In recent years there have been a slew of publications dealing with the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx. It could be argued that these works follow the lead of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, each of which argues for a relation between Marx and post-structuralism. Or it could be that the turn to Marx, or to a relation between Marx and post-structuralism, reflects not so much a change in the intellectual atmosphere, in the old battles for intellectual hegemony, as a change in the political and economic atmosphere. The years of neoliberal restructuring of the university and subsequent austerity cuts have made it harder and harder to separate post-structuralist concerns with the nature of subjectivity, knowledge and desire from Marxist concerns with exploitation. Problems with capitalism have become increasingly hard to avoid in recent years, and thus we see a turn to Marx in academia as well as in mainstream media.
 
John Grant’s book is not about the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx, but about the contemporary relevance of dialectical thinking. This shift takes us to the core of much of the post-structural opposition to Marx: the dialectic, with its central notions of totality and contradiction. The post-structuralist thinkers that argued for the importance of Marx, such as Deleuze, the late Derrida, and Foucault, were trenchant critics of the dialectic; Marx, materialism, and the critique of capital could be salvaged, but the dialectic was forever associated with the original sins of totality, teleology, and identity. There have even been attempts to save Marx from the dialectic, to produce a non-dialectical Marx in which immanence, power, or difference takes the place of the dialectic. Grant tempers this critique of the dialectic by returning to dialectical thinkers such as Althusser and Adorno who tried to separate the dialectic from its idealistic tendencies, to produce a dialectic without a subject, totality, or telos. By bringing together the criticisms of the dialectic with the most profound revisions of dialectical thinking, Grant is able to produce a dialectical revision of sorts, in which negations of the dialectic converge with its revision. The opposition to dialectics is a determinate negation, one that retains as much as it negates.
 
Grant begins his book with an examination of the Phenomenology of Spirit. His interpretation follows Adorno and Zizek, and anticipates such works as Fredric Jameson’s The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit and Étienne Balibar’s Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, in arguing that the Phenomenology is less a systematic exposition of the march of spirit than of the dialectic of disjuncture between experience and concept. Grant thus breaks with what he refers to as the onto-structural understanding of the dialectic, in which the various stages are the stages of being and its conceptual articulation, stressing instead the finitude of the Phenomenology, the tension in it between experience and its historical situation (17). It is not a matter, however, of choosing the existential understanding of the dialectic, dominated by the struggle for recognition, against the onto-structural interpretation of the unfolding of being, but of recognizing that the tension between experience and structure or logic is, as Grant understands it, the dialectic itself.
 
Louis Althusser’s articulation of a materialist dialectic draws a line of demarcation against both an existential interpretation–and any humanism–and the idealism and teleology of the onto-structural understanding. This makes him an unlikely figure for Grant’s project. However, in the second chapter, Grant excavates a provocative and surprising passage from Althusser’s early writing on Hegel, a passage in which Althusser argues for the superiority of Hegel over Marx. Althusser argues that Marx’s method is predicated on an anthropology of labor, while Hegel’s dialectic is one in which there is no first time, no ontological or anthropological postulate, but every starting point, every given is negated, becoming the initial moment of a dialectic (Grant 38). While Althusser’s celebration of Hegel is surprising, the terms of this opposition are not: Althusser would dedicate the rest of his intellectual career to contesting the primacy of origin and end, as well as an anthropological foundation not only for Marxism but for philosophy. Grant is thus able to foreground the notion of a dialectic without first terms to draw a thread through Althusser’s thought, from the development of an overdetermined materialist dialectic without essences to the later work on aleatory materialism.
 
Such a reading brushes against the grain of Althusser’s project, the trajectory of which moves from defining a materialist dialectic to rejecting dialectics in favor of a materialism of the encounter. However, Grant’s method, which focuses on the tension between experience and system, the articulation of concepts and their limits, makes it possible to see a dialectic of sorts in Althusser’s aleatory materialism. As Grant argues, Althusser’s aleatory materialism is understood to be dialectical not just because it works through the oppositions of contingency and necessity, event and structure, but ultimately because of its articulation of fundamental concepts. Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli is said to articulate two fundamental principles: the first thesis is that nothing changes, that history can only be instructive if based on invariants, while the second is that everything changes. These two theses demand a dialectic in which the concrete situation, what Althusser once labeled the conjuncture, can only be understood as the particular way in which the latter negates the former, the particular combination of change and invariants (56).
 
Grant’s final point is not just that Althusser was dialectical all along, but that his later theoretical production can be read through his early idea of a dialectic without content in order to argue for a dialectic that emerges in the tension between contradictory theses. This makes possible a rereading of particular moments in contemporary theoretical and political debates. The subsequent chapters take up “experience,” “ideology,” “totality,” and, finally, transformation, all of which have come under scrutiny and critique by such thinkers as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. Grant does not deal with concepts abstractly, simply stating that they have migrated from the “hot” to the “not” list, juxtaposing them with the new terms of “language,” “discourse,” “multiplicity,” and “deconstruction.” Rather, each chapter is structured around a particular determinate negation, a particular textual moment where the abstract opposition between terms must necessarily give way to a more nuanced, or dialectical, relation. The question of experience is read through Foucault and Derrida’s debate over madness and Foucault’s attempt to present a history of madness, while ideology is read against Deleuze and Foucault’s attempt to dispense with the notion altogether. In each case a specific theoretical intervention is used to illustrate the unavoidable nature of dialectic thought. The debate about experience, about its discursive construction, reveals the impossibility of absolutely deciding for or against experience, of maintaining some originary experience prior to its discursive construction or of a discourse that constructs all experience in its wake. There is a dialectical relation in which experience and discourse, the concept and what exceeds it, are constantly shaping each other. Similarly, Foucault and Deleuze’s attempt to dispense with the category of ideology, to have done with its sharp distinction between appearance and reality, ends up reintroducing a concept of masks and mystifications. Despite his opposition to ideology, Foucault argues, in a central passage of The History of Sexuality, that “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” (86). Rather than dispense with ideology, with the opposition between appearance and essence, a dialectical treatment seeks to grasp the reality of appearances. These particular interventions illustrate that a dialectic is at work even when it would appear to be absent. Grant takes on Foucault, an anti-dialectical thinker par excellence, to argue that the relationship between power and resistance can be thought of as a dialectic in which negation is determination (and vice versa). As Grant writes,

 

For both Foucault and Hegel, nothing is constituted purely on its own terms, but always in relation to what limits it. Power and resistance, then, have a paradoxical relationship in that they serve as the limit of the other, and yet in doing so they motivate and incite more of what they intend to check or restrain. Such a relationship is eminently dialectical.

(138)

Once removed from its onto-structural position, from the march of spirit or some ultimate argument about the contradictory nature of reality, once the dialectic becomes a dialectic, it becomes all the more ubiquitous, inserting itself in every place that a concept, or problem, is set against its opposite which determines and defines it.

 
I have suggested that Grant’s dialectic can be seen as part of a turn to Hegel in writers such as Balibar and Jameson. I mention these two authors specifically because their respective turn to Hegel is one that foregrounds the finitude and partial nature of the dialectic. Balibar has also pursued a reading of the Phenomenology in which it is no longer the speculative teleology but the dialectical moment that is stressed. Balibar stresses that Hegel’s various historical portraits, such as those of Antigone, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, are not simply the reflections of an erudite and totalizing knowledge, but demonstrate that there is no meta-language of spirit; spirit, the collectivity, can only be expressed in specific cultural and historical moments. These moments see themselves as absolute, see their historical condition as the ultimate condition. This universalization ends up being their negation. The dialectic exposes the partiality and contradictory nature of each of these moments; it is, as Balibar argues, the original form of ideology critique (284). Grant’s use of the dialectic comes closest to Jameson’s in Valences of the Dialectic. Jameson argues, against Althusser, for the merit of an idealistic dialectic. As Jameson writes,

And that would be, I think, the meaning and the function a return to Hegel today, as over against Althusser. The latter is surely right about his materialistic, his semi-autonomous levels, his structural causality, and his overdetermination: if you look for those things in Hegel you find what everybody knew all along, namely that he was simply an idealist. But the right way of using Hegel is not that way; it lies rather in precisely those things that he was capable of exploring because he was an idealist, namely the categories themselves, the modes and forms of thought in which we inescapably have to think things through, but which have a logic of their own to which we ourselves fall victim if we are unaware of their existence and their informing influence on us.

(454)

Grant, like Jameson, in a kind of dialectical reversal, takes Hegel’s weakness, his idealism, as his strength: it is precisely because Hegel focuses on ideas, concepts, and categories that his work is so useful for working through them. It is a matter of what Jameson calls a dialectic without positive terms, in which what is stressed is the contradiction, the negations that determine, and not the resolutions or progress (48). Grant does an excellent job of demonstrating the need for a dialectical treatment of some of the longstanding oppositions in the debate between Marxism, or Marxisms, and post-structuralism, the futility of being for or against categories and concepts for analysis like experience, ideology, and totality, not to mention being for or against the dialectic itself. These concepts and their limitations are indispensable for critical thought. Experience and its construction, the event, and totality are not positions that we might pick once and for all, but must be worked through according to their specific determinations and contradictions.

 
We can ask, finally, about the political import of this discussion—what does it offer besides a way out of some longstanding theoretical debates and impasses? Grant’s book is not one that simply works on philosophical and theoretical questions, assuming that the political effects will follow. It is a book that takes intervention in the politics of the contemporary moment as one of its essential provocations, reflecting on Obama’s election, the tea party, and the current economic recession. By and large these function as interesting and provocative examples: Grant’s argument that the tea party is as suspicious of the collective power of the people as it is of government, ultimately advocating a privatization of the political, is insightful, as is his argument about the dialectics of structure and event in different understandings of the current crisis (144). Their merit is to remind us that the real contradictions, the ones that matter, are not between Foucault and Derrida, but between the different understandings of the people and power. These readings of political situations are not political prescriptions, but interpretations of the dialectics of existing politics. They retroactively unpack the logic of what has taken place. The owl of Minerva still flies at dusk, even if the sun has just set. The understanding is still retrospective. Grant does offer proposals, proposals for a general dialectical understanding of the relation between creation and transformation, negation and affirmation, already at work in every political situation.
 
Grant has done much to recommend the idealist aspect of the dialectic, the examination of the negation and contradiction in concepts and categories in the tension between experience and logic. However, the turn towards a materialist dialectic in such thinkers as Althusser was not simply a rehashing of the metaphysical opposition between idealism and materialism, but an attempt to move beyond the retroactive gaze of Hegel to grasp the overdetermined contradictions of the present, contradictions that can be acted upon (106). Which is to say in closing that the dialectics of concepts, the idealistic dialectic of Hegel, albeit unmoored from its speculative grounding, may need to be complemented by a materialist dialectic, a dialectic of the forces and contradictions of material life. This would entail a return to the Marx and Hegel question, but not in terms of mystical kernels and rational shells, in which the materialist dialectic is separated from idealism, but of a dialectic of forces combined with a dialectic of concepts and logics. It would no longer be a matter of emphasizing the difference between the notion of a materialist and idealist dialectic, but of seeking the point of articulation between the two, the place where the dialectic of concepts and experience confronts the dialectic of forces and relations of production. Grant’s book does much to make this possible, liberating Hegel’s dialectic from its ossified image as purveyor of totality and teleology, but it leaves in its wake the conceptual work of connecting this understanding with its historical moment, with the material, rather than logical, situation of our experience.
 

 
It came as something of a surprise when I realized that Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts is the first book Brian Massumi has published since the influential 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Surprising only because in the decade following Parables for the Virtual, Massumi has continued to be an active and influential figure on the theoretical landscape. Among numerous other pieces, for example, he has written a series of important essays on the post-9/11 affective security regime, which, taken together, have the force of a short and incisive book.
 
Semblance and Event, the fourth volume in MIT’s “Technologies of Lived Abstraction” series, which Massumi co-edits with his partner and collaborator Erin Manning, pursues a different set of concerns, focusing largely on the arts. For this book Massumi circles back to pick up a couple of pre-Parables pieces, which he weaves together with an exciting introductory essay on “Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts” and a concluding tour-de-force in “four movements,” “Arts of Experience, Politics of Expression.” The book is unevenly (or unconventionally) organized. The introduction is longer than the first and third chapters combined, all of which together are approximately the length of the second chapter, a “semblance of an interview” published in 2008 in Inflexions, an online journal. And the final chapter, which by itself could stand alone as one of those slender volumes published by Verso or Prickly Paradigm Press, is nearly half the length of the entire book. But insofar as this chapter picks up on numerous lines of thought from earlier chapters, it serves here as a powerful conclusion to the book’s overall aim of articulating an aesthetic-political philosophy through the unfolding of the concept of “semblance.” Massumi draws this concept in large part, though not exclusively, from Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “mimesis” and “nonsensuous similarity,” tracing out its implications with the help of William James, Whitehead, and Deleuze, along with the especially useful introduction of psychologist Daniel Stern’s concept of “vitality affects.” Both through particular discussions of specific works of art (including among others music, dance, painting, and media installations) and more general discussions of abstraction, linear perspective, and the diagrammatic, Massumi advocates an “activist philosophy,” which teases out not only the politicality of the aesthetic but also the aesthetics of the political. I begin this review with such a generalized description both to prepare potential readers for the experience of reading Semblance and Event and to help account for the emphases and ellipses of this review, which focuses mainly on concepts from the introduction and closing chapter.
 
When my review copy of Semblance and Event arrived in the mail I had just finished reading Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object. Inspired by Massumi’s own commitment to relationality, one way for me to begin to think about reviewing Semblance and Event was to think about how the experience of reading Massumi differed from the experience of reading Harman. Perhaps because I had just been making my way through The Quadruple Object, Harman’s object-oriented ontology seemed in places to loom as an unnamed, shadowy adversary to Massumi’s event-oriented ontology. While Massumi does not directly engage with the texts of Harman or other speculative realists, there are several moments, beginning with the introduction, where Harman’s commitment to the ontological primacy of objects over relations comes clearly to mind. But it’s not only because I happened to read the two works next to one another that comparing the experience of reading Massumi with that of reading Harman is instructive. Indeed, from their opening sentences the two works stake out in markedly different prose styles diverging claims about where philosophy should begin. Thinking about some of the differences between the experiences of reading the two books can help illuminate some of the stakes for Massumi’s arguments in Semblance and Event as well as the two authors’ competing philosophical commitments.
 
Harman’s prose, in The Quadruple Object as elsewhere, is clear and direct—full of declarative sentences, numbered sections and claims, and illustrative diagrams. Harman presents philosophy as an agon of champions, villains, and heroes, as when he claims that “objects should be the hero of philosophy” (16). He operates in part by placing his arguments explicitly in opposition to those of the champions whom he is attempting to unseat or dethrone or knock off their horses or in relation to those whose colors he chooses to wear. At one point he likens “various forms of objects and qualities” to “the opposed armies of Korea [which] have stared each other down for over fifty years” (102). His assertions about positions with which he disagrees often consist of absolutist declarations, such as “Those who resist the notion that individual objects are the central topic of metaphysics have no other option: the object must either be undermined from below or overmined from above” (13). And at another point he likens his own philosophical ambitions to Kant and Freud (124). Thus, despite Harman’s deep commitment to objects, reading his prose can feel very much like encountering a subject- or human-centered discourse about objects, one in which philosophers champion different causes, in Harman’s case the fundamentality of objects, but in which discursive, philosophical agency remains firmly within what can often feel like an object-oriented humanism, in which the subject-object divide seems supplanted by the separation among real objects or what he calls the sensual object-real object divide.
 
Massumi’s prose, on the other hand, is alternatively fluid, dense, and fragmentary. Its effect is to produce in the reader a kind of movement or relationality similar to the relational movement for which he is arguing. On occasion one feels challenged to hold onto or reproduce these movements of thought outside of the experience of reading. Often Massumi places quotations from his philosophical forebears next to each other, in relation, with little or no exegesis or explanation, as in the second paragraph of the book’s introduction: “What’s middling in all immediacy is ‘an experience of activity’ (James 1996a, 161). ‘The fundamental concepts are activity and process’ (Whitehead 1968, 140). ‘Bare activity, as we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change’ (James 1996a, 161)” (1). Sentences or fragments with no verbs or subjects or objects are prominent, for example: “An integral synchrony of befores and afters. Unbeen, beable. Time-like, logically prior to linear time. In the limits of the present. Wholly, virtually, vaguely. Differentially. Edging into existence” (89). At first these stylistic tendencies can seem gratuitous or annoying. But the absence of subjects and verbs also works to mark the absence of the conventional SVO structure of the English sentence, which separates actors from actions and objects rather than seeing them as emerging from relationality, virtuality, potential, and so forth. Where Harman’s desire to make objects fundamental or distinct from their qualities or relations is underscored in his prose by keeping subjects, verbs, and objects grammatically distinct, Massumi’s concern with event, occurrence, movement, and relation is expressed in a prose style where the event of a sentence can be, and often is, expressed as a single word or phrase.
 
The stylistic divergence between the two works accompanies a philosophical divergence between Harman’s Heideggerian-inspired defense of the ontological primacy of objects and Massumi’s James-Whitehead-Deleuze-based philosophy of the event. Semblance and Event begins with a direct echo of the opening of Emerson’s “Experience,” which begins with the question: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” Conventionally read in the history of philosophy as an American heir to the transcendental idealism of Kant, Emerson has in the past several decades begun to be reread within a more empirical tradition leading to pragmatism and beyond, with “Experience” figuring as a key text for this revisionary project. This project took off in earnest in the 1980s with work by such diverse figures as Stanley Cavell (who challenges the “pragmatist” label even while offering a radically de-idealized Emerson), Sharon Cameron, and Cornel West.¹ In the last decade of the 20th century and the first decades of this one, this line of thought has been taken up by (among others) Jonathan Levin, Cary Wolfe, and Paul Grimstad.² Although Massumi does not engage these debates directly, in the first sentences of Semblance and Event he finds himself in pretty much the same place as Emerson: “Something’s doing (James 1996a, 161). That much we already know. Something’s happening. Try as we might to gain an observer’s remove, that’s where we find ourselves: in the midst of it. There’s happening doing. This is where philosophical thinking must begin: immediately in the middle (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21 – 23, 293)” (1).
 
Where Massumi, like Emerson, would begin in the middle, for Harman philosophy should begin with the “naiveté” of origins, that is, with objects. Indeed objects, for Harman and speculative realists, are originary in an ontological or metaphysical sense. In Semblance and Event, Massumi implicitly distinguishes himself from such an object-oriented philosophy, focusing instead on the event. Where Harman argues that every object is singular, for example, Massumi insists that events are singular. Unlike Harman, who defines objects as distinct both from their qualities and their relations, Massumi describes the event as doubled relationally and qualitatively. When Massumi invokes Deleuze to claim that his own activist philosophy is a “nonobject philosophy,” it is difficult not to hear an invidious distinction from Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. But in contrasting Massumi’s “nonobject philosophy” with Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy” we should not lose sight of their shared opposition to the “subjectivist philosophy” that can be traced back at least to Kant. Activist philosophy, Massumi insists, is also a “noncognitivist philosophy.”
 
If activist philosophy, the concept that shares the stage with “semblance” and “event” in the book’s title, is neither an objectivist nor a subjectivist philosophy, what is it? The remainder of Massumi’s introduction takes up this question, providing a series of increasingly complex answers. In perhaps another implicit differentiation from the school of “speculative realism,” Massumi characterizes activist philosophy as “aesthetico-political” and “speculative-pragmatic.” In reading object-oriented philosophy as part of the “against-which” that Massumi’s arguments are formed from and directed towards, I don’t mean to overstate its place in Semblance and Event. Massumi has his eyes on artistic as well as philosophical works here and thereby articulates the book’s aims through both frames. By linking the “aesthetico-political” with the “speculative-pragmatic,” he also highlights the politically activist implications of his philosophy. Suggesting that “the politicality of process” is the book’s “one central concern” (13), Massumi means “activist philosophy” to operate not only in terms of, say, activist left politics but in what might best be understood as the politicality of the nonhuman.
 
Thus the “final question” posed by the introduction is “that of experience in nonhuman forms of life, and in nonliving matter itself” (25). Massumi has taken up this question before, most notably perhaps in “The Autonomy of Affect,” where he draws on Simondon and Deleuze to distinguish between the human and the nonhuman not in terms of “the presence or absence” of consciousness or reflection, but in terms of their “directness.” In Semblance and Event he draws more heavily on Whitehead to unfold the question of nonhuman perception and, implicitly again, on Emerson’s concept of “experience,” especially that of nonhuman forms of life. To answer the question of nonhuman perception Massumi follows Whitehead’s discussion of the electron as “an occasion of experience.” And although he only tangentially touches on this concern in the book, pointing his reader to a forthcoming essay for further elucidation, the introduction closes with a sustained meditation on the relations among human, biological, and physical perception. As he does elsewhere in his work, Massumi refuses any hard and fast distinctions between humans, biological nonhumans, and physical matter. He does so not to equate these different “occasions of experience,” but as a means of accounting for both their continuity with and the singularity of the “human form of life” (26).
 
Massumi deploys Whitehead’s contention that “Objectification itself is abstraction” to explain the relational process through which different objects take form as experience. Humans and nonhumans alike take forms as occasions of experience through abstraction. Massumi understands the history of humanity as a “semblance,” an “abstraction” that operates like tree-rings through our nonhuman animal body. Through “specific techniques of existence,” this nonhuman body makes all human experience co-occurrent with occasions of nonhuman experience. In concluding his introduction with the nonhumanness of the body, Massumi loops back to and updates his earlier work on affectivity—and perhaps unintentionally loops back to Emerson as well. Massumi cites Whitehead’s insistence that the body is as much a part of nature as a mountain or a river or a cloud to underscore his own point that “the body as technique of existence” is continuous with the world (27). Whitehead himself echoes the early part of Nature, where Emerson distinguishes between the “me” and the “not-me,” or between the soul and nature, insisting that the body be included with nature as part of the “not-me.” After beginning his book with Emerson in the middleness of “Experience,” then, Massumi ends his introduction very much where Emerson begins. I emphasize Massumi’s perhaps not altogether intentional Emersonianism not to accuse him, as he cites others as having done, of romanticism—a charge made and addressed in the chapter 2 interview of Semblance and Event (and which he partially embraces in terms of his commitment to intensity). Rather, despite Emerson’s loose designation in twentieth-century literary histories as an American romanticist, I call attention to Massumi’s Emersonianism in order to situate both him and Emerson within the alternative philosophical genealogy that links transcendentalism with pragmatism, even with the radical empiricism of James or Whitehead. And as the previous discussion makes evident, this is a genealogy defined largely by its insistence upon the inseparability of human from nonhuman nature through the mediation of the body.
 
Massumi criticizes the concept of the medium, which he would seek to replace with something like “technique of experience.” Asked in the interview of chapter 2 why he has shied away from talking about the concept of media, Massumi denies that this is a concept at all, because it has been confused with the digital, which is not itself a medium. Insofar as digital technology itself is often characterized as a medium, Massumi’s criticism is well taken. As I argued (with Jay Bolter) nearly 15 years ago in Remediation, while digital photography and digital cinema can both be considered media, digital technology itself cannot. To replace the concept of medium, Massumi introduces Michel Chion’s characterization of the cinematic medium in terms of “audiovisual fusion,” which Massumi feels can more adequately account for the experience of technique as an event. When media theorists (often misreading McLuhan) define media as extensions of the senses, Massumi argues, they miss the way that the senses are already prostheses of the body, are already in that sense media. However, Massumi’s acute dismissal of media theory—which oscillates between defining a medium in terms either of its technological support or its sensory modality—does not speak to the understanding of a medium in relational terms as “that which remediates.” As I have been arguing for the past decade and more, media should not be identified either with their material support or with their dominant sense modalities, but rather with the relational-qualitative processes of remediation that they undertake. Such a process of remediation always takes up both technological and sensory modalities but these are insufficient in themselves to define a medium. For a broad understanding of media, as for events, occasions or techniques of existence, remediation is key.
 
In the history of Western philosophy (from Aristotle and Plato through Kant and Hegel to Adorno and recent post-Marxian media theory), mediation has usually been understood more narrowly (albeit crucially) as a secondary concept, as something coming between the nonhuman world and the perceiving human, often as an imperfect or distorting filter between the object and the subject. Consequently, it has been understood almost exclusively in terms of logics of representation, symbolization, or ideology as preventing or making impossible the “direct and immediate” relation with the world which Massumi, following Whitehead and James, insists upon as a fundamental component of human and nonhuman experience. If, however, we start with Massumi and Emerson in the middle of things, then mediation can be seen not as secondary but as a primary event or operation; the distance between mediation and perception is narrowed considerably, and the concept of mediation becomes another way to talk about the ideas of semblance, event, and occasions of experience that Massumi’s book unfolds. Indeed, this notion of mediation as event is implicit in Massumi’s work, and his activist philosophy can be read as a useful starting point for thinking a philosophy of mediation, a philosophy which I began to sketch out fragmentarily in my earlier work on remediation and have continued to unfold both in my recent work on premediation and in my current projects focusing on the concept of mediation itself. In his final chapter, Massumi lays the groundwork for such a philosophy of mediation in the aforementioned discussion of the Benjaminian concept of “nonsensuous similarity”—particularly by bringing Benjamin together with Daniel Stern’s generative concepts of “affective attunement” and “vitality affects.”³ What I finally find most exciting about Semblance and Event is the way in which its engaging treatment of “activist philosophy and the occurrent arts” provides the initial steps for a philosophy in which the nonhuman body itself is understood as the model for, and on the model of, mediation.
 

“It is not enough to just be urgent and in opposition to state violence but uncritically practice it through exclusion, alienation, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia and a racist politic of policing authenticity. Prefigurative politics really resonated with me, meaning I wanted the work I did to prefigure the world or communities I wanted to live in.”

-Reina Gossett from Captive Genders (329)

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex contributes to the emergent surge of U.S. based transgender cultural critique over the first decades of the 21^st century. In conversation with monographs by Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein, J. Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, David Valentine, Gayle Salaman, Dean Spade, Micha Cárdenas, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, and Mel Y. Chen, edited anthologies such as the Transgender Studies Reader (with a second volume upcoming), Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary, and Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (forthcoming), and an expanding trans-media network including work by Yozmit, Ignacio Rivera, Kit Yan, Wu Tsang, Felix Endara, Shawna Virago, Sean Dorsey, and the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the collection of texts that is Captive Genders produces critical interventions assembled around embodied transgender, gender deviant, and queer experiences. These interlinked works share a marked shift towards transgender and gender non-conformant bodies as material interfaces with social regimes of gender and sexual control. But to interpret these pieces together as “emergent” is to already discipline their divergent workings and our interaction with them. These transgender and gender deviant interventions are increasing self-aware of the specificities of their mediums and their networked capabilities, whether they are print book, embodied performance, digital video, cell phone video, online installation, or electronic disturbance. And they depart from late 20^th century literary, cultural, and social theory that has tended to emphasize the representational economy of the public sphere—mediated by the linguistic sign—as the chosen field of inquiry and subversion. Therefore, they do not call for a politics of critical interpretation that would “read” an emergent subjectivity along a single plane of social history as much as they work through entanglements with, and transmissions of, the multiple times, spaces, and bodies subjected to the experience of so-called shared society and historical progress. Taking my cue from these transgender and gender devious works, this review of Captive Genders assembles, connects, transmits, and intensifies, rather than performing a critical interpretation.
 
Social movements for decolonization and racial, gender, sexual, and economic justice in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, in connection with social uprisings in Third World colonies and internationally, transformed the American public sphere to include communities segregated and subordinated by the apartheid U.S. state. People of color, civil rights, feminist, Third World, gay liberation, women of color/Third World feminist, leftist, and anti-war movements developed oppositional cultural practices as critical components of mobilizing against institutional white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, classism, homophobia, and heterosexism. These social mobilizations, therefore, did not only inject previously barred communities into the dominant public sphere, but also dismantled institutional public culture through the infusion of divergent, subordinated cultural imaginations. The flexibility and contingency attributed to the system of the sign by Euro-American post-Marxist intellectual and cultural movements after World War II, including postmodernism and poststructuralism, are indebted to the de-structuring of the representational economy of the public sphere by U.S. and Third World anti-colonial and social justice movements, as much as anti-fascist, anti-capitalist critical lineages in Europe and “new” postindustrial and neoliberal conditions. By the 1980s, the political and cultural transformations activated by 1960s/70s liberation movements began to be translated into niche political blocs, niche markets, and niche cultures. As highlighted by several pieces in Captive Genders, this moment of incorporation and backlash coincides with the moment when the penal system under the apartheid U.S. state expands into a booming prison industrial complex, at the edges of the “post”-apartheid American public sphere. The managed inclusion of previously excluded communities and cultural imaginations into the apparatuses of the U.S. state, including state sponsored cultural and economic industries, has had the effect of formalizing cultural and political activism into semi-technical skills and knowledge (including literary and cultural production and interpretation, 501(c)(3) community organizing, and legal and social advocacy) and severing cultural and political work from embodied communities. Also, regulated inclusion by the U.S. state has distanced marginally included, more resourced LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people, immigrants, people of color, and women from less resourced and poorer segments of these communities, whose direct experience of the state’s administrative and penal systems is often not mediated by measured participation in the public sphere. The writings collected in Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith’s Captive Genders provide multi-vocal accounts of those segments of communities that have been forcibly denied access to the post-apartheid American public sphere. People of color, economically impoverished people, and people with scarce or no access to quality education, health care, and social services make up the vast majority of the nearly 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in U.S. state and federal prisons and local jails, according to the most recent records released by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2010. These numbers do not include those incarcerated and “detained” in U.S. territories, military facilities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, jails in Native American lands, and juvenile facilities.¹ The mass number of people imprisoned and detained in U.S. prisons, jails, and facilities is bound to increase with the Obama administration’s implementation of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Presently, African American people comprise 12.6 % of the national population, compared to 38% of the U.S. federal or state prison population. White people comprise 72.4% of the national population, compared to 32% of the prison population. Latino/a people comprise 16.3% of the national population, compared to 22% of the prison population. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 2010 prisoner reports do not count Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and people identifying as two or more races in the prison population separately or explicitly. By deduction, these people together make up 7.3% of the prison population, while together comprising 8.8% of the national population.² Although females comprise 7% of the federal and state prisoner population, compared to the 93% male prison population, women make up one of the fastest growing populations in prisons.³ People in prison are predominantly from low-income backgrounds, lacking in educational and economic opportunities. Most are unemployed or under-employed prior to incarceration, do not have high school diplomas, read English below a sixth grade level, and have a history of drug addiction and/or mental illness.⁴
 
There is no official count of self-identified transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer people in prisons and jails. As highlighted in the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s 2007 Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons, transgender and gender non-conforming adults and youth experience high rates of systemic discrimination (housing, employment, healthcare, education, public benefits, and social services) and poverty, which contribute to heightened vulnerability to police profiling and brutality and imprisonment. As many of the contributors to Captive Genders point out, transgender and gender non-conforming people are illegible within a rigorously enforced binary gender prison system. The penal legal and prison system assigns prisoners to gender-based prison housing (male versus female prisons) based on prisoners’ genitalia, rather than prisoners’ self-determination, thereby exposing transgender and gender deviant prisoners to targeted policing and abuse. And binary gender prison standards often produce the conflation of trans- and non-conforming gender presentation with homosexuality and HIV positive status—all of which are targets for segregation, administrative isolation, harassment, surveillance, and violence by prison staff and other inmates.
 
The U.S. currently imprisons more people (in total number and per capita) than any other country in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran.⁵ The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. began to skyrocket in the mid-1970s with “tough on crime” policies that included mandated minimum sentencing for drug related offenses. These new policies ran counter to stable, if not diminishing, crime rates and the prevailing public perception that drug addiction was a public health, rather than a criminal court, problem (Schlosser). In 1972, there were fewer than 200,000 people incarcerated in federal and state prisons, in contrast to today’s 2.3 million prisoners.⁶ The nesting of government and private business interests—the prison industrial complex—that was consolidated in the passing of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York in 1973 and then nationalized in the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, has produced a booming, state subsidized industry that in 2007 drew $228 billion in U.S. federal, state, and local government funding for policing, corrections, and judicial and legal services nationwide and $7.7 billion from California’s state funds alone for prison construction.⁷ But, as the assembly of voices in Captive Genders suggests, the prison industrial complex is much more than a network of interests that can be put in check with reform and regulation. Its existence and continued expansion depend on the normalization of imprisonment, state violence and policing, and criminalization as common-sense solutions to the social problems of poverty, unequal access to quality employment, housing, education, health care, and social services, the de-industrialization of the economy through corporate globalization, and systemic racism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and sexism. The normalization of the prison industrial complex essentially produces a mass penal colony of segregated, confined, and incapacitated people as the common-sense counterpart to the “free” public sphere.
 
Stanley and Smith’s Captive Genders addresses the specific impact of the prison industrial complex on transgender, gender variant, and queer lives. Together, the writings in this collection argue for the interdependency of contemporary struggles for prison abolition and transgender and queer liberation. Moving beyond the memorializing of the 1969 New York City Stonewall Riots as the inception of the gay liberation movement, the book’s opening texts introduce a vast, unofficial archive of transgender and queer opposition to state violence and criminalization. Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade give a living record of the radical lineage of transgender and queer organizing that continues to develop and transmit transformative approaches to social justice, counter to the official solutions promoted by the well-funded gay rights agenda. Jennifer Worley recalls street organizing by gay and transgender youth involved in survival sex work in the San Francisco Tenderloin in the late 1970s, against routine police street sweeps, harassment, arrests, and beatings. Tommi Avicolli Mecca remembers queens in “radical drag” in 1970s Philadelphia, who used code (“Lily Law” or “Alice Bluegown”) to warn each other when police were targeting presumed prostitutes and those not wearing “two articles of clothing of your ‘appropriate’ gender.” Nadia Guidotto returns to lesbians and gays who overtook downtown Toronto in 1981 after brutal police raids on local bathhouses. These first pieces highlight the resistances of transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming people to systematic surveillance and criminalization by police and penal systems in the U.S. and Canada. They call into question current mainstream LGBT rights-based advocacy that further strengthens the policing, military, legal, and penal mechanisms of the state. As Bassichis, Lee, and Spade argue, hate crimes legislation, same-sex marriage, LGBT inclusion in the military, and LGBT specific reform of the penal system will secure benefits and protections for more resourced segments of LGBT communities, while leaving behind the increasing number of LGBT people, who, regardless of marital status, have no inheritance, no health benefits, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of relationships. Far from challenging compulsory heterosexuality, homophobia, and transphobia, this rights-for-some approach empowers state institutions in criminalizing queer and transgender people, poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people with disabilities.
 
Captive Genders’ second set of articles focuses on the multiplying forms of informal imprisonment experienced by transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming people within “transitional” spaces at the edges of the formal penal system. Based on his work in Louisiana juvenile courts, jails, and prisons, Wesley Ware calls attention to the ways in which the juvenile justice system has become a drop-off station for parents, police, and schools seeking to punish and convert transgender and gender non-conforming youth through state custody, without the right to jury trial or adequate legal representation. From within the confines of her Single Resident Occupancy hotel unit, Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu exposes the geographic grid of institutionalization, surveillance, and control built by a network of politicians, housing development corporations, and mainstream non-profit agencies and underpinning San Francisco’s sci-fi aesthetic. Michelle C. Potts links the abuses inflicted on HIV-positive detainees and prisoners in ICE facilities, state and federal prisons, and jails (including the denial of anti-retroviral medications and medical care, mandatory HIV testing, and segregation and solitary confinement of HIV-positive inmates) to the criminalization of HIV-positive status and transgender/queer bodies mandated by federal and state HIV disclosure statutes and bioterrorism laws since the 1990s. Erica R. Meiners asks if the expansion of sex offender registries since the 1980s, with a focus on child predators, really addresses sexual violence and harm towards children, when 70% of all reported sexual assaults against children are committed in a residence by “acquaintances” and family members, rather than in public spaces by strangers. And Meiners examines the less documented history of sex offender registries, which in the 1940s were used to collect information on “known homosexuals” across U.S. urban centers. Yasmin Nair argues that advocacy for LGBT immigration, including the Uniting American Families Act, has distilled the issue of queer migration down to the narrative of broken relationships between U.S. citizens and their model foreign partners and families. This reduced narrative deflects attention from the brutality, surveillance, and exploitation experienced by undocumented immigrants and the neoliberal economy that has produced the crisis in immigration. Lastly, Lori A. Saffin suggests that the current discussion around anti-transgender hate violence and hate crimes legislation does not deal with the interconnected structural inequalities lived by transgenders of color, who make up the vast majority of those targeted in hate-motivated violence.
 
Following the advocates and activists who map the expanding informal geography and economy of the U.S. penal system are writings by and about gender non-conforming, transgender, and queer prisoners. Kristopher Shelley “Krystal,” an incarcerated black gender-non-conforming lesbian, writes about experiencing harsher court sentencing, ongoing harassment, regulation of her gender appearance (for example, being locked in until she shaved), and the targeted use of excessive force and segregated isolation based on the perception of her more masculine appearance. She has been incarcerated for nine years in California thus far, starting with her time in juvenile hall at age sixteen and then her sentencing to adult prisons when she turned seventeen. Through snippets of his letter exchanges with two middle-aged queer and non-normatively gendered inmates who have lived at least half their lives in prison, Stephen Dillon attempts to describe the “unthinkable” interdependencies between the prison regime’s routine incapacitation and immobilization of prisoners and free civil society. Based on her prior experience in prison, Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet calls attention to targeted, repeated sexual and physical attacks on gender variant, transgender, and queer prisoners by prison staff and other inmates, condoned by the prison administration. Lori Girshick’s survey of masculine-identified people in two California women’s prisons shows the forced feminization of prisoners, policing of behavior viewed as sexual between inmates (“homosecting”), and harsher treatment of masculine-presenting prisoners. Based on inmates’ survey responses, Girshick contends that the current move to further segregate LGBT prisoners within the prison system compounds the damaging effects of the existing gender segregation of prisoners based on their genitalia (rather than their subjective gender identities), as well as the abuse and harassment by prison staff already experienced by incarcerated LGBT people. Paula Rae Witherspoon describes the near impossibility of finding employment on parole and avoiding cyclical re-imprisonment as an excon transsexual woman in Texas. Cholo urges us to help stop the mistreatment and destruction of African American transgender people, transsexuals, and the queer community as a whole in prison. blake nemec recounts witnessing the violent treatment and sexualized intimidation of his friend Kim Love, a transgender prison activist and former prisoner, during an unwarranted police takeover of her apartment. In an interview following nemec’s account, Love talks about the treatment of transgender prisoners, including systematic rape by prison officers, the use of transgender women’s bodies to pacify male inmates, and unequal access to medical attention based on the amount of money prisoners have to their name. While it might be tempting to read these accounts of prisoner life as texts that provide information in the form of letters, first person accounts, memoires, poems, survey results, and fragments of interviews, it may make more sense to read these fragmented accounts as code written under conditions of confinement and policing, transmitted through surveilled prison communications systems, and then re-transmitted by those who can access the representational technologies and economy of “the” or “a” public sphere to be addressed (Warner). Even for those no longer imprisoned, the act of speaking about life in prison involves the laborious translation of a carceral system that works through arbitrary force to incapacitate and coerce bodies into submission, movement, labor, and destruction (Gilmore).
 
Captive Genders’ concluding contributors focus on building interlinked communities of resistance for queer and transgender self-determination and prison abolition. Drawing from prison activism in Canada and Britain, S. Lambel develops a queer/transgender analysis of prison systems in the global north, linking the normalization of gender and sexual policing to the normalization of prisons. Interviewed by Jayden Donahue, Miss Major talks about internal shifts in transgender community organizing that have enabled greater leadership and participation by transgender women, especially transgender women of color, who begin “living outside of the law” the moment they express themselves. Through a poetics based in body memory, Vanessa Huang reflects on the losses sustained and new understandings gained by the anti-prison movement body after the organizationally led defeat of California’s 2005–2008 proposals to build “gender responsive” prisons. Julia Sudbury AKA Julia C. Oparah describes an abolitionist vision and praxis—“maroon abolitionism”—created by black prison activists in the U.S. and Canada, drawing from direct experience with gender oppression and racialized surveillance and punishment and also African diasporic traditions of resistance and spirituality. The final piece by Che Gossett connects divergent imaginings of prison abolitionism and gender self-determination, developed by abolitionist visionary Reina Gossett, political scholar Dylan Rodríguez, and radical organizer Bo Brown in points of contact with broader lineages of exiled transgender social history, radical intellectual work, and anti-prison organizing by prisoners.
 
Stanley and Smith’s Captive Genders is a “rogue text,” more interested in extending the work of transgender and queer prison abolition than offering a stable or definitive collection.⁸ True to this aim, the book closes with toolkits for supporting the abolition of the prison industrial complex, with exercises crafted by Critical Resistance and case studies assembled by Nat Smith. The networked texts of Captive Genders move beyond the confines of the bound-print cultural production to argue for the absolute necessity of abolishing the political and cultural economy of the penal colony underpinning the “free” public sphere. They call for the de-normalizing of state violence, control, and criminalization targeting transgender, gender variant, and queer people, people of color, economically impoverished people, youth, disabled people, immigrants, and women. From there, we may move to question why we are met with the force of the unimaginable when we try to think about life without prisons (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?). And this question may mobilize us towards the abolition of the society that could have prisons (Moten and Harney).
 

 
In the 1960s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters used a psychedelic school bus to take drug culture and heightened consciousness on the road. A Volkswagen bus served a similar purpose for the young Ken Friedman as he travelled across America, promoting an altogether different sensibility. Ken Friedman is one of the remaining living figures associated with Fluxus, a legendary group of artists, designers, composers, and architects whose members included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Milan Knizak, Mieko Shiomi, Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Joseph Beuys and more, with such friends as John Cage, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Lithuanian-born architect and artist Maciunas coined the term Fluxus from a Latin-based word meaning “to flow,” describing an experimental attitude to art that resisted conceptual and disciplinary boundaries. Higgins would later coin the term intermedia to refer to art forms that crossed boundaries so far that they gave birth to new forms and media (“Intermedia”). Fluxus itself was what Friedman describes as a “laboratory of ideas” (“Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas”), serving as a crucial launching ground for such new media as performance art, installation, artist books, video art, mail art, new music, and more.
 
When he met Maciunas in New York in 1966, Friedman was an aspiring Unitarian minister more interested in philosophy and theology than in art and design. His association with Dick Higgins’s influential Something Else Press put him into the orbit of other Fluxus artists, such as Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Peter Moore, and Meredith Monk, as well as an energised vibe of creative innovation. When Higgins saw Friedman make a small box resembling a handcrafted Fluxus object in Higgins’s New York apartment, he sent Friedman to meet Maciunas (Higgins, “Being” 3). From that moment, Friedman never looked back. Assuming the role of a “Fluxus missionary,” Friedman was pivotal in the distribution of Fluxus activities throughout the country from New York (Fluxus HQ) to San Diego and San Francisco (Fluxus West), as well as to England, where he conceived and helped to launch the year-long Fluxshoe. While some locations were more active than others, the compass points also designated Fluxus centres and activities in cities throughout Europe: Fluxus East was in Prague, Fluxus North was in Copenhagen, Fluxus South was in Nice. Friedman moved between various headquarters across the United States in his Fluxmobile, a Volkswagen bus which doubled as a traveling studio and portable warehouse of Fluxus artefacts. Friedman was attracted to the Fluxus convergence of an unashamedly conceptual approach to art and the socially engaged aspirations of the counter culture with an art that would merge into and embrace daily life. In making Fluxus mobile – literally – Friedman realised the Fluxus goal of taking art out of the gallery and into the street.
 
Fluxus was not well-known in the mid- to late 60s and its significance for contemporary art, design and culture has become apparent only in retrospect. Friedman shares the credit for this recognition; as Peter Frank writes, “historically and spiritually, Ken Friedman is Fluxus. He has helped to ensure that the elusive and supposedly ephemeral Fluxus movement is now regarded as a permanent force in art and presence in art history” (177). Indeed, Frank credits Friedman with the crucial, galvanizing influence that enabled the “substantiation of the Fluxus ethos in a context wider than art” (151). While this “youthful enthusiasm” was crucial to the formative years of Fluxus in the mid-60s, Frank also recognizes this wide-ranging influence in his later creative pursuits, notably with the Finnish ceramics manufacturer Arabia in the late 1980s. Friedman’s approach to ceramics as a Fluxus artist dramatically “married the modernist workshop with the post-modern assertion of variety and individuality” at a time when Arabia was seeking a fresh approach to the design of utilitarian, everyday household utensils that were also decorative objects (149). The Finnish design economist Esa Kolehmainen specifically pointed to Friedman’s “interartistic” approach to domestic design as a means of inventively combining utility, design, and art into a kind of “gesamtkunstwerk” that could be exhibited as well as sold.
 
Fluxus continues to resonate as a set of ideas around art, design, community, and collaboration in the age of the social network, participatory culture, and increasingly mobile media. Friedman was one of several artists who anticipated the artistic and social potential of the Internet and global communications when they pioneered mail and correspondence art in the early 1970s. (Friedman’s substantial contribution to the latter is comprehensively detailed in Norie Neumark’s and Anne-Marie Chandler’s 2005 At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet). In 1976, Nam June Paik published an equally famous essay in which he predicted the “information superhighway” that became the Internet; in 1994, Paik curated the first online Internet art exhibition, including Friedman’s work. And when Dick Higgins famously coined the term intermedia in 1965, he too foreshadowed the predominant multimedia paradigm associated with the digital age. In a discussion of the history of the triptych “intermedia, multimedia, media,” Friedman points to Higgins’s recognition and acknowledgment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s precursory use of the term “intermedium” in an 1827 lecture on Edmund Spenser (Friedman, “Coleridge/Intermedium”). For Friedman, though, Higgins was “too modest,” pointing to Coleridge’s one-off use of the term. Coleridge uses the word in the context of a discussion of allegory and parses it as “the proper intermedium between person and personification” (Coleridge 511). As a rhetorical figure, allegory bestows general or universal qualities on a singular figure (such as the Faerie Queen or Bunyan’s Pilgrim). The term would have no doubt been novel in Coleridge’s day, at a time when the Romantic poets were seeking a decidedly modern idiom for the practice of literary criticism. Friedman is correct in pointing out that Coleridge’s “‘intermedium’ was a singular term, an adjectival noun, and nothing more. In contrast, Higgins’s word ‘intermedia’ refers to a tendency in the arts that became a range of art forms and a way to approach the arts” (Friedman, E-mail). In contrast to Coleridge’s gloss of a correspondence between general and particular, then, intermedia connotes flow and dissemination, the formation of syncretic novelty from different elements. Similarly, there could not have been a more appropriate term than Fluxus to describe a general attitude to art making, society and culture that crossed the “boundaries of recognized media” and fused the languages of art “with media that had not previously been considered art forms” (Friedman, E-mail).
 
2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Fluxus. I have been cautious not to characterize it as an art movement, network or other collective noun. From the early 1960s to the present, such nomination is the first thing to be qualified or simply renounced in any discussion of Fluxus. This caution became a literal imprimatur of the Fluxus imagination when Dick Higgins published a manifesto as a rubber stamp in 1966:

 

Fluxus is not:

—a moment in history, or

—an art movement

(qtd. in Friedman, “Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas” 36)

From the very beginning, artists associated with Fluxus have followed Higgins’s contrariwise definition, seeking to avoid the pigeonhole identity of a stable and fixed thing. What then, we might reasonably ask, is being celebrated, remembered, memorialized or simply noted in 2012? Perhaps Owen Smith set the right tone in 1998 when he described Fluxus as an “an attitude towards art-making and culture that is not historically limited” (Fluxus 1). Smith goes further than most to avoid identifying Fluxus with familiar ways of thinking about historical definitions of art, classifications, periods and isms. Indeed, he suggests associating Fluxus with fable by pointing to Jorge Luis Borges on the recto cover of Fluxus: The History of an Attitude. Here, Smith quotes: “‘fluxus, therefore we are,’” attributing this to “Herbert Ashe, Orbis Tertius.” This is surely the sine qua non of resistance to defining Fluxus in terms of normative or familiar organizations, art practices or traditions. Here, in a metaphysical regressus, Smith identifies Fluxus as simply plural by using a fictional character who “suffered from unreality” (Borges 6), while associating the quote with a trans-historical literary hoax (you will find Ashe in Borges, but not the aphorism). Perhaps, after five decades of qualified definition and explanation of what Fluxus is and is not, its association with something plural, elusive and continuous (the conspiracy of authors known as Orbis Tertius) may be the most accurate way of conceiving this thing known as Fluxus. Towards the end of “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the narrator anticipates that “a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön” (Borges 18). It was perhaps this anticipatory consciousness of something yet to come that prompted the artist Tomas Schmit to assert in 1981 that “Fluxus hasn’t ever taken place yet” (qtd. in Smith, Fluxus 11).

 
As if responding to or even precipitating this sense of becoming, a series of exhibitions and publications continue to appear under the rubric of Fluxus. In 2009 Ken Friedman’s 99 Events accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Stendhal Gallery in New York. Friedman’s (1998) monumental Fluxus Reader (out of print and on the rare books register for many years) has just been released as an ebook. In 2011, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire launched a major touring retrospective of Fluxus works and artefacts curated by Jacquelynn Baas.¹ The exhibition catalogue, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Baas’s remarks in her introduction to the catalogue conspicuously partake in the resistance-is-not-futile discourse of not defining Fluxus: “This is not a book about the history of Fluxus. Still less is this book about the art history of Fluxus” (1). In 2011, The University of California Press published Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (1966–1973), a massive anthology selected from the influential journal of the same name. The book is a veritable Who’s Who of the experimental music scene of the late sixties, featuring many artists and composers associated with Fluxus, including Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Robert Filliou and Ken Friedman. (In one entry, Paik describes commissioning Ken Friedman to write his third synfonie.) Any discussion of Fluxus must now engage with the issue of its legacy. Ken Friedman and Owen Smith did so in 2006, emphasising that debates “on the past, present and even future of Fluxus make it clear that Fluxus matters to many people” (10). Friedman believes that there “were many Fluxuses and there still are” (10), while distinguishing “younger artists who consciously work in the tradition” established by “the artists long known as Fluxus artists” (6). The question of Fluxus’ legacy will no doubt continue as it moves beyond its half century anniversary. The tenor of this discussion may have already been cast, for as Friedman and Smith suggested, the “question of legacy is always beset with difficulties… Who inherits? Who has the right to inherit?” (5).
 

 

Ken Friedman was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne in 2008, where he is also University Distinguished Professor. Friedman’s daily activities consist of leadership and research. In his off-work hours, he continues to spread the word and keep the Fluxus spirit alive. As a sign of the increasingly wireless, disembodied times we live in, it is entirely appropriate that this interview was conducted via email. Things do, indeed, continue to flow.

 

 

 
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) notoriously transposes the narrative of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome from the waning years of eighteenth-century France to the spring of 1944 in the Republic of Salò, the German-occupied puppet state that was established in Northern Italy after Mussolini’s flight from Rome in 1943.¹ Yet the allegorical project of the film is more complicated than the historical analogy alone might suggest. As the scenes of the film progress, the visual trappings and reminders of Mussolini’s regime in fact disappear, as do the Nazi German troops who incongruously are shown operating in the service of the Italian Fascist dignitaries in a brief initial sequence. In homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pasolini divided the plot of Salò into three distinct “circles” (namely, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood), initially intending for these sections to correspond to three of the one hundred and twenty days chronicled in Sade’s brutal epic. In the finished film, however, the director abandoned this scheme of distinguishing the days in which the action unfolds, and only a few scenes derive their inspiration from the original Sadean scenario (Bachmann 71). Pasolini neatly translates the characters of the four aristocratic libertines whom Sade depicted living and operating in the château of Schilling into the modern archetypes of a banker, a duke, an archbishop, and a judge.
 
A heated controversy greeted the film’s preliminary screenings in 1975 due to its graphic portrayal of acts of rape, torture, and murder and its overt linkage of fascism and sadism. As a result, the general release of Salò in Italy occurred several years after post-production work on the film ended. In fact, government censors seized the release prints on November 12, 1975, just ten days after Pasolini’s murder in Ostia; as a result, the first public screening took place in Paris on November 23. It should be noted that Salò remains censored under anti-pornography or anti-obscenity laws in several countries to this day. To regard the film as an exercise in erotic arousal, however, is to obscure its actual argument. Pasolini’s impulse in Salò, Armando Maggi astutely remarks, is to desexualize Sade and to present us with modern-day libertines who “differ from Sade’s because they are expressions of a societal system, whereas in Sade the libertines defy the contemporary ruling system” (286–287).
 
Paraphrasing the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we might say that whereas Sade depicted a state of exception, Pasolini shows its consolidation into a rule. To put it another way: the filmmaker regarded the themes of his Sadean ur-text as a means to the end of mounting a specific political critique of modernity and of the growing ability of power to turn human bodies into objects. This critical undertaking, which runs through Salò and many of the last writings he completed before his death, suggests that Pasolini was one of the first thinkers to discern the emergence of a new field of conflict with its own distinct rules in the growing importance of biopower, even if he did not refer to the concept by this name but rather by his own idiosyncratic terms such as “the anthropological mutation” or “cultural genocide.” However, some readers have been put off by the fact that the tone of his polemic is “apocalyptic, not merely critical of Western society’s immorality,” to cite Maggi once again (258). To what extent must we regard Pasolini’s prophetic attitude as a self-aggrandizing tactic, as the irresponsible surplus value of poetic license? Should we not consider biopolitics rather than biopower to be the concept most relevant to our current conditions, as Hardt and Negri propose, since it seems historically inevitable that the multitudes eventually will be emancipated rather than disenfranchised by the contemporary forms of power?²
 
Watching Salò thirty years later, one finds that the film’s provocative aesthetic appeal has not notably changed. However, with regard to its ideologically scandalous position, its use of sexuality as a metaphor for power, the story is different. Saló, it turns out, shares the most troubling elements of its iconography with the photographic record of torture at Abu Ghraib.³ To revisit Salò in light of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the denial of legal rights to those interned at Guantanamo Bay is to ask whether the film’s apocalyptic scenario is best understood as an exploitative poeticizing of Sade or as a distressingly proleptic insight into the current methods of biopower.⁴ The film, in other words, may be read as a visionary exploration of the phenomenon of “horrorism,” a neologism introduced by Adriana Cavarero to highlight the vulnerability and exposure of the contemporary homo sacer. Such a reading rejects the idea that the imagery of Salò represents a morbid or instrumental use of cruelty for pseudo-titillating purposes. For if the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 372nd Military Police Company who perpetrated and photographed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were inured to their activities by their consumption of pornography, they certainly did not turn to Salò for such inspiration.
 
Pasolini’s film in fact is remarkable for never letting the spectator identify with the victims, who do not masochistically enjoy their plight as in pornographic movies. Sexual acts in Salò are brutal assaults involving no foreplay and no undressing, aimed at the humiliation of naked, defenseless, and otherwise inert bodies, which look almost as though they are waiting for the gas chamber.⁵ In an interview included in The Criterion Collection’s DVD reissue of the film, the British filmmaker John Maybury notes that Salò actively undermines the viewer’s expectations of what is erotic.⁶ The victims for the most part are hard to recognize from one scene to the next, because of the director’s explicit aim of avoiding any sentimental or erotic identification by viewers with the prisoners, which would have rendered the film unendurable or suspect.⁷ The camera thus generally eschews closeups of the characters in favor of long and medium shots. Pasolini seems to discourage any perverse proximity to the torturers by casting them in the concluding and most lugubrious scenes as spectators of the final crimes.⁸ Neither sadism nor masochism are conduits to pleasure in Salò. Even the enjoyment of a more non-committal and passive form of pleasure such as voyeurism is stigmatised by the film’s final sequence, which shows the libertines looking at their victims being tortured through binoculars held in reverse to reduce the size of the image. One might say of Pasolini’s masterpiece what Stephen Eisenman says about the photos taken at Abu Ghraib, that “notwithstanding the superficial S/M scenarios there is no erotic delectation or titillation in the pictures from Abu Ghraib, nothing sexy about them” (34–35).
 
A Troubled Reception
 
Salò features few visual reminders of its ostensible period setting and even fewer references to the characteristic tenets of fascist ideology, including racist and totalitarian ambitions. The few reminders are rather subliminal.⁹ The most explicit iconographic references are to Nazism, such as the line-up of naked victims, which might remind the viewer of a choreography for concentration camps. Although Pasolini claimed that the project of adapting Sade began to have interest for him once he settled on the film’s historical scenario, he also stated decisively that he was trying to present fascism in visionary terms rather than as the logical or historical consequence of Sade.¹⁰ He insisted that he was using sex in Salò as a metaphor for power relationships, after having taken the opposite position a few years before in his cinematic adaptations of The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). In these three films, which comprised his Trilogy of Life, he depicts sexuality as a space of transgression and a vital rejoinder to every act of domination.
 
Eventually, however, Pasolini abandoned this position, announcing in the essay, “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life,” which he published in Il Corriere della Sera, that his intellectual duty was to abandon tenderness for extreme lucidity. In his late interviews and articles, we find a sustained critique of a phenomenon that he called the genocide of neofascism. Fascism, that is, provided in his eyes the clearest illustrations of what Foucault would have called “biopower” in action. At various points in his essays of the 1970s, Pasolini aired his view that the period in Italy in which he was writing had given rise to an even more calamitous incarnation of fascism than the original. He saw this crisis taking shape in phenomena such as the “strategy of tension” or campaign of bombings and assassinations by neofascist terrorist groups, the devastating effects of unbridled consumerism, and the advancing cultural homogenization (omologazione) that was annihilating the distinctive interests of the rural and urban poor to the advantage of an ascendant bourgeoisie. As he put it, “Consumerism consists in fact of a real and effective anthropological cataclysm: I live existentially through this cataclysm, which at least for now is pure degradation: I live it through my days, through the forms of my existence, and in my body” (Scritti 107).¹¹
 
At the time, he was fascinated by the rapid advance of cultural and political change in Italy following the so-called economic boom that peaked in the early 1960s, an “anthropological mutation (mutazione antropologica)”, as he called it, that encompassed among other things the spread of demographic and behavioral science. Pasolini thus may be regarded as a crucial predecessor to Agamben who, in a more philosophically formal manner, elaborates Pasolini’s anxiety regarding the biopolitical. Their sense of unease stands in contrast to the posture adopted by Foucault, whose writing typically strikes a note of enlightened detachment toward biopower. The French philosopher indeed treats the practices of biopolitics as facts of life, the harmful consequences of which such as racism may be addressed perfunctorily, in passim. After his crucial turn to the care of the self, Foucault abandoned altogether his exploration of the biopolitical. Was it because, as Agamben suggests, this line of inquiry would have led him inexorably to the reality of the death camps, the logical conclusion of a genealogical investigation of biopower? Salò may well be viewed as a work that imagines the camp as the nomos of modernity and visualizes the plight of the homo sacer whose biological life survives her legal status. The victims in Salò can be killed but not sacrificed, not even to the racist aspiration of fascism proper. Power in Salò appears in its most rigid manifestations, captured in its genealogical origin in the state of exception, yielding no productive outcome, and impervious to strategic resistance. In this sense, Salò is a profoundly anti-Foucauldian film.¹²
 
Pasolini proposed that our understanding of the body itself was being transformed by the consumerist drives of neocapitalism. These pressures, he argued in his late epistolary treatise “Gennariello,” comprise a coercive power far more effective than any religious or moral doctrine. In his second letter to Gennariello, the author instructs the boy not to fear feelings of awe inspired by the sacred and warns him against believing that the “Enlightenment” of “progressive intellectuals” is the standard of the future. Contra Foucault, Pasolini maintained that the thinking of the Enlightenment was not helpful in criticizing the false ideals of bourgeois tolerance and hedonistic self-interest. Well before the contributions of Derrida, or Wendy Brown, Pasolini was one of the first critical voices to speak out against the hypocritical ethos of tolerance promoted by the new consumerist regime.¹³ He suggested in several articles that the culture of the contemporary nation-state and, in particular, of Italy was increasingly finding expression in “the language of behavior, or physical language.” In his eyes, every aspect of our corporeal being from hairstyles to clothing and bodily posture was determined by the conformism and hedonistic consumption resulting from the triumph of the marketplace. He cautioned that the resulting physical language had assumed a decisive importance over and above that of verbal language, which in his judgment had become “conventional and sterilized” under the sway of the reigning technocracy.
 
Pasolini thus discerned in this biopolitical territory of the “somatic” the essential symptoms of the mutazione antropologica and omologazione that he believed had grown to threaten any hope for Italy’s political well-being. To grasp the significance of this claim, we might recall that in the 1960s he took the standpoint that only the body offered a basis of reality, because as he put it, “It was in such physical reality—his own body—that mankind was living its own culture” (qtd. in Cerami 82–83).¹⁴ Yet, as he understood only in retrospect, the bourgeoisie had succeeded in establishing a new civil order that functioned through the denaturalization of the body. For Pasolini, the populace as a whole thus had ceased to possess its own physical reality. Because they failed to register the cultural changes that delimited our bodily experience, the films comprising his Trilogy of Life exemplified a sort of pop eroticism that he now felt had helped to make the “false liberalization” of the 1960s more plausible in appearance. By contrast, he increasingly occupied himself in the 1970s with biopolitical questions such as abortion, demographic methods of analysis, and the transmutation of bodies through the unrelenting operations of consumerism, a menace that was conspicuously absent from Foucault’s analytic of power. In Pasolini’s view of this period, “The new system of production . . . is not only the production of goods but of human beings” (Letters 92).¹⁵ He assumed what might best be described as an anxious stance toward biopower during the last years of his life.
 
Salò and Abu Ghraib: Porno-Teo-Kolossal
 
The imagery of Salò may be seen to anticipate the imagery of Abu Ghraib in many respects. Pasolini’s camera confronts us with images of humans being forced to imitate animals, acts of sexual molestation, victims being awakened in the middle of the night, and, most importantly, the cynical stupidity of the signori and the central position of women in inciting the torture. Abu Ghraib sadly seems to have had its own narratrici in Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman, and Lynndie England, whose roles in the abuse of prisoners were rehearsed repeatedly in the media coverage. That one purpose of Salò is to examine the spectacularized condition of modern-day torture—which is to say, the status of torture in contemporary culture as an object of visual enjoyment—is perhaps best illuminated by recalling that at one point Sergio Citti advised Pasolini to shoot the film almost entirely from the point of view of the torturers, who would be played by comic actors. In particular, Citti wanted to make the torturers “simpatici,” a proposition that Pasolini found ideologically repulsive (Pasolini, Cinema 2:3156). If the finished film departs from Citti’s thinking, it nevertheless grapples with questions he may have inspired, such as what part do jokes and other devices of amusement play in enabling acts of violence, and why might a comic reading of Sade be appropriate to present-day audiences? The writer and visual artist Laura Salvini argues that, whereas Citti aimed at a cynical reading of Sade, Pasolini wished to reveal the infantile core of Sadean philosophy by means of jokes, nonsense, and Dadaist methods that ultimately (and predictably) would result in a version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (50). It seems to me instead that the reverse is true, that the film brings to the fore something all too well-known, if rarely acknowledged, in the contemporary conception of torture by focusing on the pseudo-comic modes of its dissemination, familiarization, and consumption.
 
The scandal of Abu Ghraib certainly makes the issues raised by Salò more relevant than ever. We currently face an abundance of evidence that the operations of actual, governmental power in our world more closely resemble the torments pictured in Pasolini’s Salò than Foucault’s anodyne vision of liberal democratic biopower and vitalism. At this moment, to view Salò with a critical eye means to look at what is most lamentably recognizable of ourselves in today’s headlines. It is impossible now to speak of our alienation or historical distance from the film’s images of naked, anonymous bodies, corporeal punishments and abuse, and the violation of religious taboos to taunt and humiliate. In the film, the libertines’ staging of a contest for the most beautiful ass among their captives uncannily presages the photos of Iraqi prisoners arranged in pyramids so that only their bare buttocks can be seen. The scene from the second section of Salò, “The Circle of Shit,” in which boys and girls are ordered to crawl across the floor on all fours and to eat food from the same bowls as dogs anticipates the many pictures of Iraqi men being forced to behave like animals and being threatened by dogs. Finally, the actor who plays Durcet in the film may even be said to bear an unsettling resemblance to George W. Bush, especially in his habit of responding to all events with a kind of leering, canned laughter, a trait that in Bush’s case was seized on by popular comedians such as Jon Stewart.
 
Stupidity, as Avital Ronell points out in her book of the same name, was looked upon in the philosophical tradition as an epistemological mistake and as a particular species of error (20). As in the case of Hölderlin’s appreciation of Rousseau, Ronell reminds us, stupidity has been taken at times to imply a poetic disposition due to its association with characteristics such as innocence or simplicity (8). From the twentieth century onward, however, it has become increasingly difficult to deny that stupidity also has been the accomplice of violence, cruelty, and totalitarianism. A range of thinkers from Arendt to Musil argue that totalitarianism requires the subordination of intellect to doctrine, thus reinterpreting an attribute that Pope John Paul already had ascribed to the reverential aspect of stupidity, namely the submissive obedience to the father (9). Pasolini’s critical and artistic productions contribute in decisive ways to the work of mapping the political, ethical, and cultural contours of contemporary stupidity. Salò specifically undertakes to scrutinize the cynical dimensions of stupidity and to make visible the stupidity of “jouissance.” In his late essays and his unfinished novel Petrolio, Pasolini acutely traces the connection between hedonism, the capitalist ideology of tolerance, and idiotic enjoyment. The sections on the “passegiate del Merda” in Petrolio are in this sense exemplary. Not surprisingly, an important element of the anthropological mutation against which Pasolini warns his audience is the disposition to obey and conform to consumerism’s categorical imperative to enjoy. In Salò, he explores the darkest, most repugnant aspects of enjoyment as they manifest themselves in the “state of exception.”
 
Adriana Cavarero has coined the term “horrorism,” in a book that takes this neologism as its title, to designate the extreme forms of violence that we are forced to reckon with in contemporary culture—from suicide bombings to Abu Ghraib—as seen from the point of view not of the warrior, but rather of the vulnerable and powerless victim. In a chapter entitled “Female Torturers Grinning at the Camera,” Cavarero revisits Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to dispute his sweeping conclusion that the spectacularization of violence in the process of punishment disappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ultimately to be replaced by the effort to keep at bay barbarism and torture. That the tortures of Abu Ghraib were photographed, Cavarero convincingly argues, is not an accident and by no means surprising.¹⁶ Yet however strong we might find the visual correspondences between Pasolini’s film and the photos from Abu Ghraib, what is really most important in discussing both the work of cinematic illusion and the documents of historical reality is the realization that what we encounter in both cases is finally an eliciting not of pleasure, but rather of stupid enjoyment. Discussing the Abu Ghraib photos, Cavarero observes:

Even if sadomasochistic culture plays a part, sexual pleasure is perhaps an inappropriate term here. The photos do not convey the idea of carnal ecstasy (although there is arousal) but rather that of an obtuse and grotesque form of diversion, witless and trivial. What stands out in them is a spectral caricature of torture reduced to the level of filthy farce.

(Horrorism 110–11)¹⁷

I believe the same ethos, if we may call it by this name, is present in Salò, and it is no small achievement on the part of Pasolini to inject this farcical dimension into the narrative where there is none in Sade.¹⁸

In Salò, the least Sadean and least sophisticated character in the execution of his rituals also turns out ultimately to be the most interesting and contemporary for us as viewers, namely Durcet. Whereas the archbishop, the duke, and the magistrate maintain their air of snobbery and dignified heavy-handedness as they go about the performance of their tasks and punishments, Durcet presents himself as an anarchic, farcical torturer. For example, he does not himself put up any resistance to being sodomized in public, he lobbies actively for his favorite choice in the contest for the most beautiful derrière, and he plays with panache the female role in a mock marriage ceremony to one of the other signori. Yet the most consistent and relevant trait of Durcet is the stupidity of his humor, which is made manifest repeatedly throughout the film. When somebody dies in the film—which for all the atrocities that are shown on camera takes place only in the final few minutes of Salò—Durcet lamely attempts to diffuse the tension by reciting inane jokes.
 
Blangis, the duke, functions as the ideological fulcrum of the narrative. He not only defines for the other characters the stakes and rules of the game, but also reserves for himself the privilege of articulating the nature and identity of the group. For example, in the Circle of Manias, he announces: “We the Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally once that we are masters of the state. In fact, the only true anarchy is that of power.”¹⁹ By contrast, it is left to Durcet to provide the “laugh track” of the film through his continual, neurotic self-amusement. When a boy tries to flee and is shot while the libertines are bringing the captives to the villa in the Antinferno sequence, Durcet comments with the following joke:

In the persona of Durcet, Pasolini endows Sade with a pseudo-comic chorus, one in which he stigmatizes the association of stupidity and cruelty. Durcet continues his infantile ride through the film by indulging himself with bouts of exhibitionism, as when he asks a man who is sodomizing a girl to sodomize him instead (Cinema 2: 2040).

 
The scene shows him taking a grotesque merriment in his predicament, although it is impossible to speak of the episode in terms of pleasure or enjoyment. Although the incident might look at first sight like one of the crudest moments in Salò, the “event” of Durcet’s sodomizing takes place without any trace of drama because of his cheerful, if stupid, attitude. This undramatic occurrence is quickly followed by the recitation of another of Durcet’s “numerical” jokes, after everybody realizes that one of the girl prisoners has committed suicide. Durcet’s jokes demonstrate first of all his cynical indifference to all events. In the passage of dialogue cited above, this attitude is evident in the perfunctoriness with which he subtracts the murder victim from his tally of the boy prisoners and then offers a feebleminded pun based on the sound of the word “otto.” Durcet’s jokes manage somehow to produce an easy consensus. In fact, it is only after his half-baked attempts at humor that a stage direction using the word “all (tutti)” as a means of encompassing the community of the guards and torturers (if not the victims) achieves a paradoxical validity. The jokes themselves are neither ironic, nor revelatory, nor witty in the least. Their autistic self-referentiality and reliance on elementary wordplay and numbers betray a mechanical and grotesque simplemindedness. According to both Freud and Lacan, we should remember, jokes rely on a momentary bypassing of the symbolic order but not on its suppression. In a real joke, an unconscious thought is expressed while being censored at the same time (hence the humor, the deformation, the punning energy, etc.).
 
In Salò, the “symbolic,” communicative quality of Durcet’s jokes presumes a shared state of stupid “jouissance,” as no witty detour through the domain of the symbolic is available. His “comic” performances thus establish a form of cynical stupidity as the totalitarian ethos of Salò. Indeed, the last two jokes that Durcet utters in the film are more openly aggressive, if not funnier. Thus, in the Circle of Shit, he addresses one of his victims as follows:

And of all the signori, it is to Durcet that Pasolini gives the final words of the film, of course in the form of yet another joke. As his friends are torturing and killing their victims in the courtyard, Durcet, looking on, asks one of the guards:

 

The desultory punch line is all the more jarring since the political premise of the joke, including the reference to Bolshevism, seemed to promise a more substantive effort. Yet we can hardly expect Durcet, after all, to express any passion about his ostensible creed of Fascism or any visceral antipathy to Communism. He is a cynic whose “enlightened false consciousness” derives no pleasure from subversion or satire, to use Sloterdijk’s definition in his Critique of Cynical Reason.

 
We may thus take Durcet as the progenitor of the sensibility responsible for Abu Ghraib at the highest levels of command, but also as the embodiment of their “phenomenological” manifestation in the actions of Charles Grainer, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and their colleagues who were captured striking their grotesque poses for the camera. Like Durcet, such individuals reveal their banality in the indulging of what Cavarero aptly calls “the stupidity of a criminal act committed in the excitement of farce” (Horrorism 112; Orrorismo 150). In this connection, we might reflect on the chilling interview with Sabrina Harman in Rory Kennedy’s documentary, The Ghosts of Abu-Ghraib. What is of particular interest is the matter-of-fact tone and faux-innocent manner with which Harman explains her involvement in prisoner abuse in reply to Kennedy’s questions. Harman explains her big smile in the photos taken at Abu Ghraib by insisting that she always smiles for the camera, and explains that the photos exist because like many other people she is in the habit of taking pictures of everything. Although the film contains other disturbing “explanations” of Abu Ghraib from many different sources, Harmon’s is one of the worst in virtue of the cynical stupidity of her remarks. In this sense, the truth of Salò might be glimpsed most clearly in Harmon’s self-justification and in Cavarero’s observation that Abu Ghraib has presented horror “in the imbecile and idiotic form of the leer” (Horrorism 115; Orrorismo 154).
 
For Pasolini, the parodic debasement of culture that he set out to expose in Salò provides a clear symptom of how dependent the body of neocapitalism had become on the circulation of cynicism through its veins. What was at stake in this process of debasement becomes more evident if we pay attention to one of the subtler changes that was taking place on what Pasolini would have called the “somatic” level in Italy. Throughout his career, he was particularly alert to the semiotics or poetics of smiles, perhaps secretly agreeing with Dante’s tenet in the Convivio that such expressions are like colors behind the glass of the soul.²³ Consequently, we may find it pertinent that the libertines in Salò wear perpetual “sneers” on their faces, conveying reflexive idiocy in the president’s case, perplexed lasciviousness in the archbishop’s, and false bonhomie in the duke’s.
 
During the same period that he was involved in shooting Salò, Pasolini noted a transformation taking place in facial expressions among children in Italy: “They do not know how to smile or laugh: they can only grin or grimace” (Letters 14).²⁴ Among the most painful consequences of the mutazione antropologica and omologazione of Italian culture resulting from the new order of power, in his estimation, were the erasure of regional dialects from the Italian language and the disappearance of “the old way of smiling.”²⁵ The topic of smiling is of more than peripheral importance to understand Pasolini’s late style insofar as in his visual phenomenology, the spontaneity and sympathetic expressiveness of the smile offered a possibility of relief from the detachment and repressive conformity of bourgeois laughter. The repertoire of bodily and facial responses to the cruelty and suffering that occupy our attention in Salò, however, clearly raises the prospect of an epoch in which cynical laughter has triumphed, in which every smile is converted into a frozen mask of pain.
 
Pasolini Against Foucault
 
Foucault first encountered Pasolini’s filmmaking in the documentary Love Meetings (1964), which explores Italian sexual mores through interviews with men and women of various classes and regional origins. At the time, the French philosopher looked approvingly on the Italian director’s investigation of sexual politics for exposing how the rhetoric of “tolerance” suppresses emotional and cultural differences in order to uphold the dominant social regime (Foucault, Aesthetics 229–231). On viewing Salò, however, Foucault took Pasolini to task unsparingly, assailing what he regarded as the filmmaker’s shallow decision to treat sadism as a phenomenological manifestation of fascism. Scrutinizing Salò through the lens of Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Foucault charged Pasolini in “Sade, sergeant du sexe” with contributing to an aestheticized, morbid association of sadism with fascism that seemed to him a specious fad of the moment (Aesthetics 223–227). Foucault condemned Salò for perpetuating an exploitative image of sadism that encouraged a hierarchical, punitive idea of sexuality. Sadomasochism instead represented for him an ironic, self-conscious form of life with the potential to deconstruct the bodily regimes of pleasure enforced by less playful modalities.
 
Pasolini shares with Foucault a fundamental emphasis on what the French thinker called “biopower.” Yet Foucault and Pasolini clearly diverge on where the ascendancy of the biopolitical may lead. Whereas biopower for Foucault entails the possibility of the productive rearticulation of social relations, admittedly at the risk of enabling sexist and racist disciplinary practices, for Pasolini it instead raises the prospect of irresistible authoritarian oppression. In his late work, Foucault often disputes the idea that power might be the metaphorical referent of sex or, in other words, the secret underlying our ethical and political life (Dits 1554–1565). His idealization of sadomasochism serves to expand contemporary notions of sexuality, which to a significant degree still customarily take as their starting point the Freudian teleology of genitality, into the territory of de-genitalized pleasure.²⁶ In so doing, Foucault at the same time proposes through his new cartography of sexuality the genealogy of a new subject. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, he writes: “To conceive the category of the sexual in terms of the law, death, blood and sovereignty—whatever the references to Sade and Bataille, and however one might gauge their ‘subversive’ influence—is in the last analysis a historical retroversion” (Reader 271–272). Considering the implications of this statement for Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Sade, we might ask whether or not we should consider Salò another and perhaps more acute symptom of the “historical retroversion” that Foucault attributes to Sade and Bataille and that he disdains for reflecting a morbid understanding of sexuality in terms of “law, death, blood and sovereignty.”
 
At first glance, the film might appear to rework the themes of sovereignty and blood that characterize Bataille’s view of sex and, in Foucault’s eyes, reveal its cultural obsolescence. A more nuanced analysis, however, might take Salò to be concerned more with the problematic persistence of sovereignty in the supposedly benign time of biopolitical, administrative power than with a triumphal erotics of the death instinct. In this sense, it is important to distinguish between Pasolini’s and Bataille’s projects. Whereas Pasolini’s film retains its exemplary force in the era of Abu Ghraib, Bataille’s writing does not. Giorgio Agamben helps to explain the reason for this difference when he identifies the political and critical limit of Bataille’s thought: “To have mistaken such a naked life, separate from its form, in its abjection, for a superior principle—sovereignty or the sacred—is the limit of Bataille’s thought, which makes it useless to us” (Means 7). Agamben also comments in Homo Sacer that while Bataille rightly recognizes bare life as a radical form of experience, he fails to grasp its political significance and mistakenly locates it in an ill-defined domain of the sacred, due to its association with the phenomenon of sacrifice (112).²⁷ By contrast, Pasolini makes a deliberate effort to emphasize moral and political questions in depicting the bare life of the disempowered body. As we have noted already, he furthermore studiously avoids promising the viewer an enjoyable loss of identity in Salò à la Bataille.²⁸ A sovereign use of negativity is not what informs Pasolini’s work as it does Bataille’s.²⁹
 
In the “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini observes that the ideal of sexual liberation reveals itself as an illusion under the conditions imposed by consumer culture:

Now all that has been turned upside down. First: the progressive struggle for democratization of expression and for sexual liberation has been brutally superseded and cancelled out by the decision of consumerist power to grant a tolerance as vast as it is false. Second: even the “reality” of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power—indeed such violence to human bodies has become the most macroscopic fact of the new human epoch.

(Letters 49–50)³⁰

What is apparent to Pasolini is that the “anthropological mutation” of unrestrained consumption is not “reversible” and leads irrevocably to an “adaptation to degradation” (Letters 50–51).³¹ Unlike Foucault, who glibly defines power in terms of its potential for strategic reversibility or retournement tactique (Histoire 208), Pasolini sees little possibility of counteracting this process of cultural brutalization.³² In this sense, Pasolini’s pessimism differs markedly from both Bataille’s self-indulgent romanticism and Foucault’s pragmatic optimism.

 
If we see Foucault as tending to argue for a linear, chronological progression from sovereignty to governmentality and then to biopower, a progression that ultimately entails the dissolution of sovereignty, then we may conclude that Salò represents a radically different view of history.³³_Salò confronts us with the image of contemporary culture as a continuum in which power operates without restraint, suggesting that even in an epoch when it appears that governmentality has superseded sovereignty, sovereign force has the last word. Viewing Salò in the wake of Abu Ghraib makes evident Pasolini’s prescience in insisting that uninhibited power quickly results in a totalitarian universe of suffering, especially at a historical moment when power gives the appearance of having been domesticated or “urbanized.” The film persistently raises a troubling question: has anything in fact been gained when civil authority renounces the prerogative of sovereignty “to make die and let live,” as Foucault formulated it, and instead embraces the imperative of biopower “to make live and let die”—that is, to sustain itself through the management of the biological life of the population? Whereas for Foucault, Sade represents the genealogical origin of the diversification of power into the modalities of the sovereign and the biological, for Pasolini, the French libertine personifies their ultimate point of convergence.
 
In a discussion of biopolitics in the last chapter of the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault characterizes the strategic importance of Sade as marking the transition from a symbolic of blood to one of sexuality:

Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations. Sade and the first eugenists were contemporary with this transition from “sanguinity” to “sexuality.” . . . Sade carried the exhaustive analysis of sex over into the mechanisms of the old power of sovereignty and endowed it with the ancient but fully maintained prestige of blood; the latter flowed through the whole dimension of pleasure. . . . In Sade, sex is without any norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own nature; but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power which itself knows no other law but its own.

(Reader 269–70)

Foucault speaks of sex as submitted in Sade to a “naked sovereignty” and to the “unlimited right of all powerful monstrosity” (270). This idea of sex as being subject to a “naked sovereignty” that is totalizing and inescapable in its claim on the subject is exactly what Pasolini is interested in as a reader of Sade, it seems to me. Yet it is important to observe that the logic of Salò advances from sex to blood, reversing the genealogy that, according to Foucault, Sade inaugurates. Pasolini divides the film into a sequence of three “circles” or episodes, the last of which, titled “The Circle of Blood,” follows in the narrative after the circles of mania and of shit. The action of the film thus unfolds according to a scheme that is Pasolini’s own idea and that abandons the original sectioning of Sade’s treatise into four untitled parties. As part of its project to deconstruct the illusory notion that sovereignty gives way to governmentality under the auspices of the biopolitical, Salò restores blood—not sex, not even monstrous sex—to the position of ultimate symbolic importance. Instead of providing the basis of a new language-game of erotic play, sadomasochism in Pasolini’s eyes exposes its archaic condition as an unmediated, hierarchical exercise of power. Whereas Foucault hoped that the rituals of S/M might reveal avenues for the conversion of power into sexual pleasure, Pasolini soberingly reminds us that, in the domain of our social and political institutions, the other way around is the historical reality.³⁴

 
From Foucault’s disparaging comments about the film in a 1975 interview, we might surmise at first glance that his chief objection to Salò was, in fact, that it suggested to him a mistaken historical association of sadism with fascism:

Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madman of the eighteenth century but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable. . . . The problem raised is why we imagine today to have access to certain erotic phantasms through Nazism. . . . Is it our incapacity to live out this great enchantment of the disorganized body that we project onto a meticulous, disciplinary, anatomical sadism? Is the only vocabulary that we possess for transcribing the grand pleasure of the body in explosion this sad fable of a recent political apocalypse?

(Aesthetics 226)³⁵

Foucault appears to hold that “the grand pleasure” promised by the present-day culture of S/M is categorically different from either the “petit-bourgeois” phenomenon of Nazism or Sade’s vision of sovereign sexual punishment.

 
Pasolini and Agamben on Bare Life
 
In its consideration of the managerial and institutional technologies of control, Foucault’s analysis of power might appear at first glance to be more sophisticated than Pasolini’s critique of consumer society.³⁶ As I have been arguing, however, the Italian filmmaker discerned, no less than the French critic did, that contemporary forms of life had come under the dominion of a new phenomenology of biopower, although the two thinkers reached very different conclusions about what this development signified. In widely-read critical essays such as “Discourse on Hair,” “Study of the Anthropological Revolution in Italy,” and “Article of the Fireflies,” which Pasolini published mostly in newspapers such as Il Tempo and Il Corriere della Sera at the end of his career, he clearly set out to examine the increasingly ruthless governmental and commercial methods of control over the life of the general population in Italian society.³⁷
 
His perception of an “anthropological mutation” or “cultural genocide” that could be attributed to the overwhelming commodification of social relations reflected his position that the workings of the biopolitical domain represent unmistakably “totalitarian” forms of power: “Italian culture has changed in its forms of life, in its existential texture, in a concrete way. . . . Whoever has manipulated and radically (anthropologically) changed the large masses of Italian peasants and workers is a new power which I find difficult to define: but I am certain that it is the most violent and totalitarian that has ever been” (Scritti 57–58).³⁸ Pasolini highlights the adverb “anthropologically” in this sentence by putting it in a parenthesis, thus giving special emphasis to the occurrence of change at the most basic level of human life and suggesting a certain incredulity at the pervasiveness of the process. The parenthesis seems to emblematize Pasolini’s dread of a new, “exceptional” power.
 
More particularly, Salò brings to light the vertiginousness of the state of exception— that is, the way it functions as a political mise en abîme—insofar as the film presents the Republic of Salò as a unique political exception within the larger, historically monstrous exception of Fascism itself. As the duc de Blangis, the ideological master of ceremonies, announces to his victims in the film’s prelude, the section titled Antinferno: “You are outside the boundaries of any legal order, nobody on earth knows you are here. As far as the world is concerned, you are already dead. . . . And here are the laws that will rule your life inside this place” (Cinema 2: 2036).³⁹ By putting these words in the mouth of the duke, the film locates the origin of lawless regulative force over the life of the subject in the state of exception. At the same time, Salò is keen to establish a libidinal profile for this extra-legal form of power. In his evident distance from Bataille’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power, as I have remarked earlier, Pasolini comes close to presaging many of Agamben’s positions. Pasolini’s thought may be aligned with that of Agamben in suggesting not only that there is no real historical relief from sovereignty, but that in fact contemporary conditions have exacerbated the oppressiveness with which sovereignty imposes itself on the subject by declaring a state of exception.⁴⁰ Agamben differs from Foucault in regarding the inclusion of bare life in the political realm as the original mission of sovereign power and not as a modern phenomenon. For Agamben, what characterizes the current political order is not its mere “inclusion” of bare life but rather the fact that the political realm comes to coincide entirely with the realm of bare life (Homo Sacer 9). It is in this spirit that Pasolini’s Salò may be said to illustrate Agamben’s radical and, as some critics would say, hopeless position. All the victims in Salò are exemplary cases of the “sacred” man or woman who is situated for Agamben “at the intersection of a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed, outside both human and divine law” (73). In the film, the Republic of Salò represents the experience of the concentration camp precisely in its aspect as the “nomos of the modern” (166).
 
By reading the film in this manner, I do not wish to suggest that Pasolini did not elsewhere take an interest in sadism or masochism. If we as readers seek a demonstration of his talent for the mise en scène of masochistic fantasy, however, we should turn to his unfinished epic novel Petrolio, rather than to Salò. Yet even in Petrolio, he problematizes the relationship between power and sexuality in a way that makes it impossible to give the last word naively to eros. Salò anticipates Agamben’s concept of bare life in the sense of depicting how exposure to absolute power reduces life to the merely biological dimensions of existence. The point might be rephrased by saying that Pasolini’s warnings against the cultural genocide of consumerism bespeak his awareness of the advancing transformation of bios into zoe, the meaningless substratum of capitalist triumph. In his early career, the director seemed to maintain some hope of redemptive cultural possibilities for a homo sacer of Italian society such as the titular character of his first film, Accattone (1961). In keeping with this hope, he adopted what he called a “sacred technique” of cinematography that suggested a quasi-religious reverence toward his subject matter by reinterpreting specific techniques of the Italian pictorial tradition—for example, only filming his characters frontally and never showing them entering or exiting a scene. Yet he quickly grew sceptical of the potential for social and cultural repair. Reflecting on his directorial debut near the end of his life, he wrote, “Accattone and his friends went silently toward deportation and the final solution, perhaps even laughing at their warder. But what about us, the bourgeois witnesses?” (Letters 104).⁴¹ By the time of Salò, Pasolini had no illusions about any potential salvation for the homines sacres of contemporary history.⁴²
 
To gauge just how disenchanted he had become, we ought to consider his impatience with Elsa Morante’s bestselling novel History (1974), which was published just a year before the initial release of Salò. History relates the travails of a schoolteacher named Ida as she struggles, during the events of World War II, to protect and to provide for her son Useppe, the child of Ida’s rape by a German soldier. In a review published in Il Tempo, July 26, 1974, Pasolini dismissed Morante’s sentimental triumphalism, which he suggested gave a false view of life: “ . . . . Morante does not ‘represent’ life, but in fact celebrates it” (Descrizione 464). At the end of another essay on the novel published on August 2, 1974, Pasolini took Morante to task for propounding an ideologically and philosophically simplistic opposition between history and life, pointedly asking, “How can one separate history as Power from the History of those who are subjected to the violence of that power?” (Descrizione 472). He attributed to the novelist a particularly naïve version of Spinozist vitalism, a stance that he felt led her unrealistically to posit life as an antidote to history. On this ground, we might agree with Agamben’s proposal in Profanazioni that Pasolini’s Salò ought to be viewed as a serious parody of Morante’s La storia.⁴³
 
The Aesthetic State of Exception
 
There is a long tradition within Western art, as Stephen Eisenman reminds us, devoted to the aesthetics of suffering. Examples of this lineage, such as the famous, antique sculpture of Laöcoon and his sons, may be defined by their achievement of what Aby Warburg called the “pathos formula” of perfect coincidence between archetypal form and emotional content. According to Eisenman, the genealogy evolves from the ideal of the beautiful death enshrined in classical Greek and Roman culture through the art of the Renaissance and the Grand Style, when a certain reverence for sacred and erotic violence prevailed in the modern imagination, and extends to the “entente between torturer and victim” now all-too familiar from photographic imagery and other mass media. Notable objections to the dominance of this paradigm include Hogarth’s satirical repudiation of the classical tradition as well as the anti-war paintings of artists such as Goya and Picasso (in the significant instance of Guernica) (60–91). Notwithstanding such protests, Eisenman concludes that imperialism, fascism, and mass culture have made the oppressive influence of the “pathos formula” inescapable (92). Pasolini’s Salò ought to be seen as one of the most powerful challenges to the “pathos formula” in contemporary culture, as its peculiar brand of pathos or excessive expressiveness cannot be passively absorbed and consumed. The film poses hard critical and political questions to the viewer and drives home its argument with explosive verve and theatricality. More than any cruel or pornographic subject matter, it seems to me, this challenge has been the source of the film’s civic rejection and notoriety.
 
Salò indeed deserves to be recognized as a serious parody, as Agamben has suggested, and not only of Elsa Morante’s pedestrian achievement in History. The film is constructed as a parodic mise en abîme of references to literary and cinematic masterpieces that comprehends not only Sade’s Sodome, but also Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s poem in fact provides Salò with its Antinferno as well as its circles of mania, shit, and blood, thus establishing the concentric topography of the narrative. The parataxis and framing devices of storytelling that are manifest in the ostensible, Sadean ur-text thus have less influence as structuring principles than the gravitational impetus of the film toward the abyss of Dante. From a cinematic perspective, the opening sequence of Salò strikes a note of decided irreverence toward the historical and narrative premises of Neorealism when, during the initial round-up of prisoners for the enjoyment of the four signori who are the film’s main characters, we see a mother trying to give a scarf to her son, Claudio, in mock homage to Sora Pina’s similar gesture in Rome, Open City. Repeatedly, the film ridicules bourgeois taste, manners, and judgment, particularly with respect to literary matters. For example, the signori invoke Proust without showing the slightest understanding of the French novelist’s complex inquiry into time and memory. The four libertines pretentiously reappropriate Proust’s notion of “jeune filles en fleur” (young girls in bloom) as the label for their female victims because one of them is named Albertine. The grotesque self-validation involved in this gesture gives the impression of an especially debased form of bourgeois egoism and calls into question any possibility of aesthetic recuperation. In the Circle of Shit, the film even stages a sustained travestying of democratic process when the signori call for a vote to determine the most beautiful ass among the naked bottoms of their victims. Finally, the film may be interpreted as a caricature of that very association of fascism and sadism of which it stands accused.
 
Pasolini labors to avoid aestheticizing cruelty in Salò by methodically satirizing the aesthetic snobbery of the signori, depicting them as poseurs who surround themselves with works of avant-garde art, quote Baudelaire and Proust, and sprinkle their conversation with French as if in a burlesque of fin de siècle, bourgeois domesticity. Dante Ferretti’s extravagant set design for Salò furnishes in art deco style the palatial villa where the film’s events unfold and makes a prominent display of the abstract paintings of Fernand Léger. The furniture maintains for the most part a geometrical purity of line yet occasionally displays hints of ornament, as if to embody an art besieged by mass production, a last gasp of original expression in the age of technology (cf. Benjamin on the Jugendstil in the Arcades Project). Leger’s paintings further elaborate this drama of the human haunted by the mechanical, at the same time that they stage a disorienting struggle between depth and surface. The suffocating atmosphere of the villa is enhanced by Pasolini’s and Ferretti’s deliberate choices, as not only the innocent victims of the signori, but also language, art, and thought come under attack in a continuous, totalizing, and oppressive domain that encapsulates the operations of neocapitalism and well might be called “saturated life.”
 
For this reason, we may discount Leo Bersani’s and Ulysse Dutoit’s assertion that aesthetics in Salò is used to achieve a Verfremdungseffekt or distancing of the viewer, as a way of keeping violence at bay (29). Indeed, Ferretti may be said to have created one of the most magisterially disturbing sets in film history, although it should be noted that he was helped in the end result by the equally talented costume designer Danilo Donati. Far from distracting the viewer from the agonies of the libertines’ victims, the aesthetic surface of the film reflects the violence without beautifying or otherwise mystifying it, which may be one of Pasolini’s greatest achievements.
 
Not accidentally, mirrors are present in almost every shot of Salò. In some crucial sequences, two large mirrors stand opposite each other, creating a visual mise en abîme of the torture scene that serves to intensify the viewer’s horror. Mounted in wrought-iron frames whose rectilinear ornamental patterns consort with the general art deco look of the villa, the mirrors promise a containment of the image that they ultimately fail to deliver. The Bauhaus furniture, the iron-bound mirrors, the wall-mounted triangular lamps faltering ambivalently between mechanical lines and more organic, wave-like shapes – all these details are the symptoms of an art under the malign spell of technology, as the selection of abstract paintings by Leger and by what appear to be an assortment of Futurists would appear to confirm. The overall aesthetic of the villa flirts with some vestigial concept of decoration, as in the case of the wall lamps that surreptitiously hint at a naturalistic principle of roundness. The large scale of the figures on display in the paintings by Leger suggests an allegory of the final, grotesque throes of figurative pictorialism, as they float like anxious, dehumanized mannequins in the void. The other paintings, including what looks like an example of the Fascist painter Mario Sironi’s work, generally uphold a pseudo-Futurist strain of abstraction that rapidly comes to look banal in its context.
 
As I already have noted, Pasolini tried in his earlier films to sacralize the image through techniques such as his insisting in Accattone on frontal views of the characters in order to evoke Masaccio’s compositions, alluding in Mamma Roma to Mantegna’s painting of Christ’s deposition, and echoing Fiorentino’s and Pontormo’s works in the tableaux vivants of La ricotta. Pasolini’s loyalty to the teachings of the art historian Roberto Longhi, to whose courses on art history at the University of Bologna he credited his inspiration as a visual artist, is well documented. Given the seriousness of his engagement with questions of art history and criticism, we should never believe that the references in his films to paintings or to the pictorial tradition were in any sense casual. It is thus noteworthy that Pasolini made almost no reference to modern paintings in his fims prior to Salò. The overwhelming presence in Salò of modernist, avant-garde, abstract painting thus represents a break with the visual signature of his earlier films and an unmistakeable sign that the project of sacralità tecnica is finished. Admittedly, Ferretti and Pasolini perversely chose the kind of paintings banned by Fascism to decorate the villa. Yet no apparent redeeming quality seems to be derived from this decision. The incessant exchange of fetishized, high-cultural references between the libertines, including citations of Baudelaire, Proust, Nietzsche, and Huysmann, indicates how vulnerable art and philosophy have become to commodification in the milieu of bourgeois consumerism as it is brought to light by Salò. In the “Circle of Manias” that constitutes the first segment of the film, Curval–one of the four signori–attributes to Baudelaire the following maxim: “Without the letting of blood, there is no forgiveness.” However, one of his companions in cruelty is quick to reply that in fact the quote comes from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. This claim prompts Curval in turn to propose that the quote finally derives neither from Baudelaire nor from Nietzsche, as it is simply from Dada. This entire game of attribution is made all the more farcical by Blangis, who starts singing a jingle from an Italian television advertisement that contains the nonsense syllables “da-da” in the song’s refrain (Cinema 2: 2043).
 
What emerges from this derisive portrait of the half-witted claims to cultural authority advanced by the signori is a decadent genealogy of cruelty that progresses seamlessly from Baudelaire to Dada and thence to consumerism. That Pasolini privileges the genealogy’s most recent efflorescence in consumer culture over its supposed origins in modernism or the avant-garde may be deduced from the fact that he revealingly assigns the task of singing the jingle to Blangis, the group’s ideological spokesman. In one quick passage of dialogue, Pasolini sums up the powerlessness of art, especially avant-garde art, to defy the numbing automatism of consumer society.⁴⁴ If Salò is about the unmooring of political and libidinal power as the result of a state of exception that has become the norm, then, the film also succeeds in establishing a symmetrical state of exception in the field of aesthetics. Simply to try to represent Sade on screen was to defy more than the simple conventions of polite decorum; Salò has often been considered a film that reaches the limits of the visible.⁴⁵
 
From Barthes to Foucault, the intellectual verdict of viewers at the time of the film’s release seemed unanimous. To undertake to adapt Sade’s work for the cinematic medium was a misguided project, inherently doomed to failure. “I believe that there is nothing more allergic to the cinema than the work of Sade,” said Foucault in 1975 (Aesthetics 223). Barthes similarly chastised Pasolini for having made fascism unreal and Sade “real.” ⁴⁶ In yet another sense, however, the idea of a subject that is intrinsically inappropriate for representation in the “aesthetic regime” is a contradiction in terms, as Jacques Rancière points out, because “this principled identity of the appropriate and the inappropriate is the very stamp of the aesthetic regime in art” (126). The incongruity of material and representation in Salò only fulfils one of the tenets of modern aesthetics, albeit while pushing it to its paradoxical logical extreme.
 
Yet we might have reason to feel that, toward the end of his career, Pasolini was having a hard time accepting “the aesthetic regime” in art. His late essays are anti-cynical tracts, which represent his efforts, as Carla Benedetti has suggested, to produce an impure, “inappropriate” art and poetry that might not end up in the terrain of “principled identity” discussed by Rancière, but rather in a much more disturbing territory (13–17). In his last collection of poems, Trasumanar e organizzar (1971), Pasolini’s anti-lyrical efforts result in a strangely pragmatic poetry that represents the exact antithesis of the first verses he ever published, his elegiac poems in Friulan dialect. We might surmise from the evidence of these late artistic productions that he viewed the “principled identity of the appropriate and inappropriate” to be a cynical destiny for art, regarding it as a symptom of the enlightened false consciousness that characterizes cynical reason, to borrow Sloterdijk’s terms. Although for a while he may have believed that his own brand of “impurity” would have immunized his art against the kind of moral and aesthetic game-playing of the neo-avant-garde, Salò clearly marks the point of ideological non-return.
 
The film, in other words, represents a turning point at which Pasolini finds his late style, making clear in the process that he no longer believes in the ability of art to heal the wounds of history and in fact aligning modernist aesthetics with cynicism, violence, and power. Drawing on the foundation of Sade’s Les 120 jours de Sodome, the film dares to provide images for a universe that, according to critics such as Barthes, should have been reserved uniquely for the operations of writing and the imagination. We should bear in mind, however, that Sade, who wrote his masterpiece while imprisoned in the Bastille, expressly regarded his own subject matter as having resulted in a literary state of exception: “It is now, friendly reader, that you must prepare your heart and mind for the most impure story that has ever been told since the world began, a similar book not existing either amongst the ancients or the moderns” (qtd. in Bataille 117). In this sense, Pasolini’s Salò might appear to extend the original, linguistic state of exception of Sade’s book into the domain of the visual. In so doing, the film elaborates an all too prophetic vision of what the contemporary reign of biopower has become, like an image of cruelty we can neither turn away from nor disavow.
 

As documents of the “enemy combatant,” the poems collected in Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak are unique to post-9/11 literature. Concerned centrally with the “world-changing” impact of trauma and spectacle, post-9/11 literature reinforces the testimonial function of witnessing implicit in human rights discourse.¹ This testimonial function figures the suffering human as an object of the law, and therefore cannot challenge imperial sovereignty and its extralegal legality. Take the second of “Two Fragments,” by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost:

Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,

So I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.

Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free,

But they are slaves.

I am flying on the wings of thought,

And so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.

Dost’s poem describes the hypocrisy of the liberalism that has informed the “justice” of oppressive measures, leading to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and to extralegal practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The poem’s tropes display the suffering body and thereby present the body as an object to observe. Dost testifies to the imprisonment of the “I” and to the “I”’s persistence as a “beating heart”; these conditions of confinement are portrayed to be witnessed. The speaker seems to affirm the persistence of the human spirit in the face of suffering, invoking a central and pervasive idea about the sufferer’s humanity. In the poems, the various layers of testimony—of the enemy combatant who testifies as a criminal, as a victim, and as a witness—create a legal situation outside of which none of the poems’ readers can think and which makes it impossible for them to see the relation between aesthetics and politics. If we consider the poems’ aesthetics, however, instead of reading them only as extensions of the discourses of human rights and of political resistance, then we can get a better idea of the political subject and of the torture and suffering to which he testifies.

 
But how does the poem caution against the reader’s identification with the figure of suffering that it simultaneously invokes? How does it question the “authentic ‘I’” that it also presents, stages, and puts on display? Dost’s poem, which is notably silent on the role of the witness (the spectator, the world, the bystander), remains ambiguous about the way its “body” can be read. Looking closely at the ways in which the materiality of the “body” is constructed in writing, we can advance some tentative theses about the way the function of testimony is called into question here. In Dost’s poem, the heart is a synecdoche for the “I,” and establishes an analogy between the “dark body” and the cage or prison cell. This rhetorical move places the heart in the cage, its beating a figure of the nonhuman aspect of a speaker whose bird-like insistence on flight brings to mind the image of the winged heart. The popular tattoo of a winged heart (a form of inscription that resonates with the method, used by many detainees, of inscribing Styrofoam cups with their verse before they were allowed pens and paper) is properly called the Tughra Inayati, the symbol of faith for Universal Sufism, the mystical expression of Islam. Tughra, in fact, refers to the act of writing; in Arabic it means “finely ornamented writing,” describing the detailed calligraphic script comprising the wings and the heart. A kind of object poem, then, Dost’s fragment produces this mystical symbol as a generic and universal emblem.² As a riddle, the poem creates distance between the author and the speaker and thereby challenges the principles that define the human being both by means of the extralegal law of imperial sovereignty, which isolates the body of the individual as the object of the law, and by means of the universalist and abstract notion of “human rights,” which can only respond through this same figure. Accordingly, the poetic speaker can be read as a cipher for the ways that the structure of oppression produces and enforces our identification with and as depoliticized subjects.
 
Dost’s poem allows us to consider how the identity between speaker and author, which is mandated in testimony, is produced by such formal and often material conventions. In her perceptive discussion of the ways that post-9/11 literature remains “formally familiar,” Rachel Greenwald Smith describes aesthetic form as reflective of a psychological defense against trauma.³ Her reading focuses on the “permeability” of affect, suggesting that 9/11 has made feeling vulnerable to the impingement of that other key characteristic of twenty-first century literary subjectivity. It is interesting, in this light, that reviewers of Poems from Guantanamo find the poems in the collection to be “generic” and “conventional,” works that could have been written at any time “by anyone suffering anything” (Chiasson). Insisting that the poems are “familiar”—or that they are not “good” enough to merit reading—the reviews, even if ostensibly critical of Guantanamo, are in fact symptomatic of the very logic of empire, which for the past decade has continued its empire-building activity while its critics and victims testify to and “expose” its oppression and corruption. In what follows, by contrast, I show how the initially defensive quality of the “formally familiar” becomes an aggressive measure when it is extended to understanding the poetry of the enemy combatant.
 
The uniqueness of the collection lies, then, in asking us how to read the writing of the enemy and in the challenge it thereby poses to received ideas about the testimonial function in both 9/11 and human rights literature. The collection, which has generated much discussion about inaccessible originals, translation, bad poetry, and the capacity of poetry to transmit “secret messages,” was gathered and edited by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer of some of the prisoners. By arguing that the central provocation of the publication is how to read the “enemy,” I challenge the popular assumption that its main question is how a tortured, traumatized body speaks. Instead, I ask how the “enemy combatant” comes to be redefined when he is understood as a lyric subject. To read the enemy combatant as a poet is to reject common images of the detainee as a victim of torture, on the one hand, or, on the other, as a fundamentalist terrorist.
 
The “enemy combatant,” a term employed to obscure and efface the identity of the person to whom it refers, designates the “barbarian” of our times, a figure whose alien otherness and position “before the law” announces opposition to the civilization implicit in empire. According to the logics of sovereignty and visibility that are predominant among critical efforts to understand the post-9/11 era, the enemy combatant is seen to reveal the barbarism of empire itself.⁴ Although these logics have been invoked by the Left to expose the hypocrisy of power, their shortcomings are apparent in readings that see the enemy combatant, like the poetic subject, as little more than a placeholder for opposition to empire. In contrast to reading the poetic speaker within the framework of the “state of exception,” I ask how a political subject emerges from a position of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant, as I describe him, denotes not only the unnamable negativity of empire, but also the duplicitous position of being assumed guilty and of assuming guilt for the crimes of others. The poems confront the historical rewriting of the subject of human rights literature as a victim rather than as an opponent of oppression, and introduce the paradoxical status of being at once victim and political subject.⁵
 
These considerations for reading the political subject must also include the complex history of the relationships between written and oral traditions, and between traditional and non-traditional forms of poetry. In his introduction to the collection, “Arab Prison Poetry,” Flagg Miller explains that the poems participate in various histories of poetic form, of Arab liberation, of prison literature, and of human rights discourse.⁶ As illustrated by Dost’s example, the poetic speaker takes place within a history of forms that is irreducible to the enunciation of a universal human subject. The ambiguity of this poetic speaker resists discernible efforts to provide a “close-up” of the terrorist turned victim, and in this way, the poems operate critically in a milieu otherwise rife with naïve assumptions about the self-evidence of testimony in expressive work. Along these lines, I find that the poems are not merely documents of barbarism—neither of the barbarism suspected of their authors, nor of the barbaric captivity to which they testify—but are in addition works that think through this “final,” post-9/11 stage of the dialectic between culture and barbarism.⁷ Reading the enemy combatant lyrically, as an anonymous and nonhuman subject, I explore the political alternatives that become imaginable with the poems’ publication and that are occluded by the term “enemy combatant” and by a dismissal of the enemy combatant as poet.
 

The Testimonial Function

 
Reviewers of the poems in Western media regard them as testimonies that “make visible” the crimes of the U.S. war on terror.⁸ In considering the assumptions and accusations of these disparate readers, I explore how this politics of exposure and visibility is undergirded by a dismissal of the poems’ specific “content and format.”⁹ The testimonial conflation of biography and speaker is accomplished in a dismissal of poetic form, a move that depoliticizes the poems and turns the resistant enemy into a tortured body. Robert Pinsky’s bland pronouncement that there “are no Mandelshtams here” serves as a model of this dismissal. Pinsky uses “Mandelshtam” to refer to the shared theme of imprisonment, but his reference emphasizes aesthetic form over political content. Pinsky’s judgment, which relies on a separation of aesthetics and politics that has been challenged by both poststructuralism and Marxist literary theory, indicates the poems’ embeddedness in the testimonial function, their tendency to be read as biographies of human suffering even when their readers purport to read them as “literary” documents.¹⁰ By reading the poems as more than testimonies, however, we can appreciate them not as biographical texts about universal human suffering, but as connected to the world differently and more singularly than this legalist, discursive abstraction of the human subject allows.
 
The production of a human subject—if not of humanity—was, however, the aim shared by Falkoff and the other human rights lawyers who saw the volume through to publication.¹¹ As Falkoff notes, this, and not the danger of coded messages in the original Pashto or Arabic versions, constituted the real threat posed by the poetry. He writes,

If the inmates were writing words like “the Eagle flies at dawn,” the censors might have a case, but they are not… [W]hat the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realize that these are human beings who have not had their day in court.

As Falkoff argues, the “power of words” is not in the words themselves, not in what they say, but in what they do: they allow us to perceive the “human beings” behind them. For Falkoff, the merit of the poems is their self-evidence as testimonies, and this testimony produces the subject as human.

 
The question of what constitutes a recognizable human being in this context is raised by critics on the academic Left as well. As Anne McClintock demonstrates in her essay “Paranoid Empire,” the endpoint of such critical, post-9/11 work is to shift from exposing the corrupt foundations of the oppressors to making visible the plight of the oppressed. In describing the paradigm of morality that followed Abu Ghraib, she extends Falkoff’s ideas about exposing the common humanity of the prisoners by pointing to how such an exposure intensifies our focus on ourselves. She writes,

The pornography argument turned the question of torture abroad back to a question about us in the United States: our morality, our corrupt sexualities, our loss of international credibility, our gender misrule. In the storm of moral agitation about our pornography and our loss of the moral high ground, the terrible sufferings of ordinary, innocent people in two occupied and devastated countries were thrown into shadow.

(100)

McClintock claims that “our” moral crisis competes with and displaces the suffering of others. Distinguishing between these two areas—morality versus suffering—McClintock seems to present the task of radical politics as the choice between two projects, but what emerges more tellingly is the extent to which these two choices are not really distinct. They are located rather in two subject positions—those of a moral self and a suffering other—that are both congruous with figures of testimony in human rights discourse.

The identity between poet and sufferer is enforced in the editorial decision to include a brief biography of each prisoner alongside his poem or poems (and it comes as no surprise that many find these “more evocative than the poems themselves” [Chiasson]). The insistently visual rhetoric of torture, which has become an integral part of the discourse on terrorism, makes its way in this manner into the poetic frame, by giving each name a figure.¹² Through the biographical “close-up,” we get what seems to be missing in the translated poems: the original, innocent prisoner—a victim of anti-terrorism and not a terrorist.¹³
 
The “sufferer” who testifies in Jumah al Dossari’s “Death Poem,” by contrast, questions his own status as a human being. The poetic speaker considers his death, presenting the public display of his body as signs of an “innocent” and “sinless” soul:

Take my blood.

Take my death shroud and

The remnants of my body.

Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,

To the judges and

To the people of conscience,

Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,

Of this innocent soul.

Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,

Of this wasted, sinless soul,

Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

The speaker narrates a fantasy of his death, preparing his body as an offering to the world, and the poem thus engages its own polarization of guilt and innocence to assert the speaker’s innocence. He describes how his body should be sent to “judges and / To the people of conscience.” In an ironic appeal to habeas corpus, the innocent body thus bears a guilt which is not his own. At first seeming to sediment the opposition between guilt and innocence, ending with the hypocrisy of the “protectors of peace,” the poem attacks the supposed objectivity of conscience, and with it, the idea that guilt and innocence can be extricated from one another. The judges, who should be impartial, bear “the guilty burden, before the world, / Of this innocent soul.” The poem, which asserts the innocence of its speaker, does so by calling into question the function of “bear[ing] the burden” of his “wasted, sinless soul.” The speaker does not bare his soul, but makes apparent the difference between what belongs to the first person and what belongs to the world. Al Dossari’s poem employs a thematic concern with journey—the ironic and impossible journey of a body, of “sending” a body as a document to the world. The merit of the poem lays in the construction of the body as a site of elegy, as much an object as a subject of the poem. It asks how the body can be produced as a site of justice, or how human rights— figured in the world, in conscience, and in the judges—has failed to provide justice.

 
Al Dossari’s fantasy of what the poetic body can do is the opposite of what Shirley Dent imagines in her review of the poems in her Guardian “Books blog” post, “We should look to democracy, not poetry, to deliver justice.” Dent claims that a properly functioning democracy is more possible, and more realistic, than a political subjectivity that would arise in poetry.¹⁴ She also claims that the poems don’t do enough, either as political documents or as aesthetic works. She does not mean, however, that poetry should do more, but rather that justice, this form of doing, should be left to democracy. Although acknowledging that we live in the “absence of real democracy,” her argument that the truths of poetry should be “objective, universal, and complex” serves to articulate the aesthetic principles that underlie her strict separation of aesthetics and politics. These principles do not leave room for the idea that poetry could in fact challenge ideas of justice, and especially that challenges to justice could come in aesthetic form.
 
Like other reviews, Dent’s argument, which also faults readers who want this type of affective evidence associated with poetry, relies on a dismissal of the literary value of the poetry. One of the most prominent of these reviews, “Notes on Prison Camp,” written by poet Dan Chiasson, appeared in the New York Times shortly after the publication of the poems. Chiasson, who finds the poets innocent, the poems bad, and the politics of publication “liberal,” indicts the poems on the basis of their generic universality.¹⁵ He claims that the bulk of the poems are “so vague, their claims so conventional, [they] mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written.” Although Chiasson suggests that it would be wrong to judge the aesthetic merit of poems written by people under these conditions, this disclaimer functions to justify his sustained dismissal of the poems. The mimicry of which Chiasson accuses the poems is a matter not only of his ignorance of the form from which the poems derive, but of the extent to which an insistence on innocence depoliticizes the “human” subject.
 
Chiasson seems to conclude that the lack of literary merit in the poems can be separated from the identity of the poets, but when he suggests that Falkoff is part of a conspiracy with the U.S. government, for example, he explicitly invokes the idea that the poems can be read unambiguously and transparently as reflections of the prisoner biographies. His interpretation is openly supported by longtime activist and poet Maxine Kumin, who writes in a letter to the editor “commend[ing]” Chiasson for his “forthright, intelligent review.”¹⁶ She states: “Surely the press and the editor must have believed they were doing the public a service, though their combined naiveté in the light of the facts is overwhelming.” Kumin’s position is especially conflicted, not only because she also goes on to write her own “torture” poems—from the point-of-view of the detainees—but, as Falkoff claims, because she seems to be saying, “leave the poetry about Guantanamo to me” (Worthington). In asserting that the detainees should not be writing, and in extending the criteria of innocence to the “naive” press and editor, Kumin perhaps unintentionally suggests that testimonies cannot also be political. The mutually reinforcing theses of the lack of literary merit and of innocence as an attribute of human suffering lead to a separation of aesthetics and politics that many of these reviewers would deny in other contexts.
 
In response to these reviews, George Fragopoulos discusses the need to remove the “dividing line” between aesthetics and politics. As Falkoff acknowledges in his conversation with Andy Worthington, Fragopoulos argues that aesthetics and politics do not intersect in straightforward ways. It strikes me, however, that the separation of aesthetics and politics is not the crux of the problem. It seems rather that the disregard of aesthetic form is symptomatic of a conflation of biographical and poetic speaker, and that this conflation allows the reader to project his or her ideas about the identifiable human onto the subject of the poems. In her essay on Paul de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” Barbara Johnson describes the similarity of anthropomorphism and aesthetic identification by comparing lyric poetry and the Supreme Court case of Rowland v. California Men’s Colony. She concludes that anthropomorphism is more than a tropological figure—more than an establishment of likeness—because it extends as “known” the “properties of the human.” Johnson thus defines the projective extension of what is known as fundamental to the identification of personhood. Her insight reminds us that the “I” is not a transparent subject, but rather a figure that is often the product of multiple projections.
 
The reviews that I have discussed project a knowable human subject and therefore dwell on aesthetic sentiments that arise from this schema of intelligibility. In her recent book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler applies the testimonial function of the poems to a different end; she argues that the poems, and their authors, constitute the opposition to U.S. empire. Butler takes human suffering, or the suffering victim of human rights discourse, and gives it political agency without addressing the aesthetic dynamic of activity and passivity at work in the poems themselves. Her collapse of the “I” into a “we” results in the projection of her own political ideals onto the subject.¹⁷ She adopts Falkoff’s appeal that the poems “testify” to the wrongs of detention and the humanity of the subjects. Butler finds that the poems attest to an alternative, non-Western form of ethical interaction; that is, they exhibit a particular humanity, the inspiring capacity for collective human interaction. She reads the poems as evidence of a “sense of solidarity, of interconnected lives that carry on each others’ words, suffer each others’ tears, and form networks that pose an incendiary risk not only to national security, but to the form of global sovereignty championed by the U.S.” (62). Butler derives this reading not from poetic form but from “the repeated and open question” of al Haj’s and others’ poems, “How does a tortured body form such words?” Butler’s point is that a tortured body does not form “such words,” by which she means poetry, but that it speaks the pain of an other: the words of the poem attest to the sufferings of an other and of others. Butler identifies the political potential of the poetry in its capacity to represent resistant humanity in the face of global sovereignty. Butler extends the political implications of Falkoff’s project, but in a manner that continues to think about the poems, and about the political subjectivity they represent, as a symptom of the internal antagonism and demise of American empire.
 
Butler, Chiasson, and Dent avoid the poems’ poetic qualities, all the while making strong claims about what the poems do or do not do as aesthetic documents, as if the politics are synonymous with the author’s biographical blurbs.¹⁸ The reviews are thus exemplary of the postwar depoliticization of art, which Adorno laments, for example, in his critique of the industry of culture. Along these lines, Arendt critiques not the separation of art and politics, which she understands as a conflict fundamental to society, but the role of the mediating faculty, the cultura animi, the “cultivated and trained mind” of culture. She describes how this faculty— taste—humanizes, and also how it can “de-barbarize” the world, in contrast to the way that society makes culture complicit, “monopoliz[ing] culture for its own purposes.” Arendt’s move to make art (and other activity) political is to count taste “among man’s political abilities” (220). Taste, the capacity to be in the position “to forget ourselves,” represents the role of the reader. To think of the poems not just as “documents,” or as “prison literature” and to include them within the purview of post-9/11 literature requires the aesthetic activity of forgetting oneself, of bringing the category of the “I”—like that of the “enemy combatant”—into question.
 

The Qasidah Form

 
In contrast to the interpretations discussed above, which emphasize the performative dimension of poetic work and thus place the poems firmly in the realm of contested visuality that is democratic politics, I now discuss a lyric activity that emerges where poetry and human rights intersect. I do so by asking what is particular to the poetic “content and format” of this writing. As I noted in the context of the reviews, the poetic “I”—here an ethnic “I,” to follow John Kim’s discussion of the way that the autobiographical “self” returns as a figure of “social collectivity” (337)—is made more powerfully human through an almost irresistible process of identification that collapses the distance between enunciating “I” and enunciated “I.” The “I” is the juncture of these concerns about the relation between aesthetics and politics: that figure, as Adorno found and as Dost’s poem illustrates, of “subjectivity turning to objectivity” (“Lyric Poetry” 46). As I show, the intricacy of aesthetics and politics contained in the lyric ambiguity of the poetic speaker—the indeterminacy of the “I”—disrupts these humanist models for thinking about the status and identity of the detainees. I focus on ways in which the poems’ recurring structure of the classical qasidah extends this mediation between aesthetics and politics by refusing the very terms of universal human rights that are invoked by the poems. Classical forms, and the neoclassical revival of these forms during the colonial period in the early twentieth century, thus retain an elusive, ambiguous, and somewhat spectral relationship to contemporary poetry, even as they are also rejected in the formally experimental free verse poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. The poems of Guantanamo loosely represent the variety of these poetic forms; the collection includes poems that are traditional, formal, and experimental, and that reflect influences from diverse prison writings, all the while negotiating questions about the role of the human voice in writing.
 
Contextualizing the poems within the history of Arabic poetic forms particularizes and modifies some of the attributes of human rights literature and the transnational genres of prison and resistance literature, all of which are legible in the poems. The poems demonstrate how questions of form and of literary history can be brought to bear on larger political and social discourses. Flagg Miller’s introduction to the collection, which places the poems in the context of Arab liberation and Israeli occupation, focuses on the particular history of the qasidah, a form of Arabic poetry that is often compared to the ode. The traditional qasidah, according to Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, is a metered poem in monorhyme that is usually composed of fifteen to eighty lines (3–4).¹⁹ The qasidah is recognizable through its thematic units, which Stetkevych, in her foundational text on Arabic poetry, The Mute Immortals Speak, likens to the passage of ritual: the nasib, which consists of a description of the “abandoned encampment” (3); the rahil, which describes the poet’s journey; and the fakhr, the praise of self and tribe. Several of the poems from the collection—Emad Abdullah Hassan’s “The Truth,” Sami al Haj’s “ Humiliated in the Shackles,” Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” and Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness”—function as contemporary variations of the qasidah.
 
Scholars of the qasidah, including Flagg Miller and Hussein Kadhim, who take up the overt political and social uses of these poetic forms, discuss these variations and experimentations of form. Kadhim, for example, considers the neoclassical revival of the qasidah in the early twentieth century as a form of “incitement poetry” (shi ‘r al-tahrid) against colonialism.²⁰ In his reading, the rahil is a transitional part that links the elegiac nasib to the gharad, the poem’s main part and the locus of the political message. In his work on Yemeni poets, Miller describes a dialogic variation of the qasidah, the initiation-and-response poetry of the bid ‘wa jiwab. Miller focuses on the role of the messenger, who functions as a mediator between poet and receiver and thereby establishes the authority of the written text. Miller is thus attentive to what he calls the “scriptographic tropes” of the qasidah, those metaphorical and thematic indications of the process of writing within the text itself, and this kind of reading involves an elaboration of additional sections, such as a riddle following the main section, which serve as a provocation for the receiver to formulate his response. Kadhim’s and Miller’s discussions also take up the question of the relationship between the classical form of the qasidah and the innovations of the “free verse” movement in the fifties, which experimented with traditional and non-traditional forms of verse.²¹ Recognizing these traditional forms is central to reading the poems of Guantanamo, not because the poems mimic or allude to tradition as such, but because the persistence of these forms as fragments and variations presents a valid alternative to the human rights problem of how writing (after catastrophe or after torture) is possible.²²
 
Many of the poems in the collection explicitly assert the expressive power of the human voice, inviting the testimonial function that they have been accorded. But the force of this voice emerges from its paradoxical production of the poem as written text. In his poem “The Truth,” Emad Abdullah Hassan depicts the expressive force of the speaker’s “song” as the ability to restore the singing of birds: “Oh Night, my song will restore the sweetness of Life: / The birds will again chirp in the trees.” Here, “chirping” is an effect of the speaker’s song and of the human voice, and these two forms of expression—the human and the nonhuman—are conflated and collapsed. Hassan’s poem begins by asserting the redemptive value of the song:

Oh History, reflect. I will now

Disclose the secret of secrets.

My song will expose the damned oppression,

And bring the system to collapse.

The speaker’s “song” is thus the embodiment and expression of resistance, emerging at the limits of a system that it also aims to collapse. Here it begins to present a problem for the discourse of human rights that it also represents, troubling the aims of a discourse that attempts to bring the margins to its center. The “secret of secrets” is presented not as an elusive, mystical sign to be read, but as something that cannot be understood by the speaker’s enemies. Hassan tells us what his enemy cannot understand: “that all we need is Allah, our comfort.” The secret betrays the ambiguity of the very call for universality within the poems—that they neither simply speak the universal nor speak a coded universal but instead challenge the discourse of human rights to which they also appeal.

 
Hassan’s poem lays out the problem of the poetic subject who is situated at the crossroads of human rights and resistance literature. His speaker, like many others, announces an intention to use poetry as a vehicle for assuaging wounds and for lifting oppression. Here, the irony of human rights discourse is not only that its moral principles are also its offenses, but also that its victims must appear without contradiction as innocent, a pose at odds with political resistance, which, as we will see, assumes a condition of guilt. The double task of the poet obscures the self-evidence of the speaker who seems to emerge as biography, and in the case of these poems, which invoke traditions of form, this is a tropological process, a process of “borrowing.”²³
 
The forms of response initiated by the qasidah involve the “primal, nonhuman” figure of the messenger in the rahil (Miller, “Moral Resonance” 172). Miller finds that this section differs for the bid ‘wa-jiwab because in the traditional rahil, the poet often imagines himself traveling across a landscape. The bid ‘wa-jiwab instead invokes a third party, a figure of the messenger who journeys between two correspondents. Miller’s distinction points to how the imagined “self,” the enunciated “I,” takes place in this ambiguous human/nonhuman role. The affective landscape of the journey has a nonhuman aspect; birdsong is also the voice of the nonhuman, and poetry is not only testimony to human experience or humanity but is also, as Daniel Tiffany writes in Infidel Poetics, “a distant expression, or recollection, of the inhuman voice” (152).²⁴ Tiffany points to the artifice of this process by which voice is humanized, highlighting the non-self-evident nature of the human being. These observations indicate how nonhuman figures can help to break up the unity—the unity of universal, human suffering—supposed by the discourse of modern poetics.
 
In poems such as “Death Poem,” or “The Truth,” the ambiguity of the human messenger as poet allows the poem to present questions about what constitutes human being and belonging. In Sami al Haj’s poem, “Humiliated in the Shackles,” the messenger is figured as a bird who

“witnesses” the testimony of the speaker:

When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,

Hot tears covered my face.

When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed

A message for my son.

The lyric image of birdsong, which has long been associated with the songlike or aural quality of poetry, serves as a muse, transforming nonhuman song into human tears. The poem goes on to pair the chirping of larks with the writing of the poem, establishing the process of empathic identification by which the cooing “bar-bar” of the other in the figure of the bird spurs the tears of the speaker, a cathartic identification that produces the possibility of writing. In such a model, there is no resistance to the other; he is hardly recognized as such, because within the context of the poem, and in the testimonial order it prescribes, the bird’s song is subordinated to (and sublated in) the voice of the speaker. Following this schema, the ability to “chirp” represents the healthy internalization of “cooing” and its expression as an active and embodied voice. In contrast, the nonhuman or “becoming-animal” element involves the Kafkaesque condition of assuming guilt and being assumed guilty.

 
As I have indicated, the image of the “caged bird” and other common tropes of imprisonment gain much of their power not only by extending the position of the first person to the third, and thereby creating a community of sufferers, but also by radicalizing the human subject that is implicated in this community.²⁵ In The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic Qasidah, Kadhim describes how the Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi (1869–1932) uses the ancient motif of doves to establish the theme of mourning unjust death. Here, the traditional use of birdsong as a trope and as an image in the qasidah serves the function, Kadhim notes, of keeping atrocities alive “in the memory of the people” (32). Kadhim’s argument pertains to the association between birdsong in an ancient qasidah and in a modern one, but also implies that reference to the “cooing/wailing of the doves” extends a local act of injustice to a national atrocity and thus calls for identification through injustice as well as remembrance.
 
As Kadhim argues, such invocations played a role in anti-colonial resistance writing, inviting the production of a subject whose identification with the pathos of nature implicitly recognized the usefulness of such images for mobilizing a collective response.²⁶ Kadhim details the manipulation of pre-Islamic motifs that are contemporanized in post-1948 resistance poetry through the conventions and formal structure of the qasidah. Read in this way, the “hot tears” belong not to al Haj, and also not to the speaker, but to the elegiac nasīb, the qasidah’s short prelude, which is established traditionally through the imagery of shedding tears. The tears thus mark not the experience of human suffering, but the process of writing poetry, to which the speaker also later refers. From the outset, writing remains at the level of composition or arrangement, and not of expression. The “thoughts” of the speaker abstract his voice from the composition of the poem. The reference to “thoughts” as an object, instead of as an activity of the “I” as speaking subject, indicates the disunity of expression. The introduction of the materiality of thought as the agent of expression furthermore casts off the automatic process by which nonhuman birdsong becomes internalized in the expression of human suffering, as if bird and human correspond to one another and to the binary of freedom and imprisonment. Instead, the speaker foregrounds the processes of internalization and projection that delimit not the suffering subject, but the subject who “speaks” in writing, the poetic speaker.
 
Kadhim’s observations about the way that traditional poetic motifs are mobilized as national symbols help us to think about the way that birdsong, which is not merely a motif but is rather the “universal” motif of poetic voice, is related to the universalization of atrocity. Such a movement indexes the discourse of universal human rights that Flagg Miller identifies in his introductory essay as the “language” for which the poems strive. In this way, barbarism is associated with atrocity, with the performance of an act so alien in its terribleness that it defies language, but one that, by virtue of this defiance, is expressed only as a universal. The “cooing” doves are transformed into “chirping,” and so writing qua “chirping” refers to the capacity of expressive force to restore justice by expressing its universality. The reading that is given by the testimonial function—by this sequencing of inhuman suffering, human emotion, and human expression—is thereby challenged, in the absence of a transparent human subject, by the questions that have been raised about the unity and power of human voice.
 

Assuming Guilt

 
The double task of the poet to assuage wounds and lift oppression has to do, in no small part, with his condition of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant is assumed guilty, which refers to the ground of his imprisonment, but he also “assumes” the guilt of exposing the hypocrisy of his oppressor, a position that suggests he is an active participant in his guilt. In fact, however, it is the ambivalence of this passive/active, involuntary/voluntary assumption of guilt that defines the indeterminacy of the enemy combatant as poetic speaker. The poems raise questions about the relation between guilt and responsibility that were also presented by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in his 1940 essay, “Discussion of War Aims.” Winnicott explains how the emergence of the “good,” moral citizen involves a moment of identification and projection. The supposed overcoming of a moment of barbaric conflict elides the possibility of identifying a “bad” feeling in a “good” person. He provides the example of the Englander who asserts his indifference to politics by naming both an enemy and others who are responsible for this enemy. He concludes that if the Englander were to take responsibility, the action would be equivalent to not seeing a difference between ally and enemy:

At the present time we [Englanders] are in the apparently fortunate position of having an enemy who says, ‘I am bad; I intend to be bad’, which enables us to feel, ‘We are good’. If our behaviour can be said to be good, it is by no means clear that we can thereby slip out of our responsibility for the German attitude and the German utilization of Hitler’s peculiar qualities. In fact, there would be actual and immediate danger in such complacency, since the enemy’s declaration is honest just where ours is dishonest.

(211–212)

As Winnicott illuminates so strikingly, the problem with exposing the enemy is that it reinforces the falseness of one’s own position. The mistake of the civilian, the “good” Englander, according to Winnicott, is to judge guilt and innocence through a splitting of good and bad. The move allows one to “thereby slip out of” responsibility for the oppressor, and the complacency with which this happens—not the issue of complicity or collusion—is the problem that Winnicott identifies. This raises questions about the neutrality of the witness, and in particular about the limits of moral responsibility and the role that guilt plays in taking responsibility. Moreover, Winnicott suggests that the guilt required is not redemptive (the pangs of conscience), but that the proper or more meaningful form of responsibility comes from the assumption of guilt.

 
The notion of guilt that I would like to explore is indicated by the main section of al Haj’s poem, which follows an initial supplication to both nonhuman birdsong and to the poem’s messenger, the poet’s son. According to Kadhim’s assessment of the anti-colonial qasidah, this main section contains the political message; in this case, it details the temptation and hypocrisy of oppression rather than the experience of torture. In its treatment of temptation, the main section is reminiscent of the Qur’anic story of Joseph, which Susan Slyomovics recounts in her book, Performing Human Rights in Morocco. She writes, “even though Joseph is vindicated, his innocence is of no moment; in some sense he is guilty of having exposed the master’s wife as sinful and the master retaliates: ‘then it occurred to the men… (that it was best) to imprison him for a time’” (4).²⁷ Joseph, in this example, is guilty not of a crime but of being in a position to expose the guilt of another. The guilt assumed by al Haj’s speaker lies similarly in his exposure of the hypocrisy of freedom. Al Haj’s speaker, like the other speakers in the collection, is guilty of the crime of exposing the crimes of the oppressors. His subjectivity arises from this guilt, not from the crime that he exposes, although, as I have indicated, the act of exposure is often read as an expression of the human subject. A similar distinction can be made regarding what the poems do: they do not “expose” the corrupt morality of the oppressors, but instead describe this pervasive yet inscrutable context of guilt (Schuldzusammenhang) that lies just at the margins of perception.²⁸
 
“Humiliated in the Shackles” articulates the guilt of being tempted by the offerings of empire:

The oppressors are playing with me,

As they move freely about the world.

They ask me to spy on my countrymen,

Claiming it would be a good deed.

They offer me money and land,

And freedom to go where I please.

Their temptations seize my attention

Like lightning in the sky.

But their gift is an evil snake,

Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom.

They have monuments to liberty

And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.

But I explained to them that

Architecture is not justice.

America, you ride on the backs of orphans,

And terrorize them daily.

Bush, beware.

The world recognizes an arrogant liar.

To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.

I am homesick and oppressed.

Mohammad, do not forget me.

Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.

I was humiliated in the shackles.

How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?

After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,

How can I write poetry?

The poem’s tropes of the restraints and excesses of movement are the vehicle for its expression of the hypocrisy of freedom. As in Dost’s poem, these are presented by the first person as the experience of confinement. The “world” surely includes the actions of the oppressors, figured through an entrenched vocabulary of first-person singular and third-person plural: “they” “are playing with me,” they “ask me,” they “offer me.” The paradox of freedom exposes the false guilt of the imprisoned: while the oppressors move about freely, they do so by holding the speaker’s freedom captive. The speaker proclaims his independence from these temptations, but his concern lies with the appearance of turning into the enemy of the oppressed, and thus he presents himself as a subject who actively takes on his condition of oppression by enumerating his refusals of the “world” he is offered.

 
Al Haj creates a figure of someone whose captivity does not desensitize him, but makes him more sensitive: to nature, to the hypocrisy of temptation, and also to his own feeling. In the penultimate stanza, he describes his soul as “like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish, / Violent with passion.” Distance, the enforced separation of diaspora, is here equated with emotional states that allow “nature” to stand in for or to represent the speaker. Like the first lines, prototypical images of the distance and familiarity of foreign nature follow the conventions of the qasidah, and the poet writes himself into this tradition by reasserting the generic identity of the poet: the poet who is a sensitive poet can write poetry—here are the birds, here is the message, here is Allah, here are my tears, here is the sea.
 
The poem, which invokes Allah, points through the language of religious redemption to the problems of human rights. Freedom here is not freedom from imprisonment. The freedom that is the object of criticism is not a freedom that can be granted, like a right, but the freedom that wealth bestows: the ability to circulate freely, to exchange money and land, to achieve transparency between global and individual being. In other poems, the language of universal human rights is pursued through the figure of the “world” as an impartial judge or law outside the prison: a world “that will wait for us,” to which “photographs of my corpse at the grave” will be sent, “before” which men will bear a “burden” and, finally, as an implied addressee, if “justice and compassion remain in this world.” “Where is the world to save us from torture? / Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness? / Where is the world to save the hunger strikers?”²⁹ In these formulations, the world becomes a figure for human rights, the neutral observer who is there to witness suffering.
 
The positing of a “world” outside the prison and as a “universal” idea of justice also occurs, as Kadhim points out, in the anti-colonial qasidah and implies a stable presence that can be equated with the stable identity of the human being.³⁰ But al Haj’s “world” challenges this stability and the idea of the world—of witnessing—as a form of justice. The “world,” “freely” moved about, is double-faced. Trampled upon and given the power to recognize, if not truth, then at least lies, the world becomes a figure for the oppressed. The duplicity of the world as both ground and figure constitutes the economy of oppression, and what al Haj depicts is a world that cannot safeguard acts of witnessing. Power, or profit, is generated through the exploitation of this duplicity, in which the world appears both as a given place in which actions occur and as an actor who not only takes part in the struggle but also functions as an arbiter. The stakes of such a profit game are thus not only control of the “world” as land or as a land, but also the persistent equation between civil and political rights and justice, and the persistent exclusion of social and economic rights.³¹
 
The fantasy of restoring justice to the “world,” like the fantasy of an identity between author and speaker, relies on the figuring of its good and bad through the seemingly neutral, but increasingly split images of universality—here, human song, the world, and the sea. In Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” the qasidah’s oft-invoked metaphor of the sea is taken up as a figure of a distance that is both beautiful and aggressive, its “calm” and its “stillness” no longer merely sources of contemplation, but forces, “like death,” that “kill.”³² The sea, which depicts the mediatable distance between poet and reader, between the speaker and his family, has become a force of alienation and strangeness. Al Rubaish writes,

O Sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,

And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.

Your bitterness eats away at my patience.

Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange.

The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold.

Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists,

And the navigator will drown in your wave.

Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming,

You carry graves.

If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious.

If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow.

O Sea, do our chains offend you?

It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.

Do you know our sins?

Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?

O Sea, you taunt us in our captivity.

You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.

Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?

Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?

You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?

Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.

The poet’s words are the font of our power;

His verse is the salve of our pained hearts.

What has held ground as “the world,” neutral but overtaken by oppressors in al Haj’s poem, is here presented in the figure of the “sea” as complicit with oppression. Al Rubaish turns away from a politics of “making visible”; the sea depicts a form of guilt that is like the guilt of the enemy combatant, both passive and active. Forming the borders of the island prison, the sea’s “frame” is perspectival but also incriminating.³³ Its neutral juxtaposition also becomes the source of its own guilt. This structure of self-incrimination and incrimination of the other describes the position of subjectivity faced by the enemy combatant.

 
The task of the poet is brought into question as the poem turns to ask who stands to gain from suffering. The speaker’s inquiry about what the sea has gained is in this manner a form of self-inquiry. Al Rubaish underscores the ambiguous morality by depicting the sea as a medium in which poetry is sustained despite its alienation. It is the silence and stillness of the sea as a figure of distance that offends and is offended. The speaker does not place blame, however, but rather feels taunted; he is moved about by the sea, not just held captive by it. The speaker reduces himself to the “poet’s words”: as “boats,” the poems mediate the distance between neutral waters and the imprisoned enemy combatant. Collusion, in this case, is a moment of guilt, the contradictory experience of being unable to be neutral. The sea embodies the distance between freedom and imprisonment and in this way becomes a figure for the mind and for the turmoil of the soul. Appeals to the world instead of morality are important because they acknowledge the split condition of guilt and responsibility and the fact that responsibility is often the name for the neutrality imputed to human rights discourse.
 

The Poet Messenger

 
The consequences of thinking about the psychological aspect of moral situations become evident when considering enemy combatants more explicitly as poets. As we have seen, al Haj’s poem not only exposes the acts of oppression that Empire undertakes (no free ride, the “ride” is on the “backs of orphans”), but realigns the terms of justice. He writes, “But I explained to them that / Architecture is not justice.” Architecture refers to the phrase “monuments to liberty” in the preceding stanza, and thus to the absence of freedom writ by its memorialization. Empty monumentality is another figure for the hypocrisy of American culture, a part of the logic of the false appearance of freedom. The reference to architecture has two further significant associations. First, it cannot help but refer in its context both to the destruction of the twin towers and to the symbolic nature of their destruction as “monuments of liberty.” In pointing to this destruction negatively, al Haj also indicates ambivalence about seeing such acts of destruction as justice. Second, the language of building is a metaphor for poetic activity; in the qasidah, architectural concepts are the conventional terms for poetic form.³⁴ Al Haj’s opposition to the oppressors thus challenges not only the symbols of power and political representation, but the politics of representation itself.
 
In keeping with Miller’s description of the thematic structure of the dialogic qasidah, which commonly includes a riddle after the main part, the “explanation” of the justice of architecture turns out to be a riddle instead of a moral lesson. If architecture is a figure for writing, the question to ask is not how is writing (or representation) possible after atrocity, but how is writing a form of justice? Al Haj’s poem is a poem that ostensibly seeks justice, testifying to the speaker’s innocence in consorting with the enemy, of taking enemy bribes, and of doing evil deeds. Along these lines, the speaker’s testimony serves as an assurance to his “countrymen” that he has not betrayed them. The riddling question, however, underscores the poem’s ambivalent relation to the world. Until he “explained to them that / Architecture is not justice,” the speaker has occupied the position of responding in opposition to the oppressors. He is the “me” and the “I”; he is not “they,” and yet the plurality of the world is on his side.³⁵ Here, taking the position of the subject, his explanation serves as a reminder that his innocence is of no matter. Evidence of his innocence betrays his responsibility for exposing the injustice of symbolic power. In raising the question of whether writing is justice, al Haj addresses his poem towards an audience with whom he does not identify and who does not identify with him, and thereby rejects the tropes of humanity and the religious imagery that his poem simultaneously invokes.
 
In the poems from Guantanamo, textual authority becomes a metaphor for ensuring justice, for “taking responsibility” for the condition of guilt one assumes. “Humiliated in the Shackles” builds upon its script of praise and invective to invoke the oppressor directly; the speaker apostrophes “America” at a turning point in the poem. The inversion of the structural relationship between you and them—“America, you ride on the backs of orphans, / And terrorize them daily” changes the terms of the “them.” Here, “them” does not refer, as it has, to the oppressors, but instead to “the backs of orphans,” a synecdoche for the oppressed. No longer identifying with the oppressed, the speaker turns directly to “you, America,” and ends up locating the oppressed in the position of the object. The poem’s description of the ambivalence of these positions–and of the ambivalence inhering in the very process of identification that forges a relationship between the speaker and the reader–hinges on the figure of the poet as messenger and as someone who can recast the “I”’s projection of himself onto the other.
 
The poet as messenger is described more explicitly still in Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s poem, “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness.” Al Noaimi’s poem begins with several verses of prose before he moves into the form of the qasidah. This prelude explains how the poet received a greeting from a fellow detainee who expressed that he was trying to write a poem for him. Al Noaimi writes, “I felt guilty about this. Will he write a poem for me when he is no poet, while I, who claim to be a poet, have written nothing for him?” The guilt expressed by the speaker is, in a way, a continued provocation of al Haj’s question about the justice of writing. Not affirming immediately the role of the poet, the speaker continues to describe how the poem became difficult to write, and how the poet turned to memorizing the Qur’an. “With my mind divided,” he then writes, “time began to pass. And then I was inspired.” This prose verse is a frame story for the poem; depicting the poet as a messenger, it functions to enforce the continuity between biography and poem established in the collection’s format by describing how the poet has come to write the poem. The frame, however, also establishes the poem’s authority as a written document; pointing out the poem’s textuality and the processes of constructing text, it highlights the artifice of writing.
 
In referring to the “division” of his mind between the task of memorization and the task of creation, the speaker invokes poetry’s role as “the profane antitext to the Qur’anic sacred text.”³⁶ This detail about the poem’s process of composition alludes to my larger questions about how the poem elucidates its politics. Here, the authority of the speaker as messenger arises from the contradictory methods of memorization and creation that inform not only his composition, but also his constitution as subject. The qasidah form begins where the prose leaves off:

My heart was wounded by the strangeness.

Now poetry has rolled up his sleeves, showing a long arm.

Time passes. The hands of the clock deceive us.

Time is precious and the minutes are limited.

Do not blame the poet who comes to your land,

Inspired, arranging rhymes.

Oh brother, who need not be named, I send you

My gift of greetings. I send heavily falling rains

To quench your thirst and show my gratitude.

My poem will comfort you and ease your burdens.

If you blame yourself, my poem will appease you.

My mind is not heavy with animosity.

The first three verses assert the resurgence of poetry as a figure of healing, the aftermath of being wounded. The speaker describes a temporal shift in this first verse, indicating the recovery of poetry’s power and demonstrating its embodiment of resistance. These verses comprise the poem’s nasib, its opening supplication and prelude. So the nasib, the elegiac moment of the qasidah, here describes the “strangeness” of loss and ruin—of “passed” time and a “wounded” heart. In an oblique apostrophe, the speaker then entreats the reader not to blame “the poet who comes to your land.” The poem, which has so far seemed to recall the setting of imprisonment, extends the interior of this position to its outside—quite literally, again, America—through the figure of the poet as messenger.

 
Yet the poem falls back into the address that it has claimed in the prose section, addressing the manifest recipient of the poem, the speaker’s friend and brother, “who need not be named.” This section makes use of the typically liquid imagery of the rahil—the “heavily falling rains”—to transfer blame again, as a means of establishing correspondence between the speaker and his addressee.³⁷ The speaker claims that his poem will act as a comfort, most importantly to appease his brother’s guilt. The ambiguous reference “outside” the poem causes us to doubt the singularity of the poem’s recipient, performing the paranoia it has warned its reader against. That poet—the poet as messenger, wounded by “strangeness” and now inspired—is no longer mentioned, as the poem moves to these more explicit ideas about the function of the poem: its ability to appease, to shift blame, to make pain “captive,” to hide “in our hearts” what is “expressed in my words.” These functions, which have very little to do with exposure or with testifying, refuse the position of the poet as victim of suffering. Guilt and its attendant figures make room for a consideration of the way that the textual space invites obscurity, contradiction, and resistance as alternative forms of subjectivity.
 
The questions that al Haj’s and al Noaimi’s speakers pose are equally “How can I write poetry as a survivor of torture?” and “At what distance between oppression and opposition does the subject take place?” Al Haj’s speaker exposes not only the enemy who is the object of the poem, but also the projections of his enemy readers, who are far more diverse than Bush, the “arrogant liar.” These readers are oppressive not solely because of their literary declamations, but also because they conflate the speaker’s identity with the identity of the enemy combatant and because they need a seemingly “neutral” world to do so. In contrast, the poems present a figure who raises the question of just who is responsible for oppression. Such a reading moves beyond asking how the U.S. is responsible for the conditions of “evil,” which has been the subject of the past decade’s critiques of U.S. global power, and asks instead about the guilt that both reinforces and resists these moral and aesthetic pronouncements.
 

“Sorting isn’t work? . . . Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag heading for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”

—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

But to psychoanalysis mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back.

—Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”

All the rest is a postscript.

—Harry Mulisch, The Assault

The question of mourning constitutes a central but, until recently, relatively little studied aspect of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction.¹ From the “spherical loss” that envelops Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (147) to the “Hyperthrenia” or “Excess of Mourning” (25) of the widowed land surveyor Mason in Mason & Dixon and, more recently, the grief of paternal loss traversed—in psychological as well as geographical sense—by the four sibling protagonists of Against the Day, Pynchon creates characters who are confronted with what Freud calls “the bonus [Prämie] of staying alive.”² Left with the intolerable gift of survival, his characters often find themselves, much like Hamlet, at once intimidated and urged on by the ghostly demands of the work of mourning.³ Oedipa memorably articulates this predicament in her angst-ridden query, “Shall I project a world?” which resonates throughout Pynchon’s other novels and invites direct comparison to Hamlet. Occasioned by her being named the executor of a will—that gift that death bestows upon the survivor—Oedipa’s all-but-rhetorical question comes at the end of a long, self-interrogating passage in which she considers her obligations to the deceased. Oedipa regards the will of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, the self-styled California “founding father” (15), with much of the same emotional ambivalence that characterizes the prince of Denmark in his most famous soliloquy:

If [the will] was really Pierce’s attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? If only so much didn’t stand in her way: her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself . . . Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?

(64)

To project or not to project, that is the question. The crisis of mourning that this internal soliloquy registers is one which, as in Hamlet, hinges on the character’s felt inadequacy for the task of filial coping. At the same time, both Oedipa and Hamlet intuitively acknowledge the moral urge to make action (or in this case execution) prevail over inaction. Or, in Hamlet’s words, not to let “conscience” (meaning reflection) “make cowards of us all” (III.i).

 
By contrast, in this essay I intend to elaborate what distinguishes the two soliloquies. I am referring to the curious vocabulary and method—projection, dark machine, planetarium, the act of writing—that in the four centuries that separate The Crying of Lot 49 from Hamlet have come to be attached to the discourse on mourning. That discourse has been primarily shaped by Freudian psychoanalysis, a discipline that not only developed the now common “economic” understanding of mourning as a kind of “work” (or “bonus”), but also introduced such terms as projection (and introjection) into the critical vocabulary on grief, and even the idea that such work can be said to resemble the labor of a (dark) machine.⁴ At first sight, this might seem a counterintuitive approach. Is Oedipa truly grieving for Inverarity? Is it accurate to describe her response in the terms of (personally felt) loss when the novel evokes her so often as a kind of secondary witness even to her own past, shared with a person whom she refers to generically as “the dead man”? Given Oedipa’s self-ascribed “ignorance” of him, one may legitimately wonder if mourning Pierce is in fact what she does.
 
In what follows, I argue that Oedipa’s response to Pierce’s death should be identified in terms of mourning, albeit a very specific and as-yet untheorized kind. If, as Freud famously argues, mourning consists of a (symbolic) “incorporation” of the deceased whose existence is thus “continued in a psychological sense” (“Trauer” 432), then how does this process of symbolic cannibalization proceed when the object to be ingested is in fact empty or nearly devoid of content? There is a rich psychoanalytical literature on those moments of melancholic arrest when the object of mourning is so large that ingesting it causes appetite to diminish, as Freud points out. Such is the case with Hamlet, whose refusal to take part in the banquet celebrations described in Act I Scene 2 is, in the end, also a refusal to eat. In The Crying of Lot 49, however, we encounter something like the dialectical opposite of this melancholic loss of appetite. Oedipa’s memories of Pierce have long lain dormant under a “quiet ambiguity” which, until the arrival of the letter, “[had taken] him over . . . to the verge of being forgotten” (3). Her knowledge of Pierce is so minimal that incorporating him, as the experience of loss now urges her to do, is more likely to leave her hungry than it is to cause indigestion. Indeed, Oedipa’s immediate reaction to the news of Pierce’s death, as “she tried to think back” (2; emphasis added), is to go shopping for food and to occupy herself with supper preparations, including “the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, . . . the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, . . . the mixing of the twilight’s whisky sours” (2). A plethora of other ingredients and side-aliments complement the multilayered lasagna, a filling and heavy dish in its own right. The lasagna thus becomes a still life cornucopia of sorts, a nature morte, whose connotations of death reinforce its status as a complementary meal meant to still the hunger left by the all-too-light serving of the deceased.
 
It follows that Oedipa’s eventual agreement to act as co-executor of the will can be regarded as a similar substitute (or replacement meal) for the unbearable lightness of Inverarity’s (in)corporate(d) persona, except that here the traditional direction of mourning is reversed. Unable to substantially incorporate (or introject) Inverarity, Oedipa projects her mourning outward onto the personal objects presumably included in his will, such as a Jay Gould bust he kept over the bed—“Was that how he’d died, she wondered?” (1)—and Inverarity’s stamp collection, “his substitute often for her” (31). There is an element of poetic justice to the stamp collection’s becoming Oedipa’s substitute for Inverarity. Its centrality to the plot also forms a part of a larger analogy that is central to Pynchon’s novel, that between the work of postal sorting and the work of mourning. The slowest of the many communication media that Pynchon thematizes in The Crying of Lot 49, the post mirrors the inefficient and wasteful process of mourning through the mailman’s commitment to non-productive, individual labor.
 
This analogy is particularly suggestive in the case of the Tristero, the secret mailing organization whose underground existence Oedipa uncovers and whose “constant theme, disinheritance” (132) resonates with one who herself has been disinherited from the opportunity to mourn.⁵ It is one of the central ironies in this novel that the same legal letter that names Oedipa as co-executor of Inverarity’s estate is also the one that bars her from mourning Inverarity. This inability to mourn does not originate in her relative ignorance of the deceased, however, or in the ambivalence with which a now-married housewife is bound to receive the news of a former lover’s death, but in the delay of several months with which the news of Inverarity’s death reaches her. This belatedness makes mourning Inverarity both impossible and traumatic for Oedipa at the same time as it forces her to mourn mourning itself, a process that is interminable precisely because it cannot begin.
 
Two separate moments in the novel’s opening chapter may serve to illustrate this point about the interminability of Oedipa’s mourning for Inverarity: one is Oedipa’s instantaneous recognition, as she tries to subdue the range of ambivalent emotions that has been released by the news of Pierce’s death, that “this did not work” (1). The other is a phone call the following morning by her psychoanalyst, Dr. Hilarius, who asks her “How are the pills, not working?” (7). In keeping with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the inoperative community, one might say that both of these moments evoke the work of mourning as a work that does not work, that is, a work at which one works rather than a work that produces tangible or felicitous results. “[W]hoever . . . works at the work of mourning,” Nancy’s late mentor Jacques Derrida argues contra Freud, “learns . . . that mourning is interminable, inconsolable. Irreconcilable” (Work 143). Yet to apply these more recent insights to a novel that, historically speaking, precedes the poststructuralist boom of the 1970s by at least a decade is to misrecognize the fact that not all of Oedipa’s experiences of loss are interminable. In what follows it will therefore be important to draw a clear distinction between those moments of loss which are endless and those which are not.
 
As many critics have pointed out, Oedipa’s experience of loss in the novel is multifaceted and includes elements of the personal as well as the historical and the socio-political. As a self-styled “young Republican” in the sixties (59), confronted with the early avatars of that decade’s rebellious spirit, she bemoans a bygone era when “daft numina” such as Joseph McCarthy and Secretaries James and Foster “[had] mothered over [her] so temperate youth. In another world” (84). By the same token, the ever more ruthless uprooting of the California landscape, which takes out cemeteries in order to accommodate new highways and housing projects, fuels Oedipa’s pastoral nostalgia for “a land where you could somehow walk and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones could still rest in peace . . . no one to plow them up” (79). Both literally and figuratively, one might say, Oedipa inhabits a kind of “post-humous” landscape, one that is shaped by the loss of Pierce and where any remaining trace of the soil (or “humus” in Latin) is rapidly giving way to the real estate developer’s “need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines” (148).
 
On the more strictly personal level, Oedipa is moved to tears by a Remedios Varo painting depicting “frail girls with heart-shaped faces” (11) locked inside a tower. The painting prompts her to reflect on her own suburban imprisonment: “She had looked down at her feet and known then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape” (11; emphasis added). As with the inanis pictura or “mere picture” that moves the Trojan warrior Aeneas to shed his well-known “tears of things” in Book One of The Aeneid—a canonical scene of ekphrastic mourning to which Pynchon obviously alludes in his extensive description of the Varo painting—this passage registers surprise at the power of a visual medium to elicit such a strong personal response from its viewer.⁶ Indeed, Oedipa’s grief-stricken reaction to the Varo painting is all the more marked if one compares it to her rather more subdued response to the news of Pierce’s passing, which remains devoid of any tears: she “stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work” (1). Oedipa stood: if the stasis (and her calling on God) recalls that of the Virgin standing at the cross in the late medieval hymn known as Stabat Mater, then the subsequent references to TV and drunkenness characterize Pynchon’s heroine all too obviously as a member of that mid-twentieth-century leisure class well-adept at drowning its sorrows in alcoholic or televisual bliss.
 
And yet, as the final sentence’s acknowledgment of ergonomic failure indicates, there is something particularly unsettling about Pierce’s passing, something that sets it apart from the other sensations of loss and that makes it so that it “doesn’t work.” This unsettling quality has less to do with his actual death, however, than with the curious fashion in which this news reaches Oedipa, in a bureaucratic letter sent several months after Pierce expired:

The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by someone named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they’d only just now found the will. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago.

(2)

What is unsettling and traumatic—in Freud’s sense of the term—about the news of Pierce’s passing is Oedipa’s belated learning of it. She must cope with the haunting knowledge that a once beloved passed away months earlier and with the knowledge that, until now, she had no idea that he had ceased to exist. As Freud points out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this inability to respond at the moment itself marks an event as traumatic, and often forces the traumatized individual to re-live the unassimilated experience in a compensatory strategy described by the psychoanalyst as the compulsion to repeat: “[The patient] is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19).

 
American readers have long been familiar with this logic of belatedness via the condition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a term coined in the 1970s with regard to a war on foreign soil that coincides with the novel’s setting), or via William Faulkner’s well-known quip in Requiem for a Nun (1951) that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (533). Published midway between these two equally resonant coinages, The Crying of Lot 49 may be said to occupy a mediating position between the mythical haunting of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha past and the all too actual post-war syndrome of the Vietnam veteran. Indeed, one way to account for The Crying of Lot 49’s liminal position with regard to the movements of modernism and postmodernism lies precisely here, in the way in which Pynchon’s second novel oscillates between the mythic “persistence of memory” of its modernist predecessor V. (1963) and the “traumatic delay” of the V2 rockets, which “explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in” (23) in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).7 To some extent, the Vietnam war may itself be used as a means to chart this transition, as it moves from being a passing reference (to the burning monk Thich Quang Duc) in The Crying of Lot 49 (92) to what Christina Jarvis has called the “Vietnamization of World War II” in Gravity’s Rainbow.
 
Even so, Oedipa’s experience of trauma remains curiously distinct from the experience suggested by either one of these two models. In her case it is the process of mourning itself, i.e., that which generally serves as a remedial or suturing strategy to overcome trauma, that acts as the source of trauma. Her traumatic mourning therefore mirrors not the condition of the Vietnam veteran haunted by combat scenes upon his return home but the predicament of the (Vietnam) war widow who, often after a similar (epistolary) delay, is left wondering, as does Oedipa in her initial reaction to the letter about Pierce’s passing, “Was that how he’d died?” (1). Seen in this light, the tears shed in front of the Varo painting—which Oedipa recalls soon after receiving the news of Pierce’s passing—already serve as a substitute for her inability to mourn him in the present. In the same way, Oedipa’s execution of the will, although it may be the closest that she comes to a commemoration of Pierce, is more precisely a re-enactment of this first, missed opportunity to mourn. The feeling that she is missing something indeed haunts Oedipa throughout the novel. There is the vague “sense of buffering, insulation” (11) that she intuits when first coming upon the Varo painting; there is the “ritual reluctance” that she perceives in a performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, where “[c]ertain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine . . . what these things could possibly be” (55); and, finally, there is a more general reflection on what she comes to regard as her epileptic condition:

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals . . . as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

(76)

What Oedipa here construes as a future possibility that the “central truth” regarding Inverarity (and his will) might forever be kept from her is itself already a re-enactment of the trauma of having been denied the initial opportunity to mourn him. The “overexposed blank” that she intuits is therefore at once trauma and coping strategy. On the one hand it refers her back to the shock she experienced upon receiving the letter about Pierce’s death; on the other hand, by putting herself repeatedly into situations of exclusion and thus denying herself the comfort of closure, she seeks to re-claim this event as hers.

 
This growing (and gradually more specific) sense of exclusion reaches its apex in Oedipa’s supposed uncovering of the Tristero. The organization’s syncopated Latin domination—“tristis ero”: “I will be sad”—may be said to capture the interminability of her grieving process at the same time that it highlights the uncanny parallels between the sorting work of mourning and that of the postal services. If, as Freud points out, mourning consists of a re-arrangement of psychic energy in which “every single one of the memories and expectations by which the libido was entangled with the [lost] object is adjusted and hyperinvested (“Trauer” 432), then its work is distributive rather than productive. Like the postal worker who distributes the mail along predetermined mail routes within a particular precinct, the mourner is absorbed in what Freud calls “interior work” [“innere Arbeit”] (“Trauer 432) that does not trespass beyond the precinct of his own mind. In the same way that Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” essay proceeds via the method of “comparison” [Vergleichung] and “analogy” [Analogie] (“Trauer” 428), explaining the mourning process in juxtaposition with the state of melancholia or depression, Pynchon’s novel approaches mourning from an allegorical angle by linking it to the sorting labor of the post. It follows that both Freud’s essay and Pynchon’s novel provide the reader with allegories of grieving, parables of loss whose indirect (Oedipa might say “buffered”) approach to the subject is ultimately a reflection of the indirectness to which the work of mourning compels its workers. In the absence of the departed, the mourner turn to the departed’s possessions and letters as substituted tokens behind which, as in allegory, the deceased’s actual presence must be intuited.
 
This implied analogy between mourning and mailing is made most explicit when Oedipa learns about Maxwell’s Demon, a hypothetical, mechanical sorting device that would overturn the universe’s tendency towards disorder:

The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones . . . Since the demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have to put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.

(68)

Oedipa’s immediate response to this seeming disavowal of labor—“Sorting isn’t work?”— indicates to what extent she has come to identify her own coping for Inverarity’s death within the Freudian terms of work and thus also with the demon. In its association of mental and machinic labor, the passage anticipates (and takes literally) Jacques Derrida’s post-Freudian suggestion that “[one works] at mourning as one would speak . . . of a machine working at such and such an energy level, the theme of work thus becoming [its] very force, and [its] term, a principle” (Work 143). These Freudian parallels are further reinforced by the Demon’s sedentary labor inside a closed-off box, which echoes Freud’s description of mourning as “interior work” that does not spill over to its surroundings.

 
On the intradiegetic level, the Demon’s “perpetual motion” mirrors the interminability of Oedipa’s mourning. Indeed, her inability to work (i.e., communicate) with the Demon, described in a later chapter, is yet another example of the exclusion that Oedipa re-enacts throughout the novel. Unlike the ghost in Hamlet, who speaks and identifies himself, the Demon maintains a mute and anonymous silence in her presence: “Are you there, little fellow, Oedipa asked the Demon, or is Nefastis putting me on . . . For fifteen more minutes she tried; repeating, if you are there, whatever you are, . . . show yourself. But nothing happened” (85–6). The figure of the specter, which could still dominate Hamlet as a real and tangible presence, has, under the influence of psychoanalysis and its discontents (among which one might certainly count Derridean deconstruction), been demoted to a mute and mechanical Demon, a ghost in the machine. That the specter is committed to the interminably bureaucratic labor of sorting rather than to haunting indicates to what extent the literary conceptualization of grief has changed since the Elizabethan era.
 
It also signals that Pynchon, like Freud, understands the riddle value of mourning in economic terms, as an aberration of labor lost, and not in an epistemological sense, as a disguised form of truth waiting to be uncovered. Like Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch’s 1982 The Assault, The Crying of Lot 49 relies heavily on the detective novel’s epistemological thrust only to ultimately disavow its readerly expectations of truth revelation. Both novels have open endings: Oedipa is awaiting the crying (the auctioning off) of Pierce’s prized stamp collection (the titular “lot 49”), and Mulisch’s protagonist Anton Steenwijk walks figuratively through the post-holocaust ash that symbolizes his grief. Both remind readers of the Freudian point that mourning is no maieutic operation where the truth can be delivered via the midwifery of Socratic dialogue or psychoanalysis, but rather an energy-wasting process that can lack a productive or didactic outcome. “Your gynecologist has no test for what [Oedipa] was pregnant with” (144), the narrator states, echoing Freud’s description of mourning as a “vast riddle . . . one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back” (“On Transience” 306). In “Trauer und Melacholie,” Freud writes:

Normally, the respect for reality wins out. However, its command cannot be fulfilled at once. It is carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and occupying energy and so the lost object is continued in a psychological sense . . . Why this compromise enforcement of the reality command, which is carried out bit by bit, should be so extraordinarily painful cannot be easily explained from an economic point of view [in ökonomischer Begründung]. It is curious that this suffering-unease strikes us as normal.

(430)

In keeping with Derrida’s machinic simile, one might say that mourning here appears as a Geistguzzler, as the SUV of mental processes whose wasteful spending of psychic energy runs counter to what Alessia Ricciardi, in a commentary on this same passage, calls Freud’s own “utopian faith in the resilience and self-sufficiency of the psyche, in its ability to work as quickly and efficiently as a modern machine” (25).

Yet a distinction should be drawn between mourning that takes a long time and those cases of what Freud calls “pathological mourning” (“Trauer” 434), in which the grieving mind somehow finds itself arrested without the possibility of closure. In these cases, the process of mourning cannot come to an end because it cannot begin. Freud attributes this interminability to a certain “ambivalence” [Ambivalenzkonflikt] (“Trauer” 436) in the mourner’s relationship to the deceased, one that prevents the process of mourning from taking place. Oedipa’s grieving for Inverarity belongs to the latter category. Like other canonical texts of grieving such as Antigone and Hamlet, The Crying of Lot 49 is more a work about the crisis of mourning than it is about the process of mourning proper. With no funeral to go to and no known grave site to visit, Oedipa—like Antigone—is stripped of the two preconditions without which, as Derrida points out, no mourning process can begin: “[Mourning] consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (Specters 9). Sophocles’s heroine is forced to mourn mourning after being denied the knowledge of her father’s final resting place and the right to bury a fallen brother. Oedipa faces a similar predicament.
 
The parallels between Oedipa and Antigone—Oedipus’ daughter and thus an “Oedipa” in a filial sense— are worth exploring in more detail, because both characters also foreground the political nature of grieving. In the case of Antigone, this political thrust constitutes what Hegel famously saw as the fundamental dialectic structuring the play: urged on by the divine and unwritten laws of family duty, Antigone blatantly defies a state edict that forbids her to bury her brother, a former traitor to the polis. In a similar manner, Oedipa’s melancholia, which at times resembles the more cautious approach of Antigone’s sister Ismene, has a decidedly political and even subversive undertone. This political tone emerges once one takes into account the setting for Oedipa’s identification with the perpetual sorting of Maxwell’s Demon in the passage discussed above. That setting is the power plant of the missile manufacturer Yoyodyne, “San Narciso’s big source of employment, . . . one of the giants of the aerospace industry” (15), where Oedipa has gone to attend a stockholders’ meeting. At the power plant, she learns about the Demon from one of Yoyodyne’s employee who, “as it turned out . . . wasn’t working, only doodling with a fat pencil [the] sign [of the Tristero]” (67). As these sentences make amply clear, what frames the passage about Maxwell’s Demon right from the start is an emphasis on work and the distinction that this same employee, Stanley Koteks, will soon draw between, on the one hand, the non-work of his doodling, the postal labor of the Tristero, and the sorting of the Demon, and on the other, the production-driven teamwork of the Yoyodyne plant.

“See,” Koteks said, “if you can get [the company board] to drop their clause on patents. That, lady, is my ax to grind.” . . . Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with. “This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”

(67)

Significantly, Maxwell’s Demon and the machine that includes it are created extra muros, outside of the teamwork economy of Yoyodyne, by one John Nefastis, “who’s up at Berkeley now. John’s somebody who still invents things” (68). That Oedipa in turn associates her own process of grieving with the Demon’s sorting indicates that a larger dialectic is at play in this passage and indeed in the novel at large, one that pits the non-productive and solitary labor of mourning, doodling, and sorting against the productive teamwork of the Military Industrial Complex, as represented by the Yoyodyne plant.⁸ Koteks’s last name, a reference to a well-known brand of menstrual pads, reinforces the sterile nature of the latter three activities, which work but do not produce. By the same token, the solitary nature of Nefastis and the Demon’s labor serves as a mirror image for the inalienable privacy of the work of mourning, arguably the only form of labor that we may never get to outsource. “Can’t I get someone else to do it for me?” Oedipa asks upon learning that she has been chosen to co-execute Inverarity’s will (10). Pages later, she finds out that, much as the mailman or mailwoman carries sole responsibility for his or her particular route, the sorting work of mourning cannot be assumed by others.⁹ Like the Tupperware party from which she returns in the novel’s opening line, Oedipa’s work of mourning constitutes a counter-economy of solitary, non-productive work that exists outside of the officially sanctioned economy of the Military Industrial Complex.

 
That Oedipa’s mourning is interminable makes it all the more subversive to a system that relies on the timely and efficient delivery of goods and products.¹⁰ Capital, as Pynchon has never ceased to remind readers, does not like perpetuity or idleness in its workers or its products. Hence the unfortunate fate bestowed upon the eternally burning light bulb Byron in Gravity’s Rainbow, a reprise of sorts of the Demon’s perpetual sorting. The Tristero’s violent history of attacks on governmental mail carriers may thus serve as a metaphor for the terrorist raids the work of mourning makes on society. Mourning depletes society of its economic resources, suspends consumer desire and/or career ambition, and gradually replaces any kind of productive labor for what Emily Dickinson—in a proto-Freudian fashion—already calls “the solemnest of industries.”¹¹
 
Seen in this context, Oedipa’s “I will be sad” constitutes more than a melancholic cul-desac. It acquires an unexpected revolutionary potential. It recalls the “I would prefer not to” of Melville’s Bartleby, a character that Pynchon, in his essay on sloth, has described as “bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time” (“Nearer my Couch to Thee” 57). Like Bartleby’s refusal to carry out any work but copying, Oedipa’s “I will be sad” articulates a political stance in its defense of non-productive forms of labor, as most clearly expressed in her insistence that physical and mental sorting most certainly is work. Considering that the unfortunate Bartleby ends up in a dead letter office, “assorting [letters] for the flames” (Melville 672), one might even argue that The Crying of Lot 49 begins where Melville left off, with the arrival of a dead letter. In both texts, the postal medium highlights the extent of Oedipa’s and Bartleby’s sorrow. For the post is the slowest, and therefore most slothful, of all the modern communication media, a point that Pynchon’s novel raises rather explicitly by referring to a Tristero-delivered newspaper which may have been in the mail for sixty years (98). What makes both Bartleby and The Crying of Lot 49 so recognizably and peculiarly of our own time, then, is the fact that both explicitly raise enabling questions about the place and possibility for mourning in (post)modernity. In a way this question already dominates Antigone, where “the new man” Kreon is said to tamper with the ancient rites (and rights) of mourning. It also haunts Hamlet, whose new ruler Claudius is quick to fault his nephew for his “unmanly grief” (I.2). Yet both Melville and Pynchon take these reservations one step further by showing how the question and possibility of mourning has become all the more urgent within a corporate-consumerist environment. In The Crying of Lot 49, any lingering presence of the dead is either successfully neutralized via the clinical treatment of psychoanalysts like Dr. Hilarius, buried under the buzzing comfort of “perhaps too much kirsch” (1), or literally turned into consumption products, as with the human-bone charcoal used in Beaconsfield cigarettes (45). Even the “wake” (125) for Randolph Driblette, the unfortunate stage director of “The Courier’s Tragedy,” assumes the form of an afternoon bacchanal complete with “dirty pictures” (127) and “an astounding accumulation of empty beer bottles” (124) scattered on the lawn.
 
Oedipa’s persistence in mourning Inverarity’s death beyond either one of these recognized mourning models (and in holding her own private wake by returning to Driblette’s grave at night) thus reveals a fundamental disharmony that is as compelling in The Crying of Lot 49 as in Antigone. The ultimately private process of mourning, something to be carried out at one’s own pace and in one’s own fashion, is dissonant with the public observances—funeral, therapy, prayers, monuments—through which one is expected to channel such grief. Pynchon captures this tension lexically through the double meaning of the verb “to cry,” which can refer both to a personal, emotional response—Oedipa’s tears—and to “auction off.” Although the auction at the novel’s end can be regarded as a belated memorial service of sorts for Pierce (with lot 49 fulfilling the role of the proverbial empty casket), the narrator’s assertion that Oedipa “sat alone, toward the back of the room” (152) indicates that even then she maintains her distance from the public cooptation of private grief. It is highly doubtful therefore whether the messianic vision that is hinted at in these last pages will in fact truly come to pass.
 
The shift from standing to sitting that thus characterizes Oedipa’s postural development over the course of the novel—from her Stabat Mater-like standing in the living room to the “pieta” of her holding the sailor in her arms (102) to her final sedentariness at the auction—highlights the extent to which she has come to be weighed down by Pierce’s legacy. In a way, this final sedentary pose reinforces her connection to the grieving Virgin who in most canonical visual representations of the Stabat Mater has already sunk to the ground by the time the painter presents her in her moment of mourning.¹² This emphasis on the physicality of grieving, on its various postures as well as on its economic and incorporating qualities, clearly reflects the influence of psychoanalysis on Pynchon’s rhetoric of grief at the same time that it distinguishes this rhetoric from the psychologism of Hamlet.
 
The change from standing to sitting can also be read as a prophecy of the (American) economy in a more literal sense as it moves from a production-driven, standing-at-the-assembly-line economy (represented by Yoyodyne) to a sedentary post-Fordist service industry in the 1970s. In a way, Pynchon’s evocation of grieving as sorting work presents the mourner as a white-collar worker committed to the reshuffling of (internal) documents. Yet there can be little doubt that the slothful nature of the work of mourning makes it hardly any more compatible with, or hardly any less subversive of, the post-industrial society of late capitalism in which one is typically given just a few days’ leave in order to assimilate the loss of a significant other.
 
The question of loss in Pynchon is a complicated and compelling one because his novels tend to reverse the traditional imbalance between banality and gravity that has been a part of the western literature of trauma at least since the Renaissance. Rather than offering his readers comic relief after long, sustained sequences of dramatic tension—as Shakespeare does in the porter scene following Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, for instance—Pynchon’s picaresque narratives proceed in the opposite direction. The mindless pleasures that constitute the bulk of his novels are characterized by long, episodic passages that detail the often banal travails of a numbing plethora of flat characters. These alternate with brief moments of introspection that function as something like melancholic relief. For it is in these brief moments that we are reminded that we are dealing with human beings after all, and not with puppets at the mercy of some evil demiurge. Although I have highlighted them in this essay, the relative infrequency of such moments in The Crying of Lot 49 helps explain why this novel continues to be read almost invariably as a mock (or postmodern) detective novel about a character faced with the bewildering qualities of the emergent information age. Such readings have little to no consideration for the experience of loss that Oedipa is going through. That Oedipa’s experience of loss is so easy to miss, however, may already be the point in a novel which itself thematizes precisely such a missed encounter with mourning.
 

Might there be another type of couple?

—Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (16)

If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates.

—Jacques Derrida (Positions 40–1)

“On a visit to one of the great antique collections of Rome, Norbert Hanold had discovered a bas-relief which was exceptionally attractive to him, so he was much pleased, after his return to Germany, to be able to get a splendid plaster-cast of it” (3). With this line, Wilhelm Jensen begins Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy, his 1903 story of a young archeologist who falls in love with the lower end of a bas-relief (Fig. 1 below), or rather “a splendid plaster-cast of it,” which he names “Gradiva” (“the girl splendid in walking”). As if falling in love with a copy of a copy, most readers today—like Hanold—have learned to love Gradiva through the mediation of Freud’s interpretation. Critics agree that Freud’s “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva” (1906) represents one of his earliest and most extensive attempts to couple his new science of psychoanalysis with a work of literary art.¹ What is less readily acknowledged, however—even by a critic like Leo Bersani, who has (by himself and in various couplings) spilled so much precious ink on the Freudian corpus (including a book on Assyrian bas-reliefs which, remarkably, makes no mention of Gradiva— is how “Delusion and Dream” involves a queer romance, a story of statue-love in which the very life (Zoë) of the romantic couple is placed at stake.
 
To place a life at stake usually implies a sacrificial economy. In the case of the romantic couples here (psychoanalysis and art; Hanold and Gradiva), the burning question is sublimation. As Jean Laplanche notes of sublimation, “the term itself impl[ies] a transformation of solids into gas through fire” (26), a burning (up) associated with sacrifice. But what would the burning (up) of the romantic couple imply, if not a sort of consum(mat)ing without reserve—a sizzling consumption beyond reproductive copulation? And yet Hanold imagines his beloved Gradiva leaving behind the last trace of her life, her footprints, in the burning ash (cinders) of a Pompeii about to be simultaneously negated and preserved (aufheben, to use Hegel’s verb) in molten lava.² Thus, far from a simple “transformation of solids into gas through fire,” this slow congealing of Pompeii under blackening blobs of lava would seem to provide the lowest, basest possible counter-image to the airy, ethereal (f)light usually associated with the inspirational economies of romantic art and love.³ Such (f)light figures as the uplifting relève (to use Derrida’s translation) of both Hegelian “sublation” (Aufhebung) and Freudian “sublimation” (Sublimierung). And indeed, Derrida’s use of relève, as Alan Bass reminds us, comes from the verb relever, which means not only “to lift up” (as does aufheben) but “to relay” and “to relieve,” as when one soldier relieves another of duty, or when one relieves oneself by voiding the bladder or bowels.⁴ By translating Hegel’s Aufhebung as relève, then, Derrida not only inscribes an excessive “effect of substitution and difference” (Bass 20) within Hegel’s restricted economy of uplift,⁵ but he also remarks on a fatal coupling at the heart of its romantic copulation. In “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” (1968), Derrida tethers this uplifting inspirational (f)light—the life of the Trinitarian Spirit (Geist)—to the dark remains of a corpse entombed at the base of a stony, triangular pyramid inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphic reliefs.⁶ Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that our young archeologist, Hanold, also calls his beloved bas-relief a “tombstone” (Jensen 14), despite his inflamed imagination. Indeed, given the gravity of such weighty counter-images, it is no wonder that Freud never mentions the uplifting word “sublimation” in his Gradiva study. (Nor, for that matter, does he ever read Hanold’s love in terms of fetishism—more on this later.)
 
And yet, the subject of sublimation increasingly preoccupies Freud in the years immediately following this early attempt to couple his new science of psychoanalysis with Jensen’s “little romance” (Freud, Delusion 125). Perhaps it is worth investigating what Freud may have encountered in this early romantic coupling that could have compelled him in the years immediately following to elaborate a more explicitly self-conscious concept of sublimation. Such an investigation would be crucial because, as Bersani suggests, “[s]ublimation is not a liminal or unnecessary psychoanalytic concept; rather it is the concept that, by legitimizing psychoanalysis’ claim to being a philosophy of culture, can either reinforce or threaten its strained complicity in the culture of redemption” (“Erotic Assumptions” 35).⁷ But if “the great achievement of psychoanalysis” is, as Bersani also claims, “its attempt to account for our inability to love others” (Intimacies 60), then perhaps it is equally crucial to know whether “others” includes things such as bas-reliefs. And if not, why not? Is it even possible to understand such things, as Freud claims to be doing here, in terms otherwise than those of fetishism and its humanist metaphysics?⁸ And, finally, what are the implications of such matters for Freud’s latter-day queer disciples?⁹ What I want to suggest is not only that Freud indeed encounters something base in the young scientist Hanold’s love for a bas-relief, but also that in seeking relief from such matters Freud (himself a young scientist at the time) is forced to consider the question of how there could ever arise a space of aesthetic sublimation unlike Hanold’s Pompeii, the birthplace of pornography.¹⁰ In such a space of cultural life, persons could couple with things without falling into the grave delusion of statue-love. Such a speculative Hegelian¹¹ hypothesis regarding the genealogy of Freud’s conception of sublimation would be all too appropriate here, if it did not immediately stumble over a couple of splendid impediments. Not only does Freud never manage to erect such a fully-realized concept of sublimation, but his failure already repeats the defeat of Hanold’s attempt to realize his romantic copulation with Zoë (a living person) without the mediation of Gradiva (a lifeless thing). Freud’s defeat, in other words, repeats the double feet/feat of the bas-relief Gradiva, whose two arrested (and arresting) feet rise and fall without end, rest, or relief (relève), thus enacting and annihilating the uplifting life (Zoë) of the romantic couple, i.e., reproductive copulation.
 

I

 

[W]e usually think of . . . the humanizing attributes of intimacy within a couple, where the personhood of each partner is presumed to be expanded and enriched by the knowledge of the other.

—Leo Bersani (Intimacies 53)

[P]erhaps there is something in human “life” that is incompatible with life.

—Barbara Johnson (122)

As I insinuated above, it’s puzzling that the apparent sacrifice at stake in Gradiva vis-à-vis the life of the romantic couple has never been taken up by Leo Bersani, who, perhaps more than any other critic in recent years, has tried to expose the insidious—and often, but not always, heterosexual—figure of the couple at the heart of various cultural-theoretical discourses of intimacy and love.¹² As the normative model of romance institutionalized in marriage, monogamy, and the family, the figure of the romantic couple often flies under the radar of theory. As Bersani writes in “Against Monogamy” (1998), even “the most radical theorists [Freud and Lacan] have for the most part remained remarkably silent—or at best vague and inconclusive—about the relevance of their theoretical subversions to a possible questioning of the couple…as a normative model for psychoanalytic therapy” (92). At first glance, it may appear that Freud’s reading of Gradiva can do nothing for Bersani’s radical questioning of the couple, given that Freud himself seems to valorize Hanold’s apparently successful reunion with Zoë as a form of therapeutic cure. Such a reading, I want to argue, ignores Hanold’s “pedestrian investigations” (Jensen 11) into the queer, lifeless life of Zoë-Gradiva, investigations carried out at the feet of his beloved bas-relief.
 

Indeed, it will be our wager here that such pedestrian investigations already defeat any question of an uplifting romantic reunion between Hanold and Zoë. By dramatizing the impossibility of ever untangling the living person (Zoë) from the lifeless thing (Gradiva), Gradiva shows the impossibility of answering once and for all what Hanold calls “the question of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva might possess” (75). Or as Jensen puts it: “even if it had occurred to [Hanold] that Gradiva was only a dead bas-relief, it was also equally beyond doubt that she was still alive . . . [and that] her name was Zoë” (Delusion 102).
 
More an uncanny coupling than a couple, this “dual nature” of Zoë-Gradiva (Delusion 102)—her/its lifeless life, simultaneously person-thing, life-death, cure-illness—gives Freud pause in his reading of Jensen’s Gradiva, freezing his forward progress like the stone-cold feet of Hanold’s bas-relief. In other words, it is as though Freud himself encounters a stumbling block on the roundabout road to Hanold’s romantic reunion with Zoë, one that forces him into a digression on the strangeness of Zoë’s supposed cure. As Freud states, it is strange that the real-life Zoë, Hanold’s long-lost childhood friend, should end up being both the original drive behind Hanold’s delusory flight to Pompeii and the secondary vehicle of his cure. Jensen’s novel, then, forces Freud to consider how Zoë could be both delusion and cure, such that the same thing that spurs Hanold’s flight into delusion ends up delivering him over to what he was fleeing from. Or, as Freud states: “If Zoë is the right person, we shall soon learn how one cures delusions like those of our hero [Hanold] . . . . It would be very striking . . . if the treatment and . . . the delusion should coincide [in the same person: Zoë] . . . . We have a suspicion, of course, that our case [Hanold’s statue-love] might then turn out to be an ‘ordinary’ love story” (Delusion 142).
 
An ordinary love story! What could Freud mean by this? What could possibly be ordinary—or should we say, pedestrian—about Hanold’s delusory case of statue-love? After all, as Freud himself tells us:

Hanold acts quite differently from ordinary people. He has no interest in the living woman; science, which he serves, has taken this interest from him and transferred it to women of stone or bronze. Let us not consider this an unimportant peculiarity; it is really the basis of [Jensen’s] story, for one day it happens that a single such bas-relief [Gradiva] claims for itself all the interest which would otherwise belong only to the living woman [Zoë], and thereby originates the delusion [Zoë-Gradiva].

(Delusion 174–5)

What transforms Jensen’s Gradiva into an ordinary love story (“little romance”) is not Hanold’s statue-love or his lack of interest for the living woman but rather Jensen’s (apparently) cheesy romantic invention of making Hanold’s cure and delusion coincide in the same person. Zoë (the analyst figure), after re-awakening Hanold’s desire for the living woman, can then offer herself as the consummation of his re-awakened love for life in the form of the romantic couple. A real analyst, Freud reminds us, could never marry his or her patient. Hence Gradiva’s romantic cheesiness. And granted, while this may be one way to read the seemingly uplifting reunion with Zoë at the end of Jensen’s “Pompeiian Fancy,” it is clearly one that doesn’t do much for Bersani’s radical questioning of the couple.

 
But is it really such a “fortunate set of circumstances,” as Freud says, that the cure (Zoë) and the delusion (Gradiva) coincide as if coupled in the same person (same thing)? Isn’t this, instead, precisely the queer paradox Hanold names Zoe-Gradiva, lifeless life? Indeed, as Sarah Kofman notes in her reading of Gradiva, such a strange coincidence of illness and cure operates more like a pharmakon (in the Derridean sense), radically undermining any naïve illusion of the romantically reunited happy couple through the pharmakon’s uncanny figuration of an “originary double” (“Delusion” 187). In other words, as Freud implies, there is a way in which Zoë’s cure for Hanold is itself just another delusion, just another replicated love life modeled on the (double) feat/feet of an ancient plaster-copy bas-relief. How else, then, are we to read the concluding scene of Jensen’s novel, when the apparently cured Hanold asks the real-life Zoë to replicate for him the distinctive lift of the foot on which his love for Gradiva had once hinged (Fig. 2)? Or, as Freud glosses this final scene of supposed romantic reunion, “The delusion [Gradiva] had now been conquered by a beautiful reality [Zoë]; but before the two lovers [the couple] left Pompeii it [the delusion] was still to be honoured once again. When they reached . . . some ancient stepping-stones, Hanold paused and asked the girl [Zoë] to go ahead of him. She understood him ‘and pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoë Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past . . . as though in a dream . . . with her quietly tripping gait’” (Delusions 39–40). And so, with this final “triumph of love” (Delusions 40), as Freud says, “what was beautiful and valuable in the delusion is now acknowledged” (Delusion 166). But is it really?
 

As Ika Willis argues, to truly acknowledge such a “triumph of love” would entail something far queerer than Freud (apparently) is willing to admit, since:

At the end of [Jensen’s] novel . . . Zoë is in fact standing in for Gradiva, rather than the other way round, as Freud’s reading would have it. Hanold desires Zoë insofar as she is a substitute for a substitute. The novel . . . end[s] by fulfilling not Hanold’s desire for Zoë (which would return him to “real life”), but his antiquarian desire for Gradiva” Gradiva’s name, as noted, derives from her gait . . . . [Thus] the novel seems to end with the victory of the archeological [Gradiva] over “real life” [Zoë]. That is to say, where at first it seemed that the substitute, Gradiva, in fact delivered Hanold’s desire to its true object, Zoë, now it is possible to reverse those positions . . . [with] Zoë . . . reincorporated into [Gradiva’s deadly] circuit . . . . It could be argued, then, that Hanold’s acceptance of “real life,” of the unmediated presence of Zoë, is itself a sacrifice.

(Willis 227–8)

Unlike Freud, then, who reads Hanold’s triumphant reunion with Zoë as a return to real love and the couple through a momentary deviation of statue-love, Willis reads this very same love of Zoë as being itself a deviation from a more general condition of what we might call originary replication (or originary mediation). In other words, it is Hanold’s love for Zoë (real life), not his love for Gradiva (dead matter), that is truly deviant, precisely as a deviation from deviation. And it is because of this delusory deviation from originary deviation that Willis suggests that Hanold’s love for Zoë might itself be the real sacrifice.

 
But why sacrifice? And isn’t Willis here implicitly reintroducing the burning question of sublimation and its sacrificial economy at the very moment he thinks he is challenging Freud’s uplifting reading of Hanold’s final reunion with Zoë? It is for this reason, I think, that we need to look closer at Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, for it is there that the burning question of Jensen’s little romance—its uplifting reunion (relève)—is already repeatedly posed and problematized in the arrested and arresting figure of Gradiva’s lift of the foot, i.e., at the very basis of Hanold’s love for Gradiva. Indeed, we might say that it is the endless (dis)placement of Gradiva’s two feet which has been captivating Hanold from the start. Thus, in his description of his beloved’s gait, Hanold says it was as if “the left foot had advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only lightly with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel were raised almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of . . . flight-like poise, combined with a firm step” (Jensen 4–5). A double impression! But isn’t this double impression of Gradiva’s gait—its uplifted poise coupled with its firm step— precisely a repetition of the word “bas-relief,” as though, in its hyphenated coupling, the very word “bas-relief” literally enacts and annihilates the uplifting flight of both Hegelian sublation and Freudian sublimation? In other words, instead of merely enacting the “magical power that transforms water to wine, stones to flesh . . . death to life” (33), as Mark C. Taylor writes of Hegel’s sacrificial economy of love, it is as though the queer coupling of the hyphenated word “bas-relief”—a hyphenation repeated in the name “Zoë-Gradiva”— graphically refuses any release from its base, as though tethering each of its two words to the gravity of a base “third” (turd), without relief, without end. Simultaneously abject (grounded) and ethereal (flight-like), like Georges Bataille’s famous “Big Toe” (le gros Orteil), Hanold’s pedestrian investigations thus remind us that the basis of man’s proud erection remains covered in mud—congealed in shit.
 
Like Bataille, I am arguing that a certain configuration of the hyphenated “third” (turd) in Jensen’s novel endlessly (dis)places the elevated supremacy of the couple in an arresting and arrested double movement without relief or sublimation. Or, as Taylor writes: “If there are two, there are always already at least three. The insistence of the third calls into question the integrity of the One” (274). In his reading of Bataille’s “Big Toe” (le gros Orteil), Roland Barthes notes a similar double movement around the French word for toe, orteil, which derives from articulus, meaning “little member or limb” (“infantile phallus”). Barthes argues that Bataille’s title is scandalous in its perverse play of double meanings: “on the one hand, gros is repulsive in a way that grand is not; and on the other, the diminutive (articulus) can also be repulsive . . . . [T]he toe is seductive-repulsive; fascinating as a contradiction: that of the tumescent and miniaturized phallus” (245). For Barthes, then, Bataille’s heterology is not simply the result of linking the ignoble erection of man’s dirty big toe to man’s noble upright posture, but of deconstructing the very couple (“noble”/“ignoble”) through the addition of what Barthes calls a scandalous third term (“base”) which is not regular (“noble”/“base”/“ignoble”) (246). This third in-between term is “an independent term, concrete, eccentric, irreducible: the term of seduction outside the (structural) law” (Barthes 246). Now, it would be tempting to read the hyphenated terms of Jensen’s little romance according to Bataille’s notion of the eccentric third term. Because they are heterological to the uplifting flight of sublimation, such third terms “[baffle] the nature of matter in itself ” (Barthes 246) and thus echo the stakes of Hanold’s pedestrian investigations into the queer lifeless life of a bas-relief. And yet, if the goal of Bataille’s “base materialism” (“heterology”) is to make things “insecure, wobbly (the etymological meaning of ‘scandalous’)” (Barthes 246), then it is still not clear how a pedestrian case of statue-love—or what J. Hillis Miller pejoratively calls a mere “version of Pygmalion” (vii)—could ever upset the uplifted/uplifting pedestal of the romantic couple and its uncanny fruitfulness.¹³ After all, what could be more Hegelian than the notion of the third, i.e., turning shit (base matter) into gold (conceptual value) through a three-step process of uplifting sublation (Aufhebung)? What a relief! It’s as if one could relieve oneself without a dirty, stinking remainder.
 

II

 

Remain(s)—to (be) know(n)—what causes shitting.

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 37)

[T]he fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated.

—Georges Bataille (“Use Value” 101)

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the only other major digression in Freud’s reading of Jensen’s little romance revolves around a dirty etching by Félicien Rops (Fig. 3), which Freud introduces as another allegory of repression. Like the simultaneous destruction and preservation of Pompeii under black blobs of lava, Rops’s etching also illustrates for Freud how repression never coincides with the total destruction, or total obliteration, of a memory, because a dirty trace of it always remains “potent and effective” (Delusion 159–160). Or as Freud says, quoting an old Latin proverb: “You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will always return” (Delusion 160). It is this double movement of repression that Freud then links with “the lives of saints and penitents” depicted in Félicien Rops’s etching, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1878).
 

Here, then, is how Freud describes the scandalous scene:

 

From the [base] temptations of the world, an ascetic monk [St. Anthony] has sought refuge [relief] in the [uplifting] image of the crucified Savior. Then, phantom-like, this [uplifted] cross sinks [down into the dirt] and, in its stead, there rises [elevated] shining, the image of a voluptuous, unclad woman, in the same [elevated] position of the crucifixion. Other [lesser] painters . . . have, in such representations of temptation, depicted sin . . . near the [uplifted] Savior on the cross. [But] Rops, alone, has allowed it [the base] to take the place of the Savior on the cross.

(Delusion 161)

What is happening in this remarkable description? Is Freud simply providing us with an allegory of repression, as he claims, or rather one of sublimation? And isn’t Freud’s rhetoric, in fact, repeating what Hanold had already discovered at the feet of his beloved bas-relief, the endless (dis)placement of the two? That depends. According to Freud’s allegory, the two-pronged fork, like the cross in Rops’s pornographic etching, unwittingly becomes the vehicle (both the carrier and the telos) of the very thing it tries to drive out: sex. It is as if Freud wants us to see only a pathological return of the repressed instead of an endless movement of (dis)placement. And yet, as Freud himself points out, the nude, voluptuous woman not only approaches the uplifted Savior on the cross, but takes his place, just as, in Freud’s reading of Jensen’s novel, archeology (base matter: Gradiva) takes the place of (relève) Zoë. In both cases, then, it is as if Freud wants us to see the instrument of repression (the cross in Rops’s etching; archeology in Jensen’s novel) as both the means and the end of a pathological return. And yet, despite all this, Freud nevertheless goes on to state (somewhat mischievously), “If . . . archeology [had] driven love . . . out of [Hanold’s] life, it would now be legitimate and correct that an antique relief should awaken in him the forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his childhood; it would be his well-deserved fate to have fallen in love with the stone representation of Gradiva” (Delusion 161).

 
Why his well-deserved fate? Freud’s implication, I think, goes something like this: Hanold’s capacity to love proceeds from a kind of reversed Pygmalionism. Instead of the living person (Pygmalion) giving life to a dead thing (statue), it is the dead thing (statue) which gives life to the living person.¹⁴ Hanold’s love for the lifeless Gradiva, in other words, precedes his awakening to so-called real life. It is thus the queer condition of (im)possibility for his interest in real women. But if Hanold’s love for the secondary lifeless replica is paradoxically original—the very source of his awakening to real love—then doesn’t this automatically necessitate a radical rethinking of some of the basic couples of Western thought (originary/secondary; person/thing; life/death; reality/illusion; health/sickness)? Indeed, as I shall argue, it is precisely at the beginning of Jensen’s little romance, with our entrance into this delusory world of Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, that we begin to catch a glimpse of what such a radical rethinking might entail. From the very start of Jensen’s novel, in other words, we are plunged into a world where, for Hanold, “marble and bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed the purpose and value of human life; and so [Hanold] sat in the midst of his walls, books and pictures, with no need of any other intercourse” (Jensen 18–9). From the very start of Gradiva, then, we are sutured to a queer figure that has “no need of any other intercourse” besides that with “marble and bronze,” “books and pictures.”
 
Of course, within a heteronormative framework of “reproductive futurism,” as Lee Edelman argues, such queer intercourse with inanimate things can always be read as a (deadly) delusion. The irony of Jensen’s reversed Pygmalionism, however, is that it is only through the incitement of such lifeless things that Hanold can ever really come to life at all. In other words, it is the strange feat/feet of a lifeless bas-relief that compels Hanold to go outside and compare Gradiva’s distinctive gait with that of real women on the street. Such “pedestrian investigations” (11), as Jensen writes, “forced [Hanold] . . . to a mode of action utterly foreign to him; women had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze and he had never given his feminine contemporaries the least consideration” (9). Far from being a mere deadly delusion, then, Hanold’s love for Gradiva provokes him into the real world, with his love for the lifeless, inhuman statue paradoxically awakening him to real “life” (Zoë). But if this is the case, what happens to the allegory of repression in Freud’s reading of Rops’s pornographic etching? Is such an allegory compatible with Jensen’s queer logic of reversed Pygmalionism? As Freud himself implies, it is Hanold’s coupling with Gradiva that is the condition of (im)possibility for his subsequent capacity to love the living woman. And so, rather than a pathological case of a repressed matter returning to replace the uplifted Savior, it is as if Hanold’s (in)capacity to love the living woman has always-already been marked by the double feat/feet of a bas-relief. And if this is the case, Rops’s pornographic etching becomes less an allegory of repression than of its endlessly (de)feeted sublimation. My point here, then, is not that we should simply replace Rops’s The Temptation of St. Anthony with, say, Thomas Rowlandson’s Modern Pygmalion (Fig. 4).
 

On the contrary, Rowlandson’s pornographic version of Pygmalion also ends up transubstantiating the queer coupling of a bas-relief into a romantic couple. Now, the artificial erection of a lifeless statue (Galatea) is replaced by the uplifted erection of the living artist/creator (Pygmalion) and his pro-creative copulation. Perhaps Freud’s similar misreading of an endlessly (de)feeted coupling for a happily reunited couple also explains why so many of his latter-day queer disciples have virtually ignored Gradiva. And yet, to do so, as I’ve been arguing here, is to ignore one of literature’s most radical critiques of the romantic (human, heterosexual) couple. And so, it is to this radical critique of marriage and the romantic couple in Gradiva that I shall now turn.
 

III

 

[O]ur heterosexual culture . . . reserv[es] the highest relational value for the couple.

—Leo Bersani (Intimacies 42)

Marriage: relief of the implement. The implement is solid. . . . Marriage is the relief of the constraint, the interiorization of this exteriority, the consum(m)ating of the implement . . . . [As the] free inclination of both sexes, marriage excludes any contract. Such an abstract juridical bond could in effect bind persons only to (dead) things.
 

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 123–4)

If “our heterosexual culture . . . reserv[es] the highest relational value for the couple,” as Bersani argues, then it would be hard to find a more explicit critique of this romantic system than Hanold’s anti-humanist devaluation of couples throughout the first half of Jensen’s Gradiva. On his initial trip to Rome, for example, Hanold complains of being unable to escape the “swarms” of honeymooning “dualists” (22), i.e., “young bridal couples [who are] as rapturous as [they are] vapid” (23). Indeed, the young archeologist finds himself absolutely bewildered by the motivations of these honeymooning couples and their follies:

[F]or the first time he saw . . . people brought together by the mating impulse without his being able to understand what had been the mutual cause. It remained incomprehensible to him why the women had chosen these men, and still more perplexing why the choice of the men had fallen upon these women . . . . To be sure, he lacked a standard for measuring, for, of course, one could not compare the women of today, with the sublime beauty of the old works of art . . . there was something lacking which ordinary life was in duty bound to offer. So he reflected for many hours on the strange impulses of human beings, and came to the conclusion that of all their follies, marriage, at any rate, took the prize as the greatest and most incomprehensible one.

(22–3)

Caught amidst this incomprehensible swarm of honeymooning couples, Hanold begins to notice a “strangely oppressive feeling had again taken possession of him, a feeling that he was imprisoned in a cage which this time was called Rome” (27). To escape this romantic cage— “to escape the ‘inseparables’” (27)—he decides to flee to Pompeii because, as one young bridal couple tells him despairingly, “there are only old stones and rubbish there” (29). In Pompeii, however, Hanold immediately finds himself besieged by yet another domestic “two-winged creature,” the “musca domestica communis, the common house-fly” (32):

 

He had never been subject to violent emotions; yet a hatred of these two-winged creatures burned within him; he considered them the basest evil invention of Nature . . . and recognized in them invincible proof against the existence of a rational world-system . . . . [They] whizzed before his eyes, buzzed in his ears, tangled themselves in his hair, tickled his nose, forehead and hands. Therein they reminded him of honeymoon couples . . . . [I]n the mind of the tormented man [Hanold] rose a longing for a . . . splendidly made fly-flapper like one unearthed from a burial vault, which he had seen in the Etruscan museum in Bologna . . . . [F]lies and bridal couples swarming en masse were not calculated to make life agreeable anywhere.

(33–5; emphasis added)

Isn’t Hanold’s longing for a “splendidly made fly-flapper” amidst this swarm of “flies and bridal couples” just like his longing for Gradiva (“the girl splendid in walking”)? Indeed, the splendid coupling of these two longings is confirmed later in Jensen’s novel, when, under the burning noonday sun of Pompeii, the flies and bridal couples suddenly vanish: “with their vanishing, what had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed appearance, but not a living one” (Jensen 40). In this uncanny, midday milieu, Hanold’s wish for a “splendidly made fly-flapper” is apparently answered by the sudden apparition of his beloved Gradiva: “something suddenly stepped forth . . . and across the lava stepping-stones . . . Gradiva stepped buoyantly” (46). Or as Jensen says: “[Hanold] found what he was looking for” (53). Having been harassed across Rome by swarms of two-winged creatures, it is as though Hanold now finally finds relief in the queerly coupled apparition of a splendidly made Zoë-Gradiva-fly-flapper: splat!
 
And yet, the question remains: Why do so many critical readings of Gradiva (including Freud’s) ignore Hanold’s explicit critique of the romantic (human, heterosexual) couple as an insidious domestic pest? In her recent Persons and Things (2008), for instance, Barbara Johnson notes that in his reading of Gradiva, “Freud seems to have set up a simple logic: love of statue = sick = repressed, love of real woman = healthy = free from repression. The only strange element in this structure is the animal Jensen uses to represent life: the housefly. Life is that which annoys” (148). But, as we have just seen, Jensen explicitly couples flies and bridal couples. For Hanold, these two-winged creatures go together. It is not simply life which annoys, but the (re)productive life of the romantic couple which annoys, which swarms, and which deserves a good swat with a splendidly made fly-paper. To miss this queer coupling in Jensen’s little romance is to miss how Hanold’s delusional love for a splendidly made bas-relief offers contemporary queer theory untapped material for thinking about what Bersani and Dutoit call “non-copulative mode[s] of pairing” (22). Of course, since the most contemptible thing for Bersani and Dutoit is for the partners of such non-copulative pairings to become cemented, fixed, and immobilized, like “blocks of self-contained matter” (23), it is doubtful they would be willing to read Hanold’s love for an immobile, inanimate, plaster bas-relief as anything but a grave loss of “levity” (23). Indeed, for Bersani, Baudelaire’s obsession with statue sex—“so white, so cold” (Baudelaire 69)—is itself a reactionary defense against such a life of levity and mobility. Or as Bersani writes, “necrophilia is the Baudelairean erotic ideal; it is sex with an absolutely still partner . . . [and] aspires to a sexuality compatible with death” (Baudelaire 70). And yet, if “the homo” is the one who risks “loving the other as the same, in homo-ness,” as Bersani famously asserts elsewhere, and thus the one who “risks his own boundaries, risks knowing where he ends and the other begins” (Homos 128–9), isn’t it possible to read Hanold as a sort of Bersanian homosexual, i.e., as one who risks loving “the other” (the non-human) as “the same” (the human)? Again, I suspect Bersani would say (as he does in Homos) that such “a perfectly realized and definitive homo-ness is incompatible with life” (171). Homo-ness, it seems, must transport one into the world, into life, but never into death.
 
And yet, Freud, some eighteen years after his early attempt at coupling his new science of psychoanalysis with Jensen’s little romance, himself returns to the question of Zoë (“life”) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). There, he famously speculates that the love of life may be but a secondary deviation—or, as he puts it, a “complicated détour” (46)— from a more primordial drive for the inanimate (46). Like Hanold’s love for the ancient bas-relief, then, Freud speculates that all “organic life,” while appearing to be ruled by the mobility and levity of change, is actually motivated by a more conservative drive for “an earlier state of things” (Beyond 44), what we might call (á la Hanold) an archeological striving for an “ancient goal” (Beyond 45). Thus, as Freud states:

[The] final goal of all organic striving [is] . . . . an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.”

(Beyond 45–6)

But by claiming that this drive for inanimate things precedes and makes possible a secondary deviation toward living ones, isn’t Freud, here, offering a version of the reversed Pygmalionism we identified at the very heart of Jensen’s novel? And if so, can’t we say that the later Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle unwittingly comes around to Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, even to the point of repeating a version of them as his own? Note, for example, Freud’s speculations on the strange evocation of life out of inanimate matter:

The attributes of life were . . . evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception . . . . The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out . . . to return to the inanimate state . . . . till decisive external influences altered it in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death.

(Beyond 46)

If the love of life is a secondary deviation (delusion?) provoked from out of a more originary inanimate state of things, i.e., a deviation from deviation, then doesn’t the opposition of life and death become less a couple than an originary double?

Indeed, in her essay “The Double is/and the Devil: The Uncanniness of The Sandman,” Sarah Kofman is interested in tracing Freud’s resistance to precisely such figures of originary doubleness throughout his 1919 essay on “The Uncanny,” an essay written roughly at the same time as Beyond the Pleasure Principle. And although Kofman never connects the figure of the double in “The Uncanny” to the figure of the couple in Freud’s Gradiva essay, she does note how Freud’s “Uncanny” also revolves around the story of a young man who falls in love with an inanimate thing, a doll. Like Hanold’s love for a statue, Nathaniel’s love for the doll Olympia in The Sandman becomes the locus for Kofman’s critique of Freud’s essay. Why, Kofman wonders, doesn’t Freud consider Nathaniel’s love for Olympia a paradigmatic case of the uncanny (“The Double” 141)? In a section titled “The Animate and the Inanimate: Diabolical Mimesis,” Kofman suggests that Freud’s dismissal of Nathaniel’s doll-love simply repeats a more general fear of the supplement (writing) operating throughout Western thought. Following Derrida, Kofman states, “Writing’s supplementarity indefinitely calls forth supplementarity because there has never been an originary model perfectly present and complete . . . . It [the double, the supplement] indicates that life must necessarily always pass through death” (“The Double” 137). But instead of confronting this logic of the supplement, Freud turns Nathaniel’s doll-love—like Hanold’s statue-love—into a simple, binary case of delusion, a case of lifeless artifice simply flipping sides with living reality. According to this scenario, Nathaniel (like Hanold) simply forgets living presence and turns instead to dead representations, revealing his pathological preference for a dead fiancée over a flesh and blood one. And yet, as Kofman argues, what is truly uncanny (queer) about Nathaniel’s love (and hence what is resisted by Freud) is the “failure to distinguish between the living and the dead” (“The Double” 142; emphasis added). Where everyone else sees a binary opposition between life and death, Nathaniel (like Hanold) couples them in his love, revealing the “indissoluble bond between life and death” (Kofman, “The Double” 148). And it is this queer coupling of animate and inanimate in a general economy of the double which is, for Kofman, Freud’s ultimate insight into the unheimlich (although one he reveals only despite himself, unwittingly). Thus: “understood as a general economy, the distinction between the imaginary and the real is replaced by a problematics of a simulacrum without an originary model” (Kofman, “The Double” 160).
 
With Kofman’s evocation of a Derridean general economy of the double, it would appear that we have now moved beyond the sacrificial economy we started out with, i.e., the burning question of the romantic couple.¹⁵ And yet, even the older Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle ends his book with yet another triumph of the romantic couple. To be precise, Freud ends his book by adding another step to his speculations regarding the need of “organic life” to “restore an earlier state of things” (Beyond 69). Instead of being a primordial death drive for the inanimate, Freud wonders whether this hypothetical drive might simply be a repetition of an ancient myth recorded in Plato’s Symposium. According to this myth, original human nature was different from present human nature. “Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two . . . . After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one [couple]’” (Freud, Beyond 69–70). But by adding this final Platonic (and we might say Hegelian) step to his speculations, Freud’s drive for restoring an earlier state of things becomes not a drive for the inanimate but for the reconciliation of the divided couple: romantic copulation. It is here, perhaps, that we should recall Kofman’s larger point regarding Freud’s readings of novels, namely, that they are “fictions, ‘romances’ in their own right” (Freud and Fiction 3).
 

IV

 

[T]he play of copula is subtle. Like that of the couple in general. In fact, concerning such a pair, why do they say a couple?

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 248–9)

[A] person turning to stone is usually bad, while a stone coming to life is desirable. But perhaps it is the confusion of the two realms [“life” and “non-life”] that is really, and unavowedly, attractive. Walter Benjamin . . . speaks often of the “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

—Barbara Johnson (20–1)

As Barbara Johnson notes, Walter Benjamin often speaks of “the sex appeal of the inorganic” when describing fetishism (Benjamin 153). By way of conclusion, then, I want to consider why it is that Freud surprisingly dismisses fetishism in his reading of Gradiva, and what this dismissal implies not only for my speculative hypothesis regarding the rise and fall of sublimation as a concept in Freud’s thinking, but what this dismissal might also imply for contemporary queer theorists interested in perverse couplings of “persons” and “things.” After all, such a dismissal of fetishism seems remarkable given that Gradiva would seem to have provided Freud with a tailor-made case of foot fetishism. But as Freud states:

The psychiatrist [as opposed to the psychoanalyst] would perhaps assign Hanold’s delusion . . . [to] “fetichistic erotomania,” because falling in love with the bas-relief would be the most striking thing to him and because, to his conception, which coarsens everything, the interest of the young archeologist in the feet and foot-position of women must seem suspiciously like fetichism. All such names and divisions . . . are, however, substantially useless and awkward.

(Delusion 173–4)

Although Freud clearly dismisses the diagnosis of fetishism here, he nevertheless admits that the psychiatrist might still be tempted by it. By contrast, the most striking thing about Jensen’s novel for Freud is that, “Before our eyes there is then unfolded the story of how this delusion is cured by a fortunate set of circumstances, the interest transferred back again from the cast to the living girl” (175). In other words, rather than remaining, like Hanold, uselessly fixated on the end-less (de)feet of bas-relief—its (dis)placement of the two—Freud is attentive to the fortunate unfolding of its cure as a romantic reunion. For Freud, the speculative economy of Jensen’s novel is its great analytic insight: Hanold’s interest is not uselessly squandered or endlessly wasted, but “transferred back again”—fortunately—in his reunion with Zoë.

 
Of course, throughout this paper, we have seen all the ways this “fortunate” reunion with Zoë never seems to get off the ground. The hyphenated coupling of the very word “bas-relief” at once makes possible and resists absolutely—i.e., enacts and annihilates—any idealization, conceptualization, and the (re)productive copulation of Aufhebung. But does this mean that we, too, are like the psychiatrist quoted above whose coarse perspective sees fetishism everywhere? Indeed, isn’t fetishism, by supposedly taking the side of things, a way for contemporary queer theorists to critique the uplifting relève of both Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) and Freudian sublimation (Sublimierung)? After all, as Derrida notes in Glas (1974), his own queer reading of that odd couple Hegel and Genet, “The Aufhebung, the economic law of absolute reappropriation of the absolute loss, is a family concept” (133). It is a family concept, Derrida notes, precisely because of what he calls the “child-relief” (Glas 133):

[T]he parents, far from losing or disseminating themselves without return, “contemplate in the child’s becoming their own relief.” They guard in that becoming their own disappearance . . . . The child-relief of the loss [perte] . . . . The Aufhebung is the dying away, the amortization, of death. That is the concept of economy in general in speculative dialectics. Economy: the law of the family, of the family home, of possession . . . . [T]his guarding retains, keeps back, inhibits, consigns the absolute loss or consum(mat)es it only in order better to reg(u)ard it returning to (it)self.

(Derrida, Glas 133–4)

What is interesting here is how, in Derrida’s rhetoric, this child-relief begins to resemble a fetish. It is as if the “child-relief of the loss,” as Derrida puts it, becomes a kind of fetish object for the parents, “their own relief” from death, from castration, from loss.¹⁶ Can we say, then, that what Freud encounters in Jensen’s little romance is the story of a man who prefers a bas-relief to a child-relief, i.e., prefers a dead thing to reproductive futurity and its fetish? But, then, what is the difference between sublimation and fetishism in this case? Suddenly, taking the side of things in an effort to critique the reproductive futurity of the romantic couple seems naïve when the fetish object appears at the very heart of the speculative economy of heteronormativity (the family circle: daddy-mommy-baby).

 
Consider, then, the recent debates on the (im)possibilities of lesbian fetishism in the journal differences, provoked largely by the volatile figure of the butch-femme couple. As Chris Straayer notes, “early lesbian-feminists rejected the lesbian butch for her unconventional public personal style . . . [because] a butchy appearance seemed to communicate a direct imitation of heterosexual practice via mannish signifiers [mimetic fetishes]” (275).¹⁷ Judith Butler’s essay “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (1992) not only implicitly critiques this rejection of the butch—i.e., her supposed “defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity” (86)—but it also paves the way for Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), which attempts to explicitly valorize the specificity of lesbian sexuality as fetishistic (de Lauretis 317).¹⁸ And yet, while acknowledging de Lauretis’s ability “to explain both the similarities and the differences between butch and femme sexual positions using her account of lesbian fetishism” (“Labors of Love” 165), Elizabeth Grosz states in her review of de Lauretis’s book:

I remain worried . . . about the strategic value of a notion like the “lesbian phallus,” “lesbian dildos,” and virile display: while they do have the effect of unsettling or disquieting presumptions about the “natural” alignment of the penis with social power and value, they do so only by attempting to appropriate what has been denied to women and to that extent remain tied (as we all are) to heterocentric and masculine privilege. Such modalities . . . still presuppose the normative (heterosexual) complementarity in lesbian couplings.

(Grosz, “Labors of Love” 170)

In other words, even (or perhaps especially) in the case of lesbian fetishism, there remains a normative assumption of the romantic couple, in which, as Grosz points out, the lesbian’s “love-object is not an inanimate or partial object [as it is for males, according to Freud]; it is another subject. Her ‘fetish’ is not the result of a fear of femininity, but a love of it” (“Lesbian Fetishism?” 153). It’s as if lesbian fetishism—no less than the child-relief— ultimately props up (relève) a human couple (the butch-femme).¹⁹ Or as Gayle Rubin puts it in her critique of such psychoanalytically-inflected readings of lesbian fetishism:

When I think about fetishism I want to know about many other things. I do not see how one can talk about fetishism, or sadomasochism, without thinking about the production of rubber, the techniques and gear used for controlling and riding horses, the high polished gleam of military footwear, the history of silk stockings, the cold authoritative qualities of medical equipment, or the allure of motorcycles . . . To me, fetishism raises all sorts of issues concerning shifts in the manufacture of objects . . . or ambiguously experienced body invasions . . . If all of this . . . is reduced to castration or the Oedipus complex . . . I think something important has been lost.

(85)

Are we are doomed, then, to simply oscillate like Gradiva’s two feet in a humanist metaphysics of fetishism and its couples (person/thing; subject/object; animate/inanimate), reduced to merely switching allegiances between the two? Isn’t this itself a bit like fetishism, in the same stroke denying and affirming the cut—the de-cision (castration)—in a series of substitutes, as if hanging by a thread (hair), or a hyphen (bas-relief, child-relief), end-lessly (de)feeted?
 
As we have seen, Hanold’s inability to come to life without the mediation of a lifeless thing seems to be no less of a hairy situation. But, as I have argued, not only does the hyphenated word “bas-relief” both set up and upset Freud’s concept of sublimation, but this failure of erection already repeats Hanold’s defeat in realizing his romantic copulation with Zoë at the end of Jensen’s novel. Which is to say, sublimation’s defeat ironically repeats the (de)feet of a bas-relief, whose arrested and arresting two feet rise and fall without end or relief, endlessly (dis)placing the elevated supremacy of the two in a queer double-movement. And the irony of this defeat, as Barbara Johnson suggests in her reading of commodity fetishism in Marx’s Capital, is unavoidable. When Marx, for example, describes the supposed fetishistic transformation of a table (use-value) into a commodity (exchange value), he states:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing . . . [but] analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing . . . [T]he table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

(Marx, qtd. in Johnson 141)

Changed into a commodity, the table suddenly “steps forth” like Gradiva, standing not only on its feet, but on its head. As Johnson points out, however, the problem with this fantastic scenario of fetishistic transformation is that a table is “anthropomorphic from the start” (142). We already refer to the legs of a table, for example, and this figurative anthropomorphism is irreducible. Or as Johnson states, Marx can only “play around with an existing figurative structure” (142); Marx can no more eliminate this trace of anthropomorphism from language than Freud can eliminate the queer double-movement of (de)feet from Hanold’s romantic copulation with Zoë.

 
What is queer about Gradiva, then, is not fetishism, but the specter of a “general fetishism,” as Derrida calls it (Glas 210), or what Hanold calls “Zoë-Gradiva,” whose lifeless life threatens to deconstruct the very opposition between the organic and the inorganic, the real and the artificial, the living and the dead, the thing itself and the substitute. A “general fetishism,” as Derrida argues, “no longer lets itself be contained in the space of truth, in the opposition Ersatz / nonErsatz, or simply in the opposition” (Glas 209). Indeed, since fetishism always assumes that “[s]omething—the thing—is no longer itself a substitute,” as Derrida writes, “if there were no thing, the concept fetish would lose its invariant kernel” (Glas 209). What Derrida suggests here, as Geoffrey Bennington and Sarah Kofman point out, is a kind of queer double-movement.²⁰ According to Bennington:

[T]wo essential moments . . . structure Derrida’s remarks about fetishism: the first consists in a reconstruction of a “classical logic,” in which the fetish is defined against something not of the order of the fetish (“the thing itself,” the real thing, and so on), and the second in a generalization of the fetish. This movement of generalization is itself not simple, or at least does not simply or immediately consist in claiming that “everything is a fetish” . . . but [it does posit] an economy of fetishism, in which, for example, it might be strategically justified to claim that the supposed “thing itself,” which the “classical logic” opposed to the fetish, is itself the real fetish . . . . This slightly abyssal perspective awaits us.

(185–6)

Or as Derrida writes: “a fetishism . . . unfolds itself without limit” (Glas 210), unfolds like an uncanny fabrication. It is not surprising, then, that “the sex appeal of the inorganic” is something Benjamin formulated while contemplating fashion (folds, cosmetics, gloves): “the body experienced . . . not [as] a machine, but [as] clothing . . . made up of many types of fabrics juxtaposed and interwoven among themselves” (Perniola 10).

This is, no doubt, a feat Benjamin shares with Magritte (Fig. 5), but also, I think, with Hanold, whose pedestrian investigations into the lifeless life of a bas-relief (“Zoë-Gradiva”) open a “slightly abyssal perspective [that] awaits us.”