrays it is an eminently realistic position: it does not entertain illusions about revolutionary vanguards, capitalism, or the state. Anarchism is, rather, a tough slog towards a better world which entails constant self-critique and the perpetual development of its utopian assumptions against a background of real developments and concrete engagement.
I should warn prospective readers that Cindy is not saying anything essentially new in her book; Gustav Landauer aready said as much 90 years ago. What makes her contribution valuable is that she has situated contemporary anarchism in a proud historical continuum that puts it at the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle; she has also condensed a number of complex ideas into an easily understandable argument that dodges the anachronistic, frankly antiquated pitfalls of the bulk of anarchist literature. I am willing to entertain the idea that her book is a contender for the best contemporary anarchist primer out there.
No doubt certain insurrectionary/green factions will find Cindy's statement a bit toothless; arguably, however, her anarchism is tougher-minded, more serious and more appealing than that of the more "spectacular" anarchist factions that would find her position objectionable. The global anticapitalist movement, as well as the wider, heterogeneous "movement of movements" needs people like Cindy on its side - for her integrity, her realistic but hopeful appraisal of the contemporary conjuncture, and her willingness to turn intellectual tools to good use in the critique of social institutions and the advancement of viable alternatives.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Pablo Neruda, "The Separate Rose"
(Copper Canyon Press, 1985)
One of eight unpublished manuscripts discovered on Neruda's desk at the time of his death in 1973, "The Separate Rose" is a poem cycle sketching both a vacation and a central modern dissonance. Having visited Easter Island in the late 60s, already sick with cancer, Neruda produced the manuscript as a meditative commentary on the experience. He divides the poem headings between "Man" and "The Island" - essentially, he contrasts the pure, venerable island and its deep, timeless mythology with "man" as harried, preoccupied, fleeting, sick and, ultimately, an unhappy tourist. The result is a poem cycle without resolution; Neruda deftly lays out the paradoxes of tourism, not the least of which is that of becoming superficially acquainted with deep time. Nonetheless, the two voices of the cycle often resonate. For instance, the island he paints is, like the man of the metropolis, bereft of the old gods. Such resonances account for his deep affinity for the island, even while he notes its indifference to him.
There's an exhaustion and something approaching cynicism here, but one still finds Neruda's lust for life if one digs. Even when, as one finds in the "Man" poems, his subject matter is his own disappointment and loneliness, Neruda is still Neruda. If a self-consciously "late" work can pull this off, then the creator is peerless.
One of eight unpublished manuscripts discovered on Neruda's desk at the time of his death in 1973, "The Separate Rose" is a poem cycle sketching both a vacation and a central modern dissonance. Having visited Easter Island in the late 60s, already sick with cancer, Neruda produced the manuscript as a meditative commentary on the experience. He divides the poem headings between "Man" and "The Island" - essentially, he contrasts the pure, venerable island and its deep, timeless mythology with "man" as harried, preoccupied, fleeting, sick and, ultimately, an unhappy tourist. The result is a poem cycle without resolution; Neruda deftly lays out the paradoxes of tourism, not the least of which is that of becoming superficially acquainted with deep time. Nonetheless, the two voices of the cycle often resonate. For instance, the island he paints is, like the man of the metropolis, bereft of the old gods. Such resonances account for his deep affinity for the island, even while he notes its indifference to him.
There's an exhaustion and something approaching cynicism here, but one still finds Neruda's lust for life if one digs. Even when, as one finds in the "Man" poems, his subject matter is his own disappointment and loneliness, Neruda is still Neruda. If a self-consciously "late" work can pull this off, then the creator is peerless.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Did US Intervention in Latin America Bring the War Home?
This youtube piece is a documentary on the gang MS 13 (also known as Mara Salvatrucha). This video is of poor quality and simply takes the approach of assisting community awareness. I found no quality analysis of their historical development. What caught my attention is that the documentary claims this gang originated in El Salvador. Supposedly M 13 originates from men that fought in El Salvador's Civil wars from the 1980s. They are reportedly trained in guerrilla tactics. If this truly is the case, it puts the legacy of US intervention in South and Central America on a whole different level: It brings the aftermath of the US Cold War to the home-front. I'm asking anyone reading and watching this to post information regarding this topic. It seems the need for an added critique of US foreign policy is waiting in the wings.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Nepal's General Strike
We've discussed Nepal several times (here and here), but it was during the build up to the May 1st general strike called by the Maoists. Now we've got, via Jed Brandt's website, commentary and images. Here are what the people are up to:
And here's how the government responds:
Prime Minister M.K. Nepal is meeting daily with his Indian and American military advisors – so that when the Maoists charge that he serves the Indian establishment there is more than a little truth to it.Plus ça change...
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Ideas of Communism: Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism (2009) serves as the introduction to the Seagull Books series "What was Communism?," which includes three other volumes evaluating the history of communism in Cuba and the former Soviet Union. Ali outlines a short history of communism, including its successes and its failures, as an antidote to the de-politicized amnesia that surrounded the occasion for the book, the fall of the Berlin Wall, not least the irony that such celebration took place during one of the deepest crises of capitalism since the Great Depression.Much of Ali's argument is summarized in the following passage:
A twenty-first-century socialism based on a socially just economic structure coupled with a radical political democracy would offer the most profound and meaningful challenge to the priorities of the capitalist order in the West, which triumphed largely because of the bureaucratic despotisms that led to the besmirching of socialism in the former Soviet Union. The price paid for the survival of capitalism has not been a small one: two World Wars, genocide against colonial peoples...the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians (while protecting the Emperor who unleashed the war); the use of chemicals in Vietnam; institutionalized misery in the 'Third World'; and the threat of a nuclear conflagration that could obliterate all life on this planet (89-90).
"Nor has the twenty-first century started well..." he continues, citing the continuing human cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, not to mention the latest financial crisis. With such a mounting cost, it is clear that an alternative vision and understanding of the world is necessary. The idea that society ought to be organized around the principle 'from each according to ability, to each according to need' is no less valid than it was when worker's struggles began to shake the industrialized world. Nor should we dismiss Marxist critique, which is one of the few that can explain why capitalism continues from crisis to crisis, with increased ruin behind it: capitalism is a system of distribution structured by inequality (be it by class, geography, etc.).
The brevity of Ali's account is both its virtue and its vice. For his intended audience, those who are not familiar with the history of communism, the arguments and the narrative are clear and concise, never falling into tired debates or jargon; there are no long digressions on how Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites or Maoists scored theoretical points against each other. Sometimes, however, the brevity requires Ali to simplify or schematize his account (so one is left with the impression that a self-interested bureaucracy is the primary fault of state communism, which is true to a degree but there are other sides of the failure of communism that could be explored, including continued class struggle and constant capitalist/imperialist aggression...).
Nevertheless, Ali makes sure to underline the advances that these societies experienced under communism (standard of living, health care, housing, etc.), because these are precisely the features that point toward the future. Hopefully the series "What was Communism?" will be followed by "What is Communism?" and "What will Communism be?"
Monday, May 3, 2010
Cahiers pour l'Analyse: Online Edition
An online edition of Cahiers pour l'Analyse is now online. Many of our readers may already be familiar with the Cahiers without knowing it; between 1966-1969 the journal published important essays by prominent French thinkers such as Althusser, Canguilhem, Foucault, and Lacan. Many of those texts have already appeared in English. Go get your copy of Foucault's Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, and turn to page 297, or your copy of the complete Ecrits, and read "Science and Truth." Those texts first appeared in the Cahiers. Althusser, Canguilhem, Foucault, and Lacan: I mention them because it explains the orientation of the Cahiers, and its emphasis on a formalized and rigourous approach to philosophy, which some of the younger contributors (such as Alain Badiou) never abandoned. As the overview states:
Edited by a small group of Louis Althusser's students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse appeared in ten volumes between 1966 to 1969 – arguably the most fertile and productive years in French philosophy during the whole of the twentieth century. Guided by the examples of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Georges Canguilhem, the Cahiers were conceived as a contribution to a philosophy based on the primacy of concepts and the rigour of logic and formalisation, in opposition to philosophies based on lived experience or the interpretation of meaning.
The Cahiers were soon recognised as one of the most significant and innovative philosophical projects of its time. The journal published landmark texts by many of the most influential thinkers of the day, including Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, and Leclaire. Many of the young students and writers closely involved in the production of the Cahiers (e.g. Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault and Alain Badiou) were soon to become major figures in French intellectual life.
The part that I like best about the site at the moment is how the English language editors (led by Peter Hallward) have included the original French articles online to make them more accessible to researchers. It also includes a list of concepts and synopses developed by the editors of the English edition. The definitive version, including interviews with the contributors of the Cahiers and some translations will be launched in September 2010. This project is an example of the kind of scholarship that goes on at the philosophy department at Middlesex University, and why it is in the interest of those who study contemporary French philosophy that such a department is not shut down by the university's administration.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Not Every Human is Legal
Some immigrant rights activists in the US hold up signs that read "No Human is Illegal." The problem is that a human can be illegal. Slavery was once legal. Laws are simply laws. Many of us think that various laws are wrong. Recently in Arizona there is social outcry and support for the controversial enactment of SB 1070. The idea is to proactively crack down on illegal immigration. What is lost in this debate is the fact that the majority living in this hemisphere, as the rest of the world, are poor and illegal.
It is important to evaluate the supposed significance of law in this debate. I posted a clip from a documentary highlighting the ideas of Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto. He believes the poor of the world can be integrated into global capitalism. That argument brings up a whole different set of topics (Can and should Capitalism be saved?). Significant is his research that most poor people live extra-legally. Likely, many Mexican workers--as workers living in Mexico--were no more legally integrated as citizens there than they are as workers in the US. De Soto came up with his analysis to not just find a solution to poverty, but to also combat the appeal of Maoist revolutionaries in his country of Peru. This clip makes some interesting food for thought concerning the broader spectrum the discussion about illegal immigration lies within.
It is important to evaluate the supposed significance of law in this debate. I posted a clip from a documentary highlighting the ideas of Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto. He believes the poor of the world can be integrated into global capitalism. That argument brings up a whole different set of topics (Can and should Capitalism be saved?). Significant is his research that most poor people live extra-legally. Likely, many Mexican workers--as workers living in Mexico--were no more legally integrated as citizens there than they are as workers in the US. De Soto came up with his analysis to not just find a solution to poverty, but to also combat the appeal of Maoist revolutionaries in his country of Peru. This clip makes some interesting food for thought concerning the broader spectrum the discussion about illegal immigration lies within.
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