Sunday, February 12, 2012

Excursus—Hurbinek-Odradek: A Postcard from the Edge



This excursus from my doctoral dissertation concerns my pairing of two of the strangest—and most compelling—figures of twentieth century Europe: Primo Levi’s Hurbinek as the ruptured, “perfect witness” of Auschwitz and Franz Kafka’s Odradek as an “epistemological rupture” in our reading of literature.


Franz Kafka’s Odradek

The narrative begins with these words:1

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

From this brief story, I have culled these descriptions:

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant.

Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him—he is so diminutive that you cannot help it—rather like a child. “Well, what's your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says.

Even these anwers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek.


In an online site called “The Kafka Project” by Mauro Nervi,2 Anya Meksin3 offers this analysis:

Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader. The need to normalize this rupture constitutes the “cares” or “worries” of the family man—a series of circular musings on the origin and destiny of Odradek, an effort to integrate him into the domestic regularity that it is the family man’s duty to preserve. For the reader, these same efforts at normalization give rise to a series of equally circular and anxious interpretations of the text, all proving inconclusive, but each fueling the need for the next. (italics added)


Primo Levi’s Hurbinek

In The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Judith Woolf4 introduces Hurbinek this way:

As we have seen, some of Levi’s most searing testimony involves children; at the start of The Truce5 he shows us the end product of the Nazis’ attempt to reduce their victims to the condition of animals in the depiction of a dying child so deprived that his very name is a meaningless sound, yet who nonetheless struggles indomitably to acquire human speech:

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz . . . (The Truce, p. 235)


At least one biography gives primacy to the figure of Hurbinek in Primo Levi’s published work. Francesco Lucrezi’s book in Italian is entitled, “The Word of Hurbinek, The Death of Primo Levi” (my translation).6


Hurbinek-Odradek

Am I the only one to notice a resemblance between Primo Levi’s Hurbinek and Franz Kafka’s Odradek? No, a few others have made the connection …

1)    In an article in French which I translate as “Storytelling: Witnessing in the face of the silence of language,” Esther Cohen (2003, p. 66)7 wrote:  

Tout comme Hurbinek-Odradek, il semble qu’ils n’aient pas non plus pu faire face à l’authentique catastrophe ; ils devinrent muets, sans pouvoir donner de réponse. La langue, écrit Celan, « est passée à travers et n’a pas eu de mots pour ce qui s’est passé ».

Just like Hurbinek-Odradedek, it seems that they have also not been able to confront to the authentic catastrophe; they become mute, without being able to give a response. Language, Celan wrote, “passed through and did not have the words for what happened.” (My translation)

2)    In a Brazilian text I translate as “Still-life: Finitude and Negativity in T.W. Adorno,” Maurício Chiarello mentions Hurbinek and Odradek.8

3)    Another Brazilian author, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin presented, “Odradek, Hurbinek. Annotations in the margins of a text by Kafka,” at the 5th International Michel Foucault Colloquium in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil.9

Uma das mais enigmáticas das pequenas narrativas de Kafka, no centro do “Médico rural”, trata da “preocupação do pai de família” em relação a um ser híbrido e inútil, chamado de Odradek, que escapa de sua compreensão e de seu controle. A partir de uma análise desse texto e de alguns comentários, tentar-se-á explicitar como e por que essa existência sem sentido pode despertar no leitor uma sensação de alegre resistência e de eficaz impertinência - em oposição à dor que provoca a descrição de seu irmão gêmeo, pelo menos no nome e na falta de sentido, Hurbinek, a criança sem palavras evocada por Primo Levi no início da “Trégua”.

One of the most enigmatic of the short stories of Kafka, in the middle of “A Country Doctor,” deals with the “preoccupations of a family man” concerning a hybrid and useless being called Odradek, which escapes his understanding and his control. Based on an analysis of this text and commentaries, an attempt is made to explicate how and why this existence without sense could awake in the reader a sensation of happy resistance and effective impertinence – in opposition to the pain provoked by the description of his twin, at least in the name and in the lack of sense, Hurbinek, the child without words evoked by Primo Levi at the beginning of “The Truce.” (My translation)

4)    In a doctoral dissertation in the German Department at Berkeley, David Jennings Gramling discusses Hurbinek and Odradek separately and does not link them in his studies of Levi and Kafka.

5)    Anny Dayan Rosenman’s article, “Hearing the voice of the witness,” connects silence as the best account of the suffering inflicted on children in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s purported memoir of a child of the Holocaust, Fragments, Jerzy Kosinski’s mute Gypsy-Jewish child in his novel, The Painted Bird, and Primo Levi’s Hurbinek in his memoir, The Truce.10

C’est encore le silence qui rend le mieux compte de la souffrance infligée aux enfants, de cet assaut d’autant plus violent qu’il est incompréhensible, qu’il fige la parole, emporte l’être, défait la conscience. Tel le petit Binjamin Wilkomirski qui sent en lui tout se défaire, se liquéfier, qui se sent se dissoudre dans la boue colorée où il est assis et, pour un temps, renonce à parler. Tel le narrateur de L'oiseau bariolé de Kosinski, enfant pourchassé, torturé et errant dans les campagnes d'Europe centrale qui, devenu muet au cours de l’une des épreuves qu’on lui inflige, met des années à retrouver sa voix perdue. Tel le petit Hurbinek, évoqué par Primo Levi dans La Trève, enfant né et mort au camp, qui n'a jamais appris à parler et qui reste le symbole de cette souffrance silencieuse. Sur un autre mode que celui des personages silencieux, le blanc, l’ellipse, les points de suspension, signalent ce qui dans l’écriture fait silence, traçant les limites qui ne seront pas franchies, permettant de cerner les zones où elle ne peut ni ne veut s'aventurer, d’appréhender ce qui ne sera pas dit, ne sera pas écrit, mais est pourtant là, dans l’entre-deux entre parole et silence.

Once again, it is silence that gives the best account of the suffering inflicted on the children, of this assault which is all the more violent as it is incomprehensible, that flees the word, sweeps away being, defeats the conscience. Such is the little Binjamin Wilkomirski who feels in himself that all is coming apart, liquifying who feels himself dissolving in the colorful mud where he is seated and for a time, renounces speech. So it is with the narrator of The Painted Bird, a child who is hunted, tortured and wandering in the countryside of central Europe who, having become mute in the middle of one of the trials that is inflicted on him, takes years to find his lost voice again. And so, too, with the little Hurbinek, evoked by Primo Levi in The Truce, a child who was born and died in the camp, who never learned to talk and who remains the symbol of this silent suffering. (My translation)


A Postcard from the Edge: “Return to Sender”

There are some disquieting aspects of this thread.

Rosenman’s article was published in 1998-99, when the veracity of Wilkomirski’s memoir was just beginning to be questioned by a Swiss journalist and only later declared unfounded. This is a very complex state of affairs. It is still not clear if the Wilkomirski affair was totally made up or stitched together in the life of the empirical author and constructed over decades as a regressive fantasy and above all as a therapeutic device induced by his therapist. For an overview of this episode by a medical anthropologist who is a key scholar on trauma, see Allan Young’ (2007) essay on this subject which he sees as a case of “traumatic mimesis.”11

Kosinski’s novel is powerful and seems to capture reality better than documentary films against Zizek’s assertion that we have to invert Adorno’s infamous pronouncement about poetry after Auschwitz. Zizek claims that it is prose, not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz. The denouement of the two novel-memoirs cited here would seem to bear that out. Wilkomirski turned out to be at best a misguided fantasy, at worst an outright fraud, the real purpose of which is opaque to us. Kosinski never actually claimed that the experiences of the mute tormented Gypsy-Jewish boy were his own, but it was assumed as such and this hounded him until his eventual suicide. So it seems that Zizek is right: we can tolerate and accept the most painful documentary film (Lanzmann’s Shoah) or factual witnessing (Primo Levi’s memoirs) but prose has become much more difficult, if not impossible. Witness: Wilkomirski’s Fragments. Witness: Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. A possible counter-example: Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness. Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his treatment of Holocaust themes, but his work was never well-received in his own country of Hungary.

In an extended treatment of “Odradek as a Political Category,” Slavoj Zizek adds to these associations to Odradek another parallel in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge about a “creature that is perfectly harmless” (Rilke) that turns out to be “the monstrosity of the neighbour” (Zizek).12 Although this passage occurs in a discussion of Levi’s Muselmänner and Agamben’s treatment of this category of “bare life,” Zizek does not connect Odradek with Hurbinek. The Muselmänner (German for Muslims) were prisoners who had given up on life and were considered the “walking dead” or “bare life” in Agamben’s terms.13

And now we come to Hurbinek-Odradek. The connection was sitting at the back of my mind in some inchoate but disquieting form for decades. It became explicit for me in a seminar with Judith Butler at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in the summer of 2011 while we were reading Kafka’s brief narrative on Odradek. As I was working on Levi’s account side by side with Agamben’s commentary at EGS, this new reading in Butler’s seminar finally pushed the parallel into conscious awareness. And it gave me a frisson.

I had a flight of ideas about it … Hurbinek-Odradek … the Slavic names that Levi invokes in trying to decode the name of Hurbenek, the putative Slavonic origins (but perhaps German only influenced by Slavonic) of the name of Odradek … Kafka as an Ashkenazi Jew from a Slavic country who wrote in German in contrast to the Sephardi and other Jews like Levi at Auschwitz who did not have Yiddish as the lingua franca among the Jewish prisoners there, acting as a shibboleth separating them … the Slavonic form of the two names which together repeat the K sound in Kafka … the combined place name and dual identity of Auschwitz-Monowitz (the death camp and the work camp) mimicking the combined names and dual identities of Hurbinek-Odradek …

And another, more disquieting thought: I have been immersed in the literature of the Holocaust for decades. The Muselmänner were described by many different survivor-authors. I clearly recalled both Bruno Bettelheim and Victor Frankl writing about them. But Hurbinek? Surely his case was among the most unique in the concentration camp world where millions died and uniqueness was extirpated. Were there other witnesses? Who else bears witness to this diminished life?

Let’s reread how Levi concludes his account of Hurbinek:

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.


Born at Auschwitz? And tattooed, allowed to live? Who fed him? Who protected him? “Hurbinek, the nameless,” Levi calls him. Why would no one name him? Orphans and adopted children are named—often renamed in fact. Pets are named; some people go so far as to name inanimate objects: boats are christened, the English name their homes and place the moniker at the gate and on the household letterhead. Levi gives his Häftling Nummer 174517 or “prisoner number 174517” tattooed on his arm and often cites those of other Häftlinge. Hurbinek … “whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz” … touches us. Although we want to know more, “Nothing remains of him ….” We want to know his tattoo number, the better to let him bear witness. Levi asserts that “he bears witness through these words of mine.” All we have are Levi’s words: no name, as Levi ambiguously avows (“Hurbinek” is a name after all), and no number, as the meticulous chemist Levi unaccountably omits it.

Jacques Lacan in his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” famously concluded that a letter always arrives at its destination.14 In his gloss, Jacques Derrida transformed the letter into a postcard (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond).15 With a nod to Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge,16 which is a memoir (later filmed) about her limit experiences of suffering, some messages from the edge do not arrive because they are garbled or because they die in the throats of suffering victims. Some post cards are not, in fact, posted.

In a strange reversal, Kafka’s fiction about Odradek is an “epistemological rupture” in the way we read literature, compelling us to turn away from literature to examine the facts of Kafka’s life, while the story of Hurbinek, narrated in order to “bear witness,” by Levi whom Giorgio Agamben calls the “perfect witness,” creates a rupture in our understanding of history, forcing us to ask questions about how narratives are constructed. Isn’t Hurbinek too much like Kafka’s Odradek or Rilke’s neighbor, perhaps? Kafka’s Odradek, concerning a recognizable human in a strange form is the emblematic story of his own life. We see this again and again in Kafka’s anthropomorphic creatures, notably in the beetle Gregor Samsa (notice the isomorphism of the names, reiterating a syllable—Kaf-ka, Sam-sa), who have conflicts with the father of the family. Kafka’s own famous (to us) letter to his father was never sent. As I have tried to show, Levi’s post card from the edge on Hurbinek generates more questions than it can possibly answer. Mark this one “Return to Sender.”


*


Notes

1 Franz Kafka (1971). The Cares of a Family Man. In: The Complete Stories (pp. 427-428). New York, NY: Schocken Books.

2 Mauro Nervi. “The Kafka Project.” http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=284.

3 Anya Meksin. “Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread” in http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=284. Accessed 2012/01/07.

4 Judith Woolf (2007). From If This is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved. In: Robert S.C. Gordon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35-49; citation: pp. 45-46.

5 Primo Levi (1965). The Truce. Trans. by Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head.
(Published in some editions with If This is a Man starting in 1979. Italian original, La tregua.)

6 Francesco Lucrezi (2005). La parola di Hurbinek. Morte di Primo Levi. Florence: La Giuntina. [Translation: The Word of Hurbinek, The Death of Primo Levi]

7 Esther Cohen (2003). Raconter: témoigner face au silence de la langue. Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, pp. 63-76.
[Translation: Storytelling: Witnessing in the face of the silence of language]

8 Maurício Chiarello (2006). Natura-Morta: Finitude e Negatividade em T.W. Adorno. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. [Translation: Still-life: Finitude and Negativity in T.W. Adorno]

9 Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2008). Odradek, Hurbinek. Anotações em margem de um texto de Kafka. Presentation given at: 5º Colóquio Internacional Michel Foucault (10/11/2008 a 13/11/2008), Campinas, SP, Brasil. Dra. Jeanne Marie Gagnebin – Docente, Departamento de Teoria Literária - IEL/UNICAMP e Departamento de Filosofia / PUC-SP. [Translation: Odradek, Hurbinek. Annotations in the margins of a text by Kafka]

10 Anny Dayan Rosenman. Entendre la voix du témoin. Plurielles n°7 Hiver-
Printemps 98-99: pp. 155-163. [Translation: Hearing the voice of the witness]

11 Allan Young (2007). Bruno and the Holy Fool: Myth, mimesis, and the transmission of traumatic memories. In L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson,  & M. Barad (Eds.), Understanding trauma: Integrating biological, clinical, and cultural perspectives (pp. 339-362). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

12 Slavoj Zizek (2006). Odradek as a Political Category. In The Parallax View (pp. 111-123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

13 Giorgio Agamben (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen). NewYork, NY: Zone Books.

14 John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds. (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, MD: The Johns  Hopkins University Press.

15 Jacques Derrida (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16 Carrie Fisher (1987). Postcards from the Edge. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

*

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Annotation on Philosophical Dictionaries


Note: I am reviewing a number of philosophical dictionaries and trying to put them into some kind of order. Here is one way to sort out the dictionaries I have used with some thoughts about two that I have consulted over the years, sometimes with delight, more often with consternation. 

Analytic Philosophy

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Second Edition) edited by Robert Audi (1999)
A Dictionary of Philosophy (Revised Second Edition) by Antony Flew (1979)
Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind by Pete Mandik (2010)

Continental Philosophy

Keywords by Raymond Williams (1983)
Dictionary of Critical Theory by David Macey (2001)
Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisables edited by Barbara Cassin (2004) *

* This is the most scholary and edifying of the dictionaries I have in my possession. See review: Howard Caygill. From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies. Radical Philosophy, 138 (July-August 2006): 10-14.

Particular Philosophers in the Continental Tradition

Dictionnaire Sartre edited by François Noudelmann and Gilles Philippe (2004)
Le Vocabulaire de Sartre by Philippe Cabestan and Arnaud Tomes (2001)
A Derrida Dictionary by Niall Lucy (2004)
The Derrida Dictionary by Simon Morgan Wortham (2010)
The Agamben Dictionary edited by Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte (2011)
“Glossary of Zizekian Terms” in Zizek: A Critical Introduction by Sarah Kay (2003)

Alain Badiou provides his own scholarly definitions in his two-volume magnus opus:
Being and Event (2005) has a substantial “Dictionary”
Logics of Worlds (2009) has a “Dictionary of Concepts”

Special Studies

Plastic Words by Uwe Poerksen (1995)
Annotation and Its Texts edited by Stephen A. Barney (1991)

Philosophical Dictionaries in the Analytic/Scientific Tradition

Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology by PB Medawar and JS Medawar (1983)

Philosophical Dictionary (Enlarged Edition) by Mario Bunge (2003)

There are certain kinds of scientists who believe that their achievements in their domains authorize their pontifications in others. I can formulate a general rule for this in the biological and social sciences: the greater the scientific stance, the more the insistence on correctly understanding and resolving philosophical problems. In psychology, for example, phenomenological and humanistic psychology are not presented as scientific and do not pretend to resolve philosophical problems. Rather, they address philosophical problems or pose new ones. The texts of physiological psychology, behaviorism and later cognitive psychology are filled with pronouncements on the history of science with a similar, well-rehearsed narrative: that the evolution of science is from superstition to philosophy to pseudoscience to scientific psychology. The emblem and avatar of this approach is in Steven Kosslyn’s statement that cognitive psychology had the means to resolve questions that have been “hopelessly metaphysical.” The difference becomes clear by adapting Alain Badiou’s notion of philosophy and its conditions. In this view, philosophy has allowed itself to be “sutured” or subordinated to its four conditions (politics, science, love, art). So the question becomes does psychology (or some other supposed science, from biology to physics) “suture” or subordinate philosophy or does philosophy remain autonomous as “the queen of the sciences”?  

Peter Medawar was a brilliant biologist who made signal contributions to biological research and medicine for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The dictionary he wrote with his partner, JS Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (1983) which the dust jacket advertises as “in the spirit of Voltaire,” demonstrates the extent to which even accomplished researchers endorse an ideology. In Medawar’s case, he cannot plead ignorance as he was a known polymath, and his dictionary is a canny combination of scientific reasoning at its best along with selective readings of the history of science, philosophy and other areas. What this dictionary does, like all such works, from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary to Diderot’s encyclopaedia, is to propound an ideology. Medawar’s animus against psychology and psychoanalysis in particular, the social sciences in general, and philosophy and theology more broadly, are evident throughout.

The same spirit is evident in Mario Bunge’s Philosophical Dictionary (Enlarged Edition, 2003). Unlike Medawar’s dictionary which mentions Voltaire in his Preface, Bunge appropriates Voltaire’s title and style without so much as a nod. Bunge, whose first training was in physics and mathematics, demonstrates the extent of Badiou’s contention that philosophy has become sutured to its “conditions”—in the case of the Medawar and Bunge dictionary, to science. His brief Foreword offers, nonetheless, the kind of self-referential prose that wooden satire engenders.

Medawar’s mini-essay gems on “Eugenics” and “Form and Mathematics” are offset by fluff pieces on “Missing Links” and “Illness.” On the latter, his thinking is mundane and neither critical nor inspiring. In between are open-minded reappraisals of such notions as “Atavism” and “Behaviorism” and his essay on “Aristotle.” It is undoubtedly useful to have a working scientist read Aristotle and appraise how biologists understand him in our day. Against all expectation that a Nobelist in Medicine would have something of value to say, his essay on “Biology in Medical Education” is typical of his style of citing some arcane sources, hinting at what he considers common knowledge (although I trained in England, I have no idea of the traditions he is referring to) and concluding through an oblique process with a very specific biological example, the relevance of which lesser mortals are to divine.

An antidote to such pretensions is to be found in Karl Jaspers’ reviews of Einstein’s philosophical speculations. However brilliant Einstein was in physics and however much it may interest us to know what and how he thought about other subjects, I endorse Jaspers’ conclusions that no serious philosophy awaits us there.

Conclusion: These two scientists with philosophical inclinations (one the winner of a real Nobel Prize and the other the winner of what he described to me as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in philosophy) demonstrate how science has attempted to suture philosophy into its discourse. In throwing their nets far and wide, both of them indicate that the contemporary attitude of scientists is that they can put the entire house of knowledge in order, from Greek philosophy to Marxism and from psychoanalysis to sociology.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Second Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement


Every Movement Creates its Own Psychology, Every Revolution Remakes Reality

From: Vincenzo Di Nicola@___
To: Christopher C___@___
Subject: Second Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 23:05:29 -0500


Dear Chris,

Hope you got some rest and are ready for some reading!

To respond to your request for “a reading list for getting familiar with the field of group dynamics,” I looked over my bookshelves and want to offer you three things:

(1) A highly personal, even idiosyncratic, list of recommended reading, annotated with comments about the contexts and impacts of these works

(2) Some background about two key thinkers to put this list in perspective—
Sigmund Freud and Antonio Gramsci

(3) Why the best thing to do (except for scholarly purposes, occasional inspiration and theory) may be to forget what is in these texts.


(1) Recommended Reading

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922 in German)
Besides his speculative anthropology which has been thoroughly discredited, this is the least successful or convincing of Freud’s books. He simply revisits the prejudices of his time about groups (Le Bon, McDougall, Trotter) and offers no new insights. All the successful works on groups do not use Freud as their starting point. Freuds starting point is the individual. I am of the opinion that we should start with the group and go to the individual rather than extrapolate from the individual to imagine the group. In Freud’s approach the individual is always compromised by the demands of civilization, as he called it (we call it culture today). Adorno revisited this essay in 1951, arguing that Freud “clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories.” I call these “talking dog interpretations”—everybody thinks their dog talks but no one else can understand the animal. Freud not only did not foresee fascism but had to be dragged kicking and screaming from Vienna in 1938 to save his life, ransomed for one million pounds sterling by Marie Bonaparte—truly a king’s ransom at the time. So much for Freud’s insight into groups.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960 in German)

Nobelist Canetti wrote only one novel, translated as Auto-da-Fé (from the German Die Blendung—“The Blinding”) about a solitary scholar who turns on his own work and sets fire to his library. Canetti returns to this theme in his magnum opus, Masse und Macht/Crowds and Power, of crowds and the burning of books. Literary reviewers held this book as the summa of social psychology in the 20th century but this theme is better dealt with in Badiou’s The Century and no conclusions can be drawn about crowds from totalitarian societies.

I put this book in the group of texts that have a negative view of groups, of crowds, and of relationships. In chapter 4 of my book, Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos, 2011), I examine the psychological and psychotherapeutic literature for what I see as predominantly negative views of relationship and also offer more positive ones. Against the socialist notion of solidarity, the individual is imagined as a monad, an atomized self, a singularity, not a multiplicity (as Badiou does).

Books from 20th century Europe about crowds, movements, “social forces” were written in the light of the struggle for “the new man” which started in Mussolini’s Italy and caught fire in movements as diverse as Marinetti’s Futurism to the Soviet Union’s new vision of psychology to Nazi Germany. I read any text about group psychology in its social and political context. The generation that taught me was as much informed by Richard Crossman’s edited anthology, The God That Failed, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon criticizing communism’s failure and excesses as by Benjamin, Marcuse, Arendt or Adorno warning about the excesses of capitalism.

I’ve always thought that Crowds and Power was an unfinished book; meandering, shapeless, almost atheoretical. When I read Benjamin’s Arcades Project, I connected the two works with Fernando Pessoa’s interminable project, The Book of Disquiet. All three books are by lonely men, toiling away in solitude, obsessively moving around, tasting everything new but with a kind of reactive nostalgia. Benjamin was himself a kind of intellectual flâneur, sniffing here and there, turning up brilliant insights in odd corners of the city of the mind, before moving on to another site. All three works lack what Lacan called le point de capiton—something that anchors or gives structure—“grounds” in the philosophical sense—the inner logic of the work. Wolfgang Kohler would have called this organizing principle a Gestalt.

Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy (2009 in French)
Simply a lucid and compelling outline of the implications of Truth and Event for the subject faithful to them. His typology of “subjectizable bodies”—the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject—may be interesting to examine in terms of how people respond to the challenges of Occupy, within and without. You may want to read this beside his most accessible book, The Century, where he offers a philosophical overview of the main conflict of the 20th century, the struggle for “the new man.”

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990 in Italian)
This lovely book written by Agamben, whom Badiou calls the “Franciscan of ontology,” was a response to a crucial moment in the European imagination after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a new European community. A response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s La Communauté désouevrée (The Inoperative Community) and Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community) which are about belonging, Agamben’s book takes a U-turn and disavows the notions of belonging, identity and representation. Agamben offers the notion of whatever singularity which has no identity and “severs any obligation to belonging” (Carlo Salzani in The Agamben Dictionary, 2011). If the Occupy movement is going to elaborate a notion of community, this book is essential reading to help us re-imagine community with an alternative to the polarity “universal-particular” by proposing the “example.”
           
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933 in German)
This is another example of the paranoid view of crowds and masses as given to reactionary politics. Reich argues that, “Fascism is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character. It is the basic emotional civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” Badiou casts this—the reactive subjectas only one of three types of subjects, the others being the faithful subject and the obscure subject. Reich’s approach reaches its apotheosis in American political science with Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). I don’t say they lack insight or incisiveness, I do say that it is one school of thought about mass movements. If we accept it, we will always be suspicious of movements from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street.

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973 in English)
Best read as part of a trio I am recommending: Canetti’s Crowds and Power and Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, yet Fromm’s book is by far the most cogent of the three. If my own notions of the traumatic remainder which perpetuate trauma and foreclose the Event have an inspiration, it was clearly in this book which I read as a young man in my Fromm-Marcuse-Adorno phase of trying to marry Marxism with psychoanalysis. To repeat, you must be really aware of the context and what Fromm was responding to at the time.  

Jacob Moreno, The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity (2008 in English)
I have colleagues who run children’s groups using Moreno’s psychodrama which is as rich and supple an instrument for working groups as I’ve seen. This is in marked contrast to the outcome-oriented approaches where one must produce “results” like production quotas at a factory.

René Girard, The Scapegoat (1982 in French)
This is a seminal text to understand Girard’s mimetic theory, perhaps the most lucid and compelling contemporary theory of violence, touching on the relationship between the scapegoat mechanism in history and the structure of myth. His connection to Derrida, notably through the essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is critical and made explicit in the introduction to The Girard Reader (2000). Any mass movement needs to understand the possibilities for violence, let alone violence as a chosen strategy. This book will help your movement focus on the question of violence and our unwitting repetition of myths to create scapegoats. As Freud asks in the quotation below, what will we do when we run out of scapegoats?

Mara Selvini Palazzoli and associates: Paradox and Counterparadox, The Magician Without Magic, The Hidden Games of Orgnanizations (1975, 1976, 1981 in Italian)
In a series of  radical interventions, this Italian psychiatrist and her colleagues in Milan turned from psychoanalysis to family systems theory to write a series of brilliant explorations in relational psychology. Her motto was, “Family therapy is the starting point for the exploration of ever wider social units.” She and her colleagues established the most radical and effective model of family therapy in Paradox and Counterparadox, followed by two books on working with larger systems, from schools to industry. How they saw through institutional games and crafted ways around them is documented with lucidity and panache. The third title is badly translated from the Italian—Sul fronte dell’organizzazione: strategie e tattiche, “At the Front of Organizations: Strategies and Tactics”—which sounds more appropriately like a guerilla manual for psychological warfare. Together, these works are modern iterations of The Art of War for human relations!

Otto Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995 in English)
The dean of American Freudian psychoanalysts offers his view of the aggression that is at the heart of all relationships. At once informed and disturbing yet touchingly compassionate. This is the man who coined the term “malignant narcissism” which describes destructive leaders like Saddam Hussein. Kernberg is a bit like Kant in psychoanalysis—you can try to refute him, but you can’t avoid him!

Finally, there is an entire range of utopian and dystopian texts that are hard to get out of your imagination once they enter it. For someone of my generation, coming into political awareness during the 1960s, it is difficult to put these images out of my mind when we talk about groups, society and change:

·      some you know well: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four
·      some deserve to be more well-read: Eugene Zamyatin’s We (plagiarized by Huxley and Vonnegut); others less: Ayn Rand’s Anthem is a glimpse into a really mediocre mind (she is the darling of US libertarians and the Tea Party)
·      some are not well-known but can be paired with more famous works: H.D. Thoreau’s Walden and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two
·      Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as well as their predecessor, Thomas More’s Utopia, are still worth reading to prepare you for the possibilities of what happens when we are trying to imagine new communities
·      Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is fascinating not only for being a fictional  incarnation of Canetti’s book burnings, but for how society is organized without book knowledge and how rebel readers build a new society, which touches on themes about technology and memory as old as Socrates and Giulio Camillo’s “theatre of memory”
·      Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (“nowhere” more or less backwards) is along with Zamyatin’s We among the most intellectually lucid of dystopias. The Erewhonians reversed illness and crime: it was a crime to be ill and criminals were treated with compassion for their unfortunate and totally contingent condition.


(2) On narcissism and being one’s own doctor

I would like to share extended quotes from two authoritative thinkers:

·      Sigmund Freud on the conflicts between the individual’s instinct for aggression as he called it (we hardly have better words for it, in spite of Steven Pinker’s recent cheerful history of violence) and civilization as he called it (we would say culture); and

·      Antonio Gramsci on the similar theme of how the individual is forced into a hypocritical conformity to the demands of society (Marx called it false consciousness, a theme take up by Sartre in his theoretical existential psychoanalysis and clinically by psychiatrist R.D. Laing).


Freud on “the narcissism of minor differences”

This is one of Freud’s political comments from Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 in German) of which much has been made, from descriptions of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the hilarious scenes in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” (1979) where factional fighting among the Judean resistance groups becomes more fractious and passionate than the struggles against the occupying Romans:

The communists believe they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and as well-disposed to his neighbor; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and waited the temptation to ill-treat his neighbor; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor.  If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men.  Since everyone's needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.  I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous.  But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the systems based are an untenable illusion.  In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property.  It reigned almost before property had given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child).  If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike in the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing.  If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow at there.

It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression.  They do not feel comfortable without it.  The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.  I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other -- like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on.  I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”, a name which does not do much to explain it.  We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance, part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.  To the Romans, who had not founded their communal life as a State upon love, religious intolerance was something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the State and the State was permeated by religion.  Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-Semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempts to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois. (Italics added)


Gramsci on “the insulted and injured” and being “one’s own doctor”

Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading political theorists of the 20th century, was imprisoned by Mussolini. These are from his Lettere del Carcere/Letters from Prison (1965 in Italian, 1973 in English)1 to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, about his wife Julia living in Moscow and suffering from bouts of psychological illness.

“To be sure,” Gramsci admitted in a letter dated February 15, 1932, “my knowledge  of psychoanalysis is neither vast nor precise … but of the little I have studied I think there are at least a few points on which I can give a definite opinion … The most important point seems to be this: that a psychoanalytic cure can be helpful only to those elements in society which romantic literature used to call the ‘insulted and injured’ … those individuals who are caught up between the iron contrasts of modern life … people in short who fail to overcome warring contrasts of this nature and are incapable of arriving at a new moral serenityamd tranquillity; i.e., an equilibrium between the impulse of the will and the ends which the individual can reach. The situation becomes dramatic at certain definite moments in history and in certain environments: when the environment is superheated to extreme tension, and gigantic collective forces are unleashed which press hard on single individuals… Such situations become disastrous for exceptionally refined and sensitive temperaments … I believe therefore that a person of culture, an active element in society (as Giulia certainly is), is and must be his own best psychoanalyst.”1

In a later letter dated March 7, 1932, Gramsci expanded his views of the “dialectic of the human psyche” in James Joll’s (1977) descriptive phrase, acknowledging that psychological crises not only affect the insulted and injured but that they arise when the demands made by society with “an individual’s actual tendencies, which are founded on the sedimentation of old habits and old ways of thinking” (italics added).1 If this tension cannot be resolved – for instance by a sceptical and hypocritical conformity with the demands of society –

“the question can only be resolved in a catastrophic manner, because it gives rise  to morbid outbreaks of repressed passion, which the necessary social ‘hypocrasy’ … has merely numbed and driven deeper into its subconscious.”1

Joll (1977) sees in this a limited acceptance of Freud’s repression and the unconscious combined with Gramsci’s Hegelian view of an “ideal society” where the laws of the state and the dictates of the individual conscience or will coincide. This is precisely what Freud holds to be improbable – hence the discontents of civilization – and, Freud has the honesty to add, at least in the civilization we have come to know. Nonetheless, Gramsci maintains that

“one can arrive at a certain serenity even in the clash of the most absurd contradictions and under the pressure of the most implacable necessity. But one can only reach it if one succeeds in thinking ‘historically’, dialectically, and identifying one own task with intellectual dispassionateness … In this sense … one can and therefore one must be ‘one’s own doctor’.”1

Gramsci sees the possibilities of being one’s own doctor as related to a clear understanding of one’s surroundings, including an understanding of the historical situation and the possibilities of action. For Gramsci as for Marx, theory must be yoked to praxis, just as praxis makes the true philosopher. They are organically related, creating what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals.”

What Gramsci calls “the sedimentation of old habits and old ways of thinking” I call in more Freudian/Lacanian terms, the traumatic remainder. Freud argues for the necessity of aggression in our civilization or culture, which is only partly tamed at the price of creating outsiders upon whom that aggression is discharged, whether it be neighbours who are minimally different or scapegoats creating by differences in beliefs, such as Jews. René Girard elaborated this at great length in his analysis of the scapegoat with his mimetic theory. While Gramsci holds for an ideal of the individual adapting to the society, he understood that this required great presence of mind and great clarity of purpose in the face of “collective forces which press hard” on the individual.

1 Citations from: James Joll. Gramsci. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977.


(3) Every movement creates its own psychology, every revolution remakes reality

A revolution cannot take anything for granted. How to deliver the milk and eggs, how to write the constitution for a revolutionary government, how to understand and respond to suffering, how to deal with questions of order and justice.

Just as you wouldn’t want the old guard to repeat tired old answers to these questions from the economy to justice in a new guise, you wouldn’t want a revolution to start with the same old assumptions about “human nature” as both the nativists in psychology and humanists argue, but rather address the problems of living together in fresh ways that speaks to our current hopes and dilemmas. Every movement creates its own psychology. Especially in the social or human sciences—everything involving our understanding of being and existence, from language acquisition and education to the social sources of suffering—will be rethought and revitalized anew. Every revolution remakes reality. The faithful subject is marked by porosity, an openness and an enthusiasm for what is new and liberating.

Let me suggest an interesting question for Occupy:

If tomorrow you were to be given the task to teach a child about the movement, about your personal transformation, about your hopes and wishes for yourself and for her life, what would you share with her? And how would you do it?

How would you balance sharing your frustrations and what brought you to resist with transmitting your hopes and expectations for today and the day after? Not some mystical time and place—“the coming community” in Giorgio Agamben’s vision—but the community we are building hic et nunc as our ancestors said. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” says the Gospel of Matthew. We’ve had enough of social ills (or however we construe “evil” today), let’s make social good, starting now, and put trauma behind us.

So, if you do consult the books on this list, be sure to maintain a critical stance as to the social, political, ethical context in which they were conceived and expressed. Foucault calls them “discursive formations.” Being aware of that creates what Zizek calls the “parallax view” and makes us more exquisitely aware of context. These texts were put together to solve the predicaments in their worlds. What are ours?


With social hope and growing solidarity,

Vincenzo