Yet these dreams can be interpreted only in the sobriety of philosophical reflection. Hence the strange power of the music video, of music television (music television, the vision of music from afar — an unfathomed dialectical subtlety hides here): that odd companion to my adolescence. Not just sober revelry, Apollo and Dionysus, the tragedy packaged, made consumable: like those candied apples that in my childhood my mother forbade me to eat.

Brian Wilson composed “California Girls” while tripping for the first time. The most powerful utopian vision is never subtle, yet it is born of terror. And perhaps psychedelic drugs, at least in late capitalism, had little to do with exploring consciousness, and everything to do with dangling at the threshold between the divinatory and the childish — like Alice in Wonderland, the Nutcracker, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory— bringing to its fulfillment a  motif born in the furnaces of industrial capitalism. The ground beneath our feet, the walls of our house, becomes edible. The commodities begin to dance. And if the Christmas sweet, hidden away in cardboard chambers and meted out with the days of the month, was the only form of eschatology that could insinuate itself into an absolutely secular upbringing, then perhaps only this remains of the Christian God: a sugar daddy.

Uncanny, the uncandy. A bad pun, no doubt: but it gives a name to this feeling that grips me as I watch this video for the Nth time, trying to trace out the slight, strange, sinuous convulsions in that resonance machine of a soul that has already been infiltrated, and left tender, by world spirit.

Fine, fresh, fierce — the triune aspect not only of the commodity come to life, and the flesh turned into commodity, but a moment of revelation. Not to be ignored is the contradictory nature of these attributes: what could be at once refined and savage, fresh and yet processed, new to the world like a child and yet already inducted into its ways. At once consumer and consumed. Hence the numbing repetition of a candied-over fellation: oral intercourse, in which the delectable becomes delector, is the iconic gesture of late capitalism.

The ideology of the present consists in the forced choice between nature and nurture; genetics and environment. The only freedom still permitted is the choice between two determinisms. Ideology means, above all, being condemned to make this choice; forced to choose how to annihilate oneself. The great rigor of Dexter consists in its insistence that the serial killer is neither born nor made, but born again. The birth of the serial killer is baptism in blood. Murder follows a logic of proselytization, and initiation.

The three murders of the trinity killer, the series within the series of killings in a series about a serial killer, provide a dissection of the crucifixion: bleeding from the wounds, height and falling, and the hammering of the nails. And the first in series, discovered last —the  burying alive of young boy at the moment he takes on the name of  the killer— is the rebirth that follows death.  An incomparable theological rigor, and rigor mortis, is at work here.

The trinity killer’s sister Vera died in the bathtub. She was taking a shower when, startled at the sight of her brother peaking at her from behind the door, she fell. The glass partition shattered, cutting her leg, and she bleeds out almost instantly. The serial killer is born is his sister’s baptism in blood.  The Suendenfall begins, once again, with shame at one’s nakedness, but this time mediated through the doubled gaze of voyeur caught in the act.

Vera — does it mean faith (as in Russian), or truth? Either way, and perhaps the double entendre alone is decisive, what matters most is that it is sutured to Venus, the name of her favorite song, the haunting masterpiece of a young Frankie Avalon.  Venus: the goddess whose nature is so ambiguous that one could only surmise, as in the Symposium, that she is not one but two — earthly and heavenly.  Is it truth and beauty, or faith and love: the serial killer is poised on he threshold between the pagan and the Christian.

The song, played from a single on the sort of turntable that a child might have had in his bedroom, is the quintessence of that uncannyness peculiar to American suburbia of the late fifties and early sixties. And he plays it to his victim  in a bomb shelter. With the threat of nuclear oblivion hanging in the air, one burrowed into the earth — as if Kafka’s mole had anticipated the air-raid siren that was implemented in World War II, heard in its silence throughout the cold war, and finally rendered irrelevant in the age of terrorism.

First his sister dies accidentally, then his mother commits suicide, and finally he bludgeons his father to death: first Zufall, then Fall, then Ueberfallen. Could it be that the ever-repeated series of serial killers provide a Gliederung of Verfallenheit? But if his family shattered so easily with one wayward glance, was it not because death was in the air. Already in Homer, epic narrative begins with the — Dionysian — suspension of Apollonian Luftkrieg.  Epic might again be possible in the post-nuclear holocaust, — this is the premise of so much science fiction —, but the threat of nuclear war evacuated the world of all epic qualities. In Homer death has its poignancy because it was looked at with childish awe, even by those who did its work, as an affront to life and joy. With nuclear war, death has consumed everything, and what remains of life is only a sort of surreal afterlife. The serial killer revives epic by creating one more death : individual, personal, even, in its way, sincere. A death so superfluous that it cannot but demand, in its turn, a refusal of the superfluity of individual life.

Was Frankie Avalon the last, in the history of Western poetry, to invoke a pagan goddess, and none other than Venus, with such sincerity? It is no accident that the trinity killer’s song would tie up, in this way, to the Latin epic of Lucretius and Virgil.  Perhaps it is only then, at the verge of the venereal revolution, that desire, ambiguously sexual and romantic, could take the form of prayer.  To think that a teenage boy could be alone in his bed and dream of a beautiful woman without masturbating takes a power of imagination of which no one is capable anymore. (In how many sitcoms, since Seinfeld, after all, does masturbation appear as the transcendental signified that fills out every void in  meaning?).  Thus the words of Frankie’s chaste prayer to Venus can only appear, with a half a century elapsed, sinister and perverse:

Hey, Venus! Oh, Venus!
Hey, Venus! Oh, Venus!

Venus, if you will
Please send a little girl for me to thrill
A girl who wants my kisses and my arms
A girl with all the charms of you

Venus, make her fair
A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair
And take the brightest stars up in the skies
And place them in her eyes for me

Venus, goddess of love that you are
Surely the things I ask
Can’t be too great a task

Venus, if you do
I promise that I always will be true
I’ll give her all the love I have to give
As long as we both shall live

Hey, Venus! Oh, Venus!
Make my dreams come true

Hey, Venus! Oh, Venus!

The haunting power of these lyrics has everything to do with the fact that the serial killer is, in his way, a hero of fidelity. Repetition compulsion is memorialization.  But above all, the serial killer is faithful to details. The Miniature Killer in CSI, endowed with a preternatural memory, leaves behind an exact replica of the scene of the crime.  (Not incidentally, both the Miniature Killer and the Trinity Killer are born when one sibling — from jealousy or incest — kills the other.  In each case, biblical motifs come to the fore) The detective also partakes of this fidelity, but in their case it is negative and reactive. Only the serial killer creates details.

Did Adam and Eve take a last look around when the left the garden of Eden? One imagines that they were too busy getting their affairs in order. Too preoccupied with the uncertain future that awaited them, they did not think how important in might be, in the future, to remember what paradise had looked like. They did not realize that a precise memory of the most fleeting details might have sustained them in their despair. The descriptive poverty of the Torah testifies to this oversight, and the human race still suffers its consequences. Perhaps all our poetry, at its most sublime, is just filling in the blanks. And so too the serial killer, in his fidelity to details, gives us an imagined memory of the paradise that only comes into being with its destruction.

]]> http://wozuwozu.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/disjecta-membra-dexteri/feed/ 0 ottiliemignon MSI - CSI Miniature Killer 2 http://wozuwozu.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/nietzsches-mindlessness/ http://wozuwozu.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/nietzsches-mindlessness/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:32:51 +0000 ottiliemignon http://wozuwozu.org/?p=2055 ]]> The most important and overlooked aspect of Nietzsche’s so-called madness is the question what sanity would mean, in Nietzsche’s case. This in turn would depend on a general idea of the health of the psyche and the powers of a whole mind. The debate over whether Nietzsche was actually mad, or just feigning, or about the nature and origin of his madness is a false path, designed to lead you away from the heart of the matter. When you compare it to the simple question: is anyone who writes not mad?—a species of the question: is anyone not mad, and, in turn, how many madnesses are there—this reproach, this label, this stigma, this smear that amounts to a poor biologicization of biography clearly disregards Nietzsche’s own theory of the soul as an agon of wills, his theory of human dispositions under the nihilistic state of submission to “knowledge” in Europe, and his exposure of all the false claims about mind and spirit that go along with philosophy and Christianity. Madness is as inexistent as the Geist that it is supposed to afflict. The question is whether we, born this late, have any better chance of understanding Nietzsche’s mad texts, early and late. In point of fact, the later texts become progressively less mad, in comparison, let’s say, to Zarathustra or BGE, the maddest and most maddening.

One would like to recommend psychotherapy not to Nietzsche but to critics obsessed with his madness. Perhaps, with time, they would come to see their obsession as a reflection of their own fears that the great mind, their ego-ideal, will have utterly let them down.

How willing are we to be driven mad? This is the bittingest question.

There is no history of history; that is an illusion and a pernicious one. Any historiography that represents itself as a history of history or a representation of all histories that have been constructed or all types of history has failed to understand history’s basic gesture, to recast everything in a different shape, with different meanings, different relations, different orders, and different tendencies, such that historiography would be one among many meanings, relations, orders, tendencies, one in which everything is again recast, and thus it wouldn’t represent anything about the histories it claimed to represent, each of which would have presented its viewpoint as unique and total, inclusive of everything worthy of including. The one thing, we could say, that a history can never do is represent events as autonomous and whole. This prohibition applies to itself above all. History is total, but it cannot show it, and especially if, in these democratic times, it seeks to represent itself as one viewpoint among others. Nevertheless, it offers us a whole of which other viewpoints are elements of its holism, and not accidents, tangents, chaff, or invisible things, non-beings. Even the most distanced views of history writing—like much of what goes under the name of “philosophy of history”—that claim to include what was excluded from other moments, from other historiographies, itself makes another totalizing and exclusive perspective. The task for the theorist of history, for the thinker about history, is to describe this peculiar refusal of an overview without pretending to give it an image or even perhaps a name. We should rigorously distinguish this from the concepts of history, progressive certainly, that show its general shape to be something like a set of shifting constellations or a movement between dispersal and collection, construction and destruction, or any universal, any structure. On the contrary, such absorption, revision, and totalization, underlined by a recurring amnesia differs fundamentally from a universal, a form, or an idea. Precisely how remains to be formulated. Even Derrida can’t. Neither difference nor différance achieve this. Both of these noble words are spoken in too much ignorance, too much knowledge.

One sign of bad philology (and bad writing) in intellectual history is an abundance of lists—author names, book titles, conceptual terms. This alone is a kind of word magic. Seeing the names together on the page evokes a pleasant feeling of solidarity between them in the reader. Just so, when Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, Kojève, and “of course” also Heidegger critique or refute “humanism” (this word, these many words)—in a recent book positing a history or trend of ‘anti-humanism’—the positions get established through condensation, established for the first time, i might add, for the first time, we could say, for the first time again. Certainly in the sentence that links them they seem established for the first time altogether and once and for all. Made into synonyms, homonyms, uninyms, they are then made into shills for the author’s thesis. Who doesn’t write this way? Who doesn’t try to avoid it?

Be that as it may. Someone says that Levinas’s, Sartre’s, Blanchot’s, Kojève’s, and of-course-Heidegger’s “humanism” are the same or even similar enemy or target. There can hardly be a question, however, that their “anti” or “antis” are different, even radically so, and so a variety of relations should be imagined. Some Hegelian, one Kafkan, one perhaps Mosaic, some Heideggerian, probably misunderstood, there are many negations in effect across this list, and, we might add, different no’s from different contexts, with shades and more than shades of unheard of, coming, or arcane Nichts, nots, less-thans, otherwises, and so on.

Who is to say what is similar enough to be described as a trend? Shouldn’t one know what similarity means first? By right as well as by nature this idea alone can be similar to nothing. No one can write a history of similarity, not without, perhaps, going mad. Similarity is the strangest, most worldless, distant thing, unlike anything you’ve known and unlike what you think it might be, if thinking is like making likenesses.

And beyond these irreducible paradoxes, shouldn’t one know what violence the mere assertion of similarity does and be sure of its politics before proceeding? What violations against texts, intentions, oeuvres, traditions, let alone against languages—against them last of all! them last of all?—are allowable? How will the violations be classified and by whom? And if this is asking too much, why is it too much to ask?

One of intellectual history’s great gifts to thought, we could say, taking some liberties with the genre, is unease. It gives, without reservation, the sense that a manifold has been illicitly, at night, behind the watchman’s back and for the good only of the insomniac, against history but moving toward history as its founding crime, stuck together, puttied, and whitewashed. In its hands, one effectively concedes that history produced those thoughts, not writers, languages, or other contingencies. This is comforting and also disconcerting, since clearly what is out of place here is the stuck-together whole, in which all the lively discrepancies, whose usual refuge is language, are barely concealed.

Another way to say something similar: dephotography does not let the eye rest, even within the putative edges of the frame, but makes you circle around and slip in and out.

Photographs by Dan Abbe ~ http://street-level.mcvmcv.net/