Trip in the Wayback Machine

January 13, 2000

Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler

- one of his most influential plays, The Dolls House, focuses on a woman who believes she loves her husband, but soon realizes that she is unloved by him and leaves; at the time, the play was controversial because of this aspect.

- most of Ibsen's plays revolved around certain issues. His plays are sometimes called "problem plays," and later perceived as character sketches or character studies.

- Hedda Gabler is, supposedly, a character of great depth and complexity.

- Hedda is a fierce individualist and proud of her family, etc.

- Her marriage at the age of 30 seemed quite percuilar; since Tesman approaches professorship, she desires materialistic wealth in order to be happy.

- The aunt was not upset upon hearing the death - runs parallel to Thea's reaction to Eidet's death, same with Tesman's reaction at the end.

- Hedda is surrounded with shallow and transparent characters...

- The allusion to the wine-leaves in Eilert's hair refers to Dionyesus, the god of wine and excess. Eilert represents what Hedda wants to do; Hedda is heemed into routine, at times on the verge of tedium.

- Hedda flirts with the judge, but does not initiate an affair.

- Hedda does not want to come under the power of the judge; she kills herself to escape it all - scandal, Tesman, and etc.

- Conventionally, a character rebels against society; but in Hedda Gabler, the rebel is a product of society - the dancing and glantary: idyllic conception of life.

- Hedda has very strong emotions, and the dramatic elements creates the atmosphere of its conclusion.

- Hedda and Eilert were once almost lovers. Her apprehension about society's expections leaves her afraid of her own sexual desires.

- Hedda and Thea are contrasting characters, foils.

- Hedda tries to destroy everything during the play. Her "beautiful" death at the end triumphs over everything that trampled her.

1) Why is the play named after her?
2) How does her vision of her father affect her life?
3) Why does Hedda play a frenzied dance melody before her death?

- Hedda was raised under the influence of her military father; that translated into her married life.

- Hedda's manipulation and control over Locuborg - drinking and killing - was her desire to do something to gain control over her life.

- Hedda's suicide could also be a custom to escape dishonour - possibly a final conformist act.

- Is there a psychological nature to Ibsen's plays.

January 27, 2000

Luigi Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author
(Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore)


- An early twentieth century play, part of a shift away from realism.

- Pirandello is very important to modern drama, due primarily to this shift.

- He does not present a slice of life, he concerns himself with theoretical and philosophical issues - identity and reality, etc.

- He explores the inability of language to express what is "intended", the difficulty of communicating with another.

- He explores the variability of personality - life illusion to stage illusion.

- Note the relativity of perception to time, place, mood, personality, and even the state of one's digestive process.

- the play is about embodied characters who may or may not be "immortal". In spite of the author's death, the characters in the play live on, in search of another "creator". They live on as far as their author allows them to.

- The characters enter to plead to the actors to play their story, as the actors rehearse "The Rules of the Game".

- Characters found a platform for their story. They insist their story is much more significant than the one the actors are currently undertaking.

- This puts the notion of reality in question; the theatre is inadequate in portraying reality.

- Pirandello critiques the usual conventions of the play. Much of the play is a critique of the medium of theatre.

- The producer tries to produce a more sentimental scene, despite the sorrid scene involving the father and stepdaughter.

- There is a paradoxical notion that theatre is truer than life; fixed fictional characters may be truer than the ever changing real beings, the actors.

- Characters on stage are expected to be consistent and not "out of character", i.e. father is fixed in one moment of his life, with the stepdaughter.

- The author left the little girl or boy without personalities: undeveloped character.

- The characters are frustrated in their attempts to extend their fixed identities. They do not, like human beings, have to try to unify the various aspects of their personality and identity.

- It is very difficult to portray the various aspects of human personality.

- Human beings have moods, impressions, expressions, social masks, beliefs that can't be fully integrated; the problem is that we try to unify these aspects, and Pirandello believes this integration is impossible - some often try, rather futilely, to rationalize the discrepencies that arise in life.

- As the history of the family unfolds, the outer action merges with the inner action.

- As the chaos of the final scene unfolds, reality and "make-believe" blur together. The traditional narrative is partially embedded into the unconventional?

- Henry Barrackson, in his ideas regarding the immutability of human identity, and Ibsen's strong grasp of "inner life" influence Pirandello. Ibsen portrays the inner life of characters, even though the inner thoughts of the characters are not available to the audience.

- Pirandello may be seen as an influence on Camus, Beckett, and other contemporary absurdists.

- Are there ways the character can achieve independence from the author? In literature? In "everyday"?

- Think about the play "within" the play.

- Is the boy dead? In what ways is he? In what ways is he not?

- Henri Bergson - talked about intuition; he said time is an experienced duration; emphasized the creative process over the scientific process; a forerunner of existentialism?

- Even when they found an author, they never found an author.

- Their illusion is their independence.

- The "actors" are portrayed as hams?

- The characters can't escape their roles, the son tries to escape the cyclical performative.

Guinness

The Guinness sign reflects my image back to me, here in this "beer-room". The great unknown, the veritable mystery of life, lies before me, with my gaze turned upon itself. The Guinness sign reveals my inner defiance, my fire, my lack, my absence, my fear, my desire for kitsch, my eros, my playfulness, and misery...that's there somewhere...somewhere...misery that's not mine, but foisted upon me by circumstance. I slam my head into the sign. The crowd converges over me, chattering aimlessly, as I bleed over into the unknown.

Tis' better to have loved and lost...

More than love, less than lust, I felt inexplicably drawn to her. Lovelier there are lovelier ones than her. Her uniqueness savages the plainness of appearances. She is a fearsome creature, delivering me to pain at every turn. I want her punishment, a relentless stream of heartbreak, pain, and sorrow. I want to shed those ecstatic tears. I want to feel pleasure and pain in equal parts. Death by pleasure and pain rolled into one...what bliss! Misery...I want to live with misery on my head. The marks...the wounds...display my love for her.

Will

The wonky ceiling fan dangles precariously as it finishes its revolutions. It shall fall onto my balding skull and finish me off for good. Can I will it to fall? Will? What an odd thing will is. Can you decieve yourself and every one else? You have no will, why fake it? The fan shall dangle precariously for the night, but I can't will it to fall - it will do it on its own accord, when gravity overpowers its weakened structure. There is no will. Will becomes a miraculous overcoming of all human limitations in the noetic mind and rendered useless, a pipe dream.

MUST

I stared, attempting to will an impossible transformation. Nothing. Only Stillness. Still just a pathetic creature contemplating the empty universe without any means to change it. Action, so elusive, so far from convention, appropriated by expectation. You MUST, they goon. Where to then? Liberty is a MUST, you must spend, consume, dispose, fuck, spawn, cherish, and on and on and on. MUST is a loaded word. Everything's loaded.

Eighteen

In adolescence I lived according to an erroneous assumption: life begins at eighteen. To the uninitiated, eighteen years as a living, breathing, and - most importantly - consuming creature is like the sudden burst of a cocoon – the unveiling of an idyllic life free of constraints. Alas, the uninitiated, blessed with a belly-full of optimism, often grow up to be twenty-nothings smoking pot in their parent’s basement. For others, eighteen is like any other any other grey non-descript milestone marking the long winding path leading to an anticlimactic end – dribbling onto an adult bib while being spoon-fed by an obese nurse, that is if you’re lucky. For me - because my own account assuredly has an unparalleled internal significance - eighteen was an inauspicious occasion. I made love to my seventeen year old girlfriend for the first time as a legal person. And somewhere in the dank recesses of my wretched mind, she remains a nubile forbidden seventeen; pink boundless lust stretching from head to toe.

The event has significance only in the larger historical context. It was to be our last encounter; the relationship soured and we went our separate ways. She moved on. I didn’t. That’s eighteen for me – a sumptuous fantasy suspended in the cold comfort of fleeting eternity.

“Eighteen years young and never to be the same,” my father told me with his mouth half-full with partly chewed birthday cake. Somewhere at this imaginary moment, when the reader discovers the writer’s wretched word, someone on the verge of an eighteenth birthday bathes in a porcelain tub of once immaculate waters spiritised by self-inflicted crimson. Another steps deliberately onto the seat of a black swivel chair – positioned and readied for the bed sheet noose. Another chooses a spectular sudden end and empties the barrel of a handgun into their skull. On my eighteenth, thoughts darker than these disturbed the ubiquitous sense of optimism orbiting me, the ever so special birthday boy. But nothing came of it. An instinctive fear of death and a boundless weariness about the vast unknown assurances that lay beyond held me back from the abyss. Nevertheless, there are those bold, brave, and honest souls who choose to end it in the prime of their youth, on the cusp of maturity, rather than bear the lukewarm stagnation of those etc. years following eighteen. They are pure Beings, who stand defiantly against the tide of change, and destroy themselves rather than be swept along. You see, those who idealize eighteen as the completion of freedom are naïve enough to believe that freedom is simply the ability to mortgage debt, drive a car, buy smokes, buy alcohol, legally buy pornography, and etc. Alas, when you’re eighteen, sugary presumptions are hard to swallow. You choke a bit, cough it up, and meticulously examine the hideous bile of naïveté; its beauty lies in its chameleon nature, its ability to take any form evolved by an enchanted mind. Naïveté has its origin in a most narcissistic emotion, romantic love. As a hapless romantic, still dwelling on unrequited affection, I can tell you that I am at once honest and duplicitous, self-deprecating and invariably self-absorbed. Alas, that is the condition of a stubborn fool still green and in constant fear of his surroundings, clinging to a long lost impossibility - with utter disregard to present or future.

One who passes through eighteen stands before a long portentous road snaking towards an unavoidable conclusion: death. In order to distract from the omnipresent possibility of having to face their own mortality, individuals convince themselves that they are in love with someone else – their “better half”, “partner”, or “beloved” – to repress a prior and essential impulse for self-love.

Woody Allen may have been onto something: "What's wrong with masturbation? It's sex with someone I love."

What was will never be again

I dreaded being spurned and refused to take the plunge. After I mucked things up royally, I realized that it was indeed love. Years later, she lingers; ours a still-born love.

Love, as I have been told, is equal parts hatred and affection, devoid of indifference. I loved her. I really did. I still do, to an extent. But appropriately, I loathe her absence. I despise her lips, those lips I still yearn to kiss. I despise her voice, an angelic voice that melted inhabitions, because it is merely a recollection, no longer immediate, no longer a repetition, no longer a reality. I despise her laugh and her orgiastic cries, lost to me and belonging to another. Vertigo and paralysis is all one can feel when imagining his beloved in the bed of another. I hate that recurring nightmare. I hate that faceless romantic rival. I leave him without face, holding out hope that it could still be my face. I loathe myself most of all, for squandering that time with her. I hate that I still love her.

A feeling of utter incompleteness is terribly unbearable. As I hiked a trail the other day, I remembered her being there, some time ago. When I camped out, all by my lonesome, she was there in my thoughts. And as I sat on the rocks looking at the setting sun, I wished she was there to share it. Incomplete. I am incomplete without her. It's futile though. What can I do? I hate this feeling of helplessness.

Is she my soulmate? Who knows. But I suspect there is no such thing. But I miss her all the same. I don't remember her as an object of my affection. I remember her as my partner, forever lost to me. I loved her and always will. I wish I had grown up in time to tell her.

Feist - Let It Die

Let It Die - Feist

Let it die and get out of my mind
We don't see eye to eye
Or hear ear to ear

Don't you wish that we could forget that kiss
And see this for what it is
That we're not in love

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

It was hard to tell just how I felt
To not recognize myself
I started to fade away

And after all it won't take long to fall in love
Now I know what I don't want
I learned that with you

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart
The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

The romanticism that stirs within

Economy of language demands strict precision. No word or punctuation will be employed without purpose. This is how I was taught to write in ESL. As time passed, disenchantment emerged. Why should I contort my thoughts to fit such rules? And in adolescence, composition was infected with romanticism. Even Baudelaire would wretch at the prose produced by a decadent youth. They were empty expressions of unrequited passion, groping for an object of "affection". This Affection concealed wretched narcissism. The object of affection summoned base desires, obsessed with perception. Alas, surfaces do betray its facility, and in doing so, wounds the inner romantic. Without the sensation of beauty, what can I have? The grotesque pulled him into the abyss. Beauty was lost, forever? One is never free from self-grandeur. It stirs within. The drama concocted within the self distracts, bemuses, and entertains the bored individual.

Never were and forever

Darling, while you're chilling in Paris, I'm stuck nowhere, thinking vast thoughts slowed by minutia. But darling, don't you see? You keep me alive. My heart races to the vision of you, with naked or mind's eye. Beyond appearance, beyond sentiment or crude arousal, you are a wonder. At the edge of an abyss, you keep me from going over and slipping aimlessly into despair. May we share an encounter that never will be, lost forever in that misty dreamscape; a dream that sustains us nonetheless...until the next. Goodbye, hello...reality/dream...me and you, never were and forever.

The demonic fruit

- Are you ready?

Yeah, I am.

- Have you prepared a few words for us?

Nope, but I’m ready.

- Well, the stage is yours.

Thank you.

I am here, but not for long. I have much to say, but will tell you nothing at all. I will tell you what you want to hear, feed your illusions, and affirm your preconceptions. I will stroke your egos and add to their massive largesse. But I will tell you nothing at all – nothing that you don’t already know. When life becomes futile and passionless, nothing is all that I can tell you. A loveless existence is interminable. Honestly, I have nothing to tell you really.

But this is my time. This is my stage. This is my opportunity to peddle trite facility as truth - to a group that sees through my duplicity. Here I stand here today not a good man or a bad man, whatever good and bad means. So what do you want to know?

- What’s your favorite food?

Why?

- Because that question that tells a lot about a person.

Oh really? Well all right.

I really liked hot dogs.

- That’s not food.

What do you mean?

- It’s not a type of food.

Well what the bloody hell have I been shoving down my gullet all those years?

- We cannot disclose that, but we can safely assure you that hot dogs are not food.

Okay, I don’t want to know.

- Was there any other food that you had a special affinity for?

Yeah, I enjoyed bananas.

- The demonic fruit?

The what what?

The demonic fruit!

I don’t understand how bananas are demonic. I mean they were tasty and a versatile fruit.

You can eat them, fry them, make banana splits and blend them into smoothies and shakes.

- Yes, all of that is true, but that does not make them any less demonic.

Okay, I love the demonic fruit then, next?

- Please don’t address us with that tone.

Hey, is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

- We are the ones posing the questions, not you.

I thought this could be a dialogue, an exchange of information and all that.

- We know all.

Good, so fruit or vegetable?

- A tomato is a tomato.

That’s some profound shit.

- Please refrain from using that language.

You know all, right?

- Yes.

So don’t prude up like you never knew about that little word.

- Please change your tone of voice.

All right, I suppose I’m disclosing too much, go on…what else do you want to know?

- What is love?

Okay, so we go from hot dogs to bananas to tomatoes to love? I have eaten the first three, but the last one ate me.

Prada spontaneity

She glanced at him. There was no doubt about it. She turned to walk away, but he spotted her. In a crowded Granville Island marketplace, they would meet for the first time in ten years. She courteously turned around to greet him, hoping to keep the encounter as short as possible, because she still had shopping to do.

”Hey, it’s been a long time,” he initiated. She looked at him intently, trying to see who this really was and replied with a nervous chuckle.

“Yeah it has.” She stared at her shoes, as she had often done in order to short circuit conversation. But as she grew absorbed with her footwear, her mind wandered. Groceries, clothes, bookstore, shower, nightlife…but this wasn’t part of her Saturday. They stood there for while. She wanted him to say, “So nice to see you again” and shuffle off. It never happened when she looked up. He was still there.

“I know that you probably want to get on with your usual Saturday. But usual is the usual, ya know? How about accompanying an old acquaintance for the day?”

She was taken aback by his candor. In spite of the abruptness of the encounter, she was intrigued by the proposal.

“And I’ll treat you to dinner. I mean its something long overdue.” To which she replied in cliché.

“So are you asking me out…on a date?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I mean we barely know each other now. I just didn’t want to wander the streets of Vancouver all by my lonesome,” he said with sedate joviality. She started to be swayed by his proposal, but still stood there silently, devising a response appropriate for the moment. When such a response was not forthcoming, he intervened again.

“You look like you’re on a schedule,” he said looking at her grocery list. “How about this? I’ll tag along with you for the morning as you go through that list. And if you aren’t tired of me after that, we can go on from there.” The slightest of smiles appeared on her face. She was amused that he was now a willing participant in her shopping escapades.

“That sounds like plan,” as she restarted her walk through the market. “And please try to keep up.” A playful haughtiness fused with her steps, as her Saturday routine was pleasantly disturbed.

---

Elevation

Above the valleys, over rills and meres,
Above the mountains, woods, the oceans, clouds,
Beyond the sun, past all etheral bounds,
Beyond the borders of the starry spheres,

My agile spirit, how you take your flight!
Like a strong swimmer swooning on the sea
You gaily plough the vast immensity
With manly, inexpressible delight.

Fly above this morbid, vaporous place;
Go cleanse yourself in higher, finer air,
And drink up, like a pure, divine liqueur,
Bright fire, out of clear and limpid space.

Beyond ennui, past troubles and ordeals
That load our dim existence with their weight,
Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great
Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields!

The man whose thoughts, the larks, take to their wing
Each morning, freely speeding through the air,
- Who soars above this life, interpreter
Of flowers' speech, the voice of silent things!

- Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal, 3

The dandy

A desire for the end, simple release from mortality, informs nihilism. What must I do in order to fulfill my essence, my fate? This question torments the nihilist. He does not believe in nothing. He is the prototypical liberal taken to logical limits. Cutesy, nouveau ways of presentation, the task of aesthetical sensibility makes claims to supremacy over all other matters. A romantic is simply a nihilist existing in a state of abysmal denial. For the dandy, it is how he appears that trumps all.

As he walks through town with his notebook in tow and his cape draped elegantly over his shoulders, his face betrays the disdain he harbours for those who fail to understand him - he, the master-artist, the master-philosopher, the beautiful mind, wasted amongst the degenerate mass. Purity is exclusively his domain, and only he can hope to attain it. He walks glumly through the village, still yearning for purer times, for better times. Alas, as his sojourn nears its conclusion, he encounters the local drunkard, appearing as slovenly as ever, who asks for a pence to buy a drink. The dandy shoots him a cold stare, turning his cape in an equally dismissive manner, and marches onward for home. Upon returning to his studio, he draws a bath, strips off his garments, opens his veins, and waits for purity, because life is not where genuine being resides for the dandy.

There is the life-as-expected, the long journey to the middle, a search for the serenity-as-artifice, for the banal and the safe. This is life as a road map – meticulously planned in a general way. Here are the milestones, hit them on your way to the middle. The dandy can't lower himself to the petit bourgeois. It is repugnant to his 'nobler' sensibilities; the rabble rabble is below him.

The life unexpected comes to being through spontaneity. It is a life open to surprise, receptive of contingency. It breaks through the crust of repetition, refusing the teleology of rigid expectations and well-made plans. Life is wonder, bewilderment; it is not expressible simply in words or doctrine nor simply feelings and perceptions. What life is cannot be encapsulated in descriptions or speculations about what it should be, guaranteed. Life unfolds without knowledge of what is to come. The unknown is not an object the flaneur acquires, admires, critiques, and elevates by virtue of his general iridiscence. The dandy fears the unknown, even as the last drop of blood enters the bathwater. "Anywhere is better than here..." So begins the final entry in his notebook. He expires before finishing the thought.

The story begins and ends here...

“What if I were to tell you that I am still in love with you?”

“It doesn’t matter. It has been too long. We are different people. We will always be different people.”

The story begins and ends here, I suppose. What else can be said for love unrequited other than it is absurd. Yearning lingers in the heart of the romantic and can never be fully expiated. Contentions attesting to the contrary are patently duplicitous. He fully grasps the limits of romance, ecstasy and pain. It is at these most intense points where he imagines himself and his beloved. In his mind, he lives at the margins – imagines the blissful union, but remains in fear and trembling of the distance between. The romantic needs the pain of separation. For the union of lovers casts finitude upon individual psychic machinations. In encounter he must confront his other in actuality. The torment of alienation, that ineluctable distance between lovers, remains endless. The romantic needs perpetual yearning and hunger to satisfy his desire for the boundless.

Fixation

What is fixation? Fixation can be a stubborn, atavistic, romantic, and desperate hold onto a condition that never was -- and never will be. Fixation is that unyielding worship of a perfectible object, possible through a determined decision not to confront an existent human condition. Fixation yearns for confirmation and meaning. It desperately wants to believe that cosmic unity manifests itself at single percievable point - represented by an old man in the sky, a pair of supple breasts, the pure green of virgin pastures, or a lost garden blessed by blissful ignorance. But cosmic unity, if such a phenomena is at all possible, cannot be perceived, possessed, or grasped by a single One. Unity is lived in life between us and the world -- it requires a bold and courageous move into unknown horizons, not simply passing into contemplative purity. When fixated upon the idol, the object of affection and reverence, one is blinded to lived truth. The dream inspires but satisfies only individual delusion. Dreams are actualized, however imperfectly, in the life between human beings -- driving human becoming rather than fixating on Being. For no eternal form can satisfy the need for human becoming, since becoming is a transformative address of a world in flux. Fixation is a beautiful wax figure, that will be nothing more than what it appears. It cannot move. It cannot challenge facile judgments. It only reaffirms false perception and prejudice.

Medical History

A thirty year old man visits his doctor for the first time in a decade. The doctor opens up his file and notes that the patient has never undergone a physical. He asks the patient why this is the case. The patient simply informs the doctor that he is a nihilist and believes in nothing. The doctor tells him that he cannot in good conscience continue to be his physician, citing the lack of a medical history. The man gets up, drops his pants, and reveals the remanants of a castrated penis.

"No colds, no flus, didn't drink, didn't smoke, regular exercise, semi-regular sex, but my ex-girlfriend gnawed off my penis."

"Oh," the puzzled doctor replied. "Did she wear braces?"

"Why no."

Darling

Darling, my love, I have travelled countless miles on this earth and in my imagination, but there you are, just as you were, painfully lovely and forever elusive.

Darling, I have moved heaven and earth to separate from you, to forget us. I can't. Here I am, just as I was, tragically infatuated with impossible you. Impossible you, my darling, I cannot fathom to be away from you.

Darling, I wonder, I wander, I meander back to you, impossible you. Still, even now, I hear your laugh. Still, even now, I feel your touch, I sense your bashful and elegant body pressed close to mine. Still, right now, my world has no vibrance without you, my darling.

Darling, I wonder, I do wonder, how you are, how things could be, how things should have been between you and me. I love you and that I cannot deny. Your warmth, your dreamy exuberance, your passionate lips, your ebullience, our ebullience, our joy, our passion; but now, there's only pain, pain forevermore. Every moment absent of you destroys me ever so slowly; it accelerates my degeneration, cuffs me to regression, and whittles away my soulless atrophied existence.

Darling, you hurt me so, you left me shattered, you left me groping for impossible hope. How can I go, my love, without you? How can I go on without you my darling?

Darling, darling, I love you so.. I await your impossible return and I know I shall come to grief.

Closure?

She laid there, as if daring me to do what that I knew I shouldn’t. I wanted to succumb so badly. She bit her lip in an irresistibly flirtatious way, as I made a half-hearted grasp at composure. Off came one strap, then the other, and she started to shimmy out of her dress. She knew full well that my inhibitions had been shattered, and that she was in full control. She smiled. It was a command more than a smile. I went over. It was too much for me to bear.

As we laid in an intimate, expended embrace, she whispered those things I had longed to hear. When morning broke, the whispers were forgotten. I looked over and, as always, she was gone. And as expected, the note was there: “Thanks. Love, T”. She had to get to the church for preparations; her groom was waiting.

I drove past the church and stopped across from the street. I contemplated it. I really did. I walked up to the steps and back to my car. I stared at the cathedral, still contemplating it. Then the passenger door opens. I swiveled my head around to see who it was. All I could only make out was a blur of white. Of course, it was her climbing in. Off came one strap then the other…and it ends.

The fantasy-nightmare never holds the same details, but it unfolds in a familiar way. It ends as quickly as it begins, because dreams reject the constraints that govern conscious life. They are liberating and debilitating; feeling eternity in an instant is to have nothingness and totality meld into the other. After waking up from it, an anxious arousal surges through my body. It is only in the shower, after I have assuaged the need, do I experience serenity. As I stood in the shower with water pouring over my head, I realized the utter absurdity of it, the absurd idea of her. And it was then, pleasuring myself to a familiar fantasy, did I realize that the dream was liberating once I accepted its absurdity - the impossibility of a girl whom I never encountered but seemingly understood so intimately. Following the climax of a morning shower, I would think no more about it...until her inevitable return.

Failure of the Romantic

"Sometimes I feel that I have failed everyone who loves me. I have let complacency rather than dogged determination define my life. When I look back at the quarter of a century that I have spent on this planet, I see nothing but failure – potential unfulfilled. The runner who constantly looks over at his fellow competitors quickly finds himself lagging behind. I measure and compare myself to those around me, all the while layering mask upon mask, until I do not know who I really am. Although I put up a brave front, the fear of relegation is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a teenager, I experienced the deepest scar – genuine heartbreak. The heartbreak was the product of timidity more so than of bold arrogance. It was a massive blow upon my budding masculinity. Rather than growing up, I was stunted. I found the stereotypes far too easy to abandon. An arrogant, brash, and consciously negligent visage desperately concealed a profound disillusionment with the world and with human relationships in general. I could not trust myself, much less in others. Friendships were strained. My ego grew seemingly larger, while truthfully my self-esteem neared annihilation.

Emptiness was all that I felt. I could not see beyond a moment in the past, and a penchant for superficiality emerged. Things, things, and more things are what I turned to in order to fill a void that seemed boundless. I could not see an end to the pain – apart from the auto-destruct button. Where would I go? It all seemed to have passed me by. Once, I sat alone in the playground, reminiscencing about the lovely joyous excursions as a child. I was wiser back then, I thought, as that young boy swinging on the swing, without care or neuroses. He ran side by side with his peers without direction or telos; the joy was in the act itself. There was no concern for measuring sticks, no persistent fears about failure. But even childhood is romanticized beyond recognition; recollections are unreliable, the product of a melancholic mind. If better times were behind me, what could I look forward to?

Even now, as I type this meandering collection of pathetic recollections, I still think of what might have been. It has paralysed me. I have made bold manifestos in the past. “I will turn things around now!” are how they usually go. But the singular gesture, the monumental moment of epiphany burns out quickly once things ease back into the status quo. How to turn things around? I still do not know. I just know that I want to change. I just haven’t found out how."

Beachwood

The ocean waves pounded the sandy shores, a tranquil violence. The noises of my modern cocoon, the constant bombardment of the superficial, were forgotten for the moment. It had been too long since I could hear nature in her elemental spontaneity, calling out to me, her prodigal son. My feet felt the sediment shift to and fro, sensing the inimitable rush of the waves journeying to shore. Standing knee-deep in the ocean, its vastness freed me, if only momentarily, from my neuroses. From whence we came, we shall return. But the technical world - its networks of minutia, massive hollow dreams, and the deprived awareness of individualism – is controllable. It feeds a faux-sovereignty where the individual thinks he exercises control over nature. But these waves will, as they have before, sweep the illusory away, leaving the technical paradise desolate, exposing its facility. Modern man, that arrogant, capable, self-willing creature, presents problems only he can answer. The integral relationship with nature, as it is with humans, does not hinge on answers. Relationship requires thoughtful silence and response. An imbalanced fascination with material accumulation has detached knowledge from wisdom and body from spirit. The being of man, his animality, and his innate tie to the unknown and unforeseen is too often displaced in favour of the rational, knowable, and predictable. From whence we came, we shall return.

Soon I reached the end of the beach, and ostensibly the end of my sojourn. But before I reached the carefully placed concrete path leading back to my vehicle, I saw a formation of beach wood. It was an address to play, a call to exorcise my constrictions. After inspecting my surroundings, I noticed the very distant figure of an elderly couple and their dog, thus banishing the bashful fear of embarrassment. I looked anxiously at the beach wood logs laying precariously on top of each other. I readied my body and tried not to topple under the weight of my own self-consciousness. But regardless of caution, I slipped and toppled, crumbling into a pile of small wood chips. Although the fall stunned me momentarily, it didn’t inflict any deeper wounds. And almost by impulse, I looked for the mocking laughs of the playground. None were forthcoming. I smiled. I had to fall in order to believe that I could walk without the weight of all those things unnecessary to my being. I picked myself up, readied myself again, and navigated atop the beach wood. Sure, there still was anxiety in my steps, still cognizant of what abyss may lie below, but my steps were invigorated with an unfamiliar confidence – accepting the possibility of the fall. I hopped from log to log, never recalling my initial failing. Alas, it is always too easy to speak of freedom, to pontificate endlessly about liberty; but it is the simplest joys – the ability to tightrope along beach wood – that allows one to live free, to laugh at failure and, if for only an instant, to be something other than the unsure self of neurosis. Free is that timeless moment of exposure to the unknown.

February 29, 1980

February 29, 1980

“Restlessness cannot be quenched by the surge of coitus. Oh, it is a rush, and like any rush, it leaves one satisfied and deprived. Sex destroys love when it is mere ritual, done for the sake of custom or out of a sense of boredom on a Saturday night. Don Juan, oh great Don Juan, you pale to Lord Byron in the art of misery. Overcoming again and again, only to repeat and rinse. How must the nihilist live in order to destroy? The structure of passion leaves you chained, dependent on restless desires. The rituals, the pursuit, the preordained play of sensual forces lead to the act, to the release, to an end and a beginning. Fuck all you want – it’s a pastime, it’s for our amusement and distraction, insulation from the harshness of reality, from everything else beyond the self. Masturbation, may it prosper, for it is only an exploitation of oneself.”

Lonely...so lonely...

With the passing of time, you come to realize that loneliness is integral to life. It is not simply an abysmal silence that renders the individual valueless, dare I say useless. It is the potential of human existence at rest, in anticipation of encounter and genuine relationship. It is in encounter that life takes place. Solitude provides the opportunity for reflection and preparation, to provide the conditions for genuine meeting.

However, loneliness is a state of being that is often repressed and concealed. "I must not appear alone." Hold onto your spouse/partner/fuck-toy/suck-toy a little tighter. Show him or her or him-her off proudly, lest you appear...lonely. But, we are not a species who lives in perpetual togetherness. We require distance. And, for the sake of sanity, we need distance.

Then why do appearances matter? Because, as modern sensibility dictates, only appearance really matters. The sanctity of martial bliss - the 'blessed' idea of eternal union - is now an illusion. People often plunge into marriage, because it is expected. And conversely, divorce is as much of an inevitability, because even the breakdown of union is expected, in spite of matrimonal rites that make promises...forever. It is the normal progression of affairs for a society full of romantic dogmatists. But the same applies to the virile bachelor(ette), who subscribes to a doctrine of promiscuity. For them, truth exists between one's legs. And, of course, there are those who choose a life of utter solitude, who reject all relationships - apart from those with God and with self. For them, truth lies within the individual soul - achievable only in isolation.

Solitude alone is not life. A prioritization of solitude over and above encounter is, in many ways, passive anticipation of death, anticipation of forever? The truly aloof individual does not accentuate his or her isolation. It is what it is. "Here I stand, I can do no other," the rebel says, willing to accept what may come from his stand. The one attempting to appear aloof, however, strangely longs for the gaze, for the attention that being part of the "crowd" could never bring. Isolation augments the value the gaze will provide, once he or she breaks from solitude. This, of course, harkens back to a time when aristocrats remained above and beyond the rabble, the masses. Of course, the aristocrat is nothing without the jealous and sublimely resentful gaze of the peasant. The idea that the peasant secretly wants to butcher him surely arouses the aristocrat - it confirms his high place of status. The gaze, especially one produced within the artifices of simulation and dissimulation, confirms self-grandeur. Mutual encounter only debunks self-delusion, and is, for the vain and aloof, to be avoided at any cost. Solitude, to put it clumsily, can be the artifice of aristocratic sensibility. In this context, loneliness is not accepted as part of life. It is grasped as an instrument for inflating self-worth, a means to elevate oneself as a valuable - desirable and superior - object. Solitude can be simulated for the purposes of manipulation.

Loneliness, in general, is feared. To be more precise, the perception of loneliness is feared. We are alone at times, but it is often difficult to confront alienation. The valorization of aloofness is indicative of aristocratic distance, a sentiment that claims that the lonely thinker is the ignored prophet, the voice salvation left without an audience. "No one understands," the lonely thinker concedes. It is an easy trap to fall into, especially when one uncompromisingly believes the paramount authenticity of one's ideas. An exclusive claim to truth is part of a project of self-aggrandizement.

Silence is not necessarily arrogant or ignorant. A silent acknowlegement of the human condition is also an acceptance that with communication comes mis-communication. Human action is invariably imperfect; much is lost in translation. Whether mis-communication leads to violent reprisal or further attempts at understanding is left to the participants in the encounter. Those who impose certain truth rationalize violent means in pursuit of absolute ends. For them, freedom is to be left alone...for eternity. There is, evidently, not purity to be found on a planet where man is imperfect and limited. The divine will works within the chosen few - the exclusivity of aristocratic distance is most pronounced in Calvin, wherein only a chosen few among the chosen few are to be saved.

----------

So what's so bad about being alone? The moments when I grow weary of my solitude revive thoughts of what might have been. Romanticism is invariably revisionist. What might have been hurts me profoundly. While dining at a restaurant, I will often look across the table remembering a time when she was there, thinking that she should be there, and realizing that she is not. Those moments hurt. Those moments make me painfully aware of my solitude. But the pain leads to personal insight. I realize that solitude is not simply a matter of choice or purely a product of circumstance; in truth, intentionality is often inconsequential to it. Solitude is part of the human condition; and the task of life is to shake alienation, returning us back to relationship.

I don't know why she is central to my thoughts about the past. She infects my memories, suffused throughout the space between past and present, and will be scattered along the path between now and tomorrow. Usually, the yearning for better times quickly pass and I return to my table for one, returning to my meal. And from time to time the idea of her returns to comfort and torment.

It is the feeling of loneliness that compounds existental incompleteness. And it is this incompleteness, axiously awaiting an encounter that may never happen, that makes solitude unbearable. However, solitude is necessarily a part of a thoughtful life. It is in solitude that clarity emerges. In understanding that loneliness is part of life, a person confronts the conditions integral to a thoughtful engagement with the limitless strangeness of the human condition.

The President's Humidor?!?

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
"Ask not whom your country does, ask whom can you do for your country?"
"Ask not where to stick it, just do it."

Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar

David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

On p. 9, Dyzenhaus points out that there is a clear tension between Hobbes’ individualism and his political absolutism. “The sovereign is legally and politically unconstrained, answerable for his action not to his subjects but only to Hobbes’ laws of nature. These laws are to provide the basis both for the sovereign’s judgments and for the legal subjects’ obligation of obedience to the sovereign. But the content of these natural laws has to be determined for legal subjects by the sovereign. There is, in short, no place in Hobbes’ conception of legal and political order for mechanisms on which legal subjects are inviolable. Indeed, Hobbes’ argument for excluding individual rights against the state is that the laws of nature or of morality are always already included or immanent in the positive law enacted by the sovereign.” (9) The last part of this quote addresses the debate between legal theorists H.L.A Hart and Ronald Dworkin regarding the core and penumbra of legality, initially explored on 6-7.

Dyzenhaus of course attempts to connect the two threads. “Since contemporary exponents of legal positivism are liberals, their attempt to resolve the tension is to deny that the law is ever in and of itself legitimate. Legitimate law is merely that law which happens to have the right moral content, where the standards of rightness are the standards of liberal morality.” (10) Dyzenhaus notes that the legal positivist view is an inversion of Hobbes. More importantly, the legitimacy of law, for legal positivists, is presupposed by liberal standards. “Hence Dworkin and contemporary legal positivists share one pivotal assumption: they assume that if the law is to be legitimate, it must meet the standards set by liberalism. And both assume that this liberal morality hovers above the positive law, a by and large universal and eternal set of standards that provide us with the criteria for evaluating particular and changing positive laws. Their conceptions differ only in that Dworkin claims that liberal standards are also already immanent in the law, waiting to be brought to the surface in principled justifications for judicial decisions.” (10) Hence, Dworkin’s approach to legitimate legality is inseparable to liberal assumptions, which ostensibly are inherent in law. Dworkin’s relationship to Hobbes’ thought is particularly interesting.

“Against Hobbes, Dworkin claims that there is more to law than positive law, but with Hobbes he claims that sound moral standards are already immanent in the positive law. Against Hobbes, contemporary positivists claim that there is no moral obligation to obey positive law, but with Hobbes they claim that law properly so called is positive law. Nihilists sets off one pole against the other to support a thesis that order is just a veneer which attempts to hide general indeterminacy and the struggle of the powerful to control the law.” (10) This sets up a brief exploration of Weber. The central premise of his section on Weber explicates the central aspects of Weber, but ultimately leading to a discussion of Schmitt and Kelsen. The need for a strong President, as prescribed by Weber (13), and the measures constructed to ensure this was eventually exploited to subvert and destroy Parliament (14). The incomplete nature of Weber’s work on the two ethics, of responsibility and conviction, as Dyzenhaus points out, may have lead to such exploitations (12-13). Dyzenhaus sets up Schmitt (conviction) and Kelsen (responsibility) as adopting each of these ethics, to the exclusion of the other. “Kelsen developed a theory of law as a system of positive law which contains the political power of the state. He thus expresses the idea of an ethics of responsibility that somehow floats free from any substantive political aims. Schmitt, by contrast argues for an ethic of pure conviction and executive will, unconstrained by any rules.” (14) Dyzenhaus then appears to link Schmitt to the neo-Romantic impulses of Volk. “In particular, he will use the technological forces that Weber thought largely constructed the bars of the cage to shatter the cage and construct the idea of the Volk, ‘the people’, which can impart meaning to the lives of individuals. And, according to Schmitt, the idea of the Volk has substance only when it is understood to refer to an utterly homogenous group.” (14) However, these ideas are differentiated from so-called neo-Romantic yearnings, largely due to its focus on modern technology. “In putting forth these ideas, Schmitt joined a larger group of German intellectuals who have aptly been called ‘reactionary modernists’. For them, the loss of the German monarchy introduced the same kind of state of emergency into German society that Hobbes had responded to in his day. With Hobbes, they thought that traditional modes of legitimacy could not be revived to deal with the emergency. Unlike Hobbes, they could look back to some centuries of an attempt to find an alternative in a rational grounding for political power.” (14)

Much of what Dyzenhaus says about Schmitt is, as he informs his reader, exposition. But the point he arrives to links the state of emergency in the Weimar to Hart’s liberal positivist penumbra. “On Schmitt’s account, the Weimar Constitution was just another liberal attempt to tame and constrain the real irrational sources of political power in chains of legality, but it cannot help but recognize those sources and thus prepares the way for its own destruction. The state of emergency provision, in other words, was the constitutional recognition of the general state of emergency in society to which the Weimar Constitution was a necessarily botched and contradictory response.” (15) “Hart’s penumbra,” Dyzenhaus continues, “is a kind of mini state of emergency for a positivist theory of law. It is an emergency because, by positivist stipulation, it is not resolvable by law. But it is mini because it is containable: order can be secured as long as the core of law is large enough. But if the boundary between core and penumbra cannot be sharply drawn, the core seems to disappear; and then for positivists the state of emergency becomes uncontainable and generally pervasive. Dworkin’s principled solution may then seem no solution at all if, as seems to be the case, there is little consensus as to the principles and their content.” (15) He concludes the section by stating the purpose of the next. “As I will show, an exploration of aspects of the Weimar debate on legal and political philosophy gives us both a better understanding of the current state of impasse in political and legal philosophy and a basis for a productive route forward. But before embarking on this task, I will provide a little more historical context.” (17) What is most important about his section on the short history of the Weimar is his interpretation of what led to its demise. “My position,” Dyzenhaus writes, “is firmly with those who regard the destruction of Weimar as the direct and deliberate result of the efforts by anti-democrats to subvert democratic institutions at every opportunity.” (17) On page 19, Dyzenhaus outlines the details of the Weimar constitution: the role of the President, how he is elected, the powers he possessed both domestically and in regards to security, the process behind the dissolution of the Reichstag, and of course Article 48, which gave the President “vaguely defined power to ‘take measures’, including armed force, to intervene in the affairs of the Reich or of a particular Land in order to restore public safety and order” (19). But Dyzenhaus notes that paragraph 3 (a provision that required the President to inform the Reichstag of his measures and that the Reichstag could demand the measures be suspended), paragraph 4 (which permitted the Reichstag to ‘determine the details’ of further action in terms of Article 48), and that orders of this sort required the countersignature of the Chancellor placed limitations of the power of the President (19 - 20). He notes the obvious weakness in these limitations. “The President could get rid of the supervision of the Reichstag over his measures taken in terms of Article 48 by continual use of his authority to dissolve that body.” (20) On pages 20-21, Dyzenhaus continues to list the key aspects of the Constitution; Article 76 protects the Constitution itself, and the second half of the Constitution listed the fundamental rights and duties of the German people. The socio-economic conditions of a war-worn Germany under the burden of Versailles, and a political climate inhabited by far-left and far-right elements were less than optimal circumstances for the Constitution to come into being (21). The legend of the ‘shameful peace’ perpetuated by radical political elements on both sides of the spectrum is quickly debunked by Dyzenhaus (21-22). However, as he notes, the legend, as baseless as it may be, still “managed to hold German democrats responsible for all of the troubles of Weimar at the same time as relieving of all blame the right-wing forces clustered around the military” (22).

Dyzenhaus revisits a familiar point in regards to the rise of the Nazis; namely that Hitler recognized the usefulness of manipulating nationalist fervour for purposes of dissimulation and propaganda, in pursuing power through constitutional methods. Once in power, the form of the state can be remoulded to fit Nazi ideas (23). Or as Dyzenhaus succinctly puts it, “he would use more or less legal means to overthrow the legal order” (23). Pages 23-27 outline the usual historical account of the rise of Hitler to power. “The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 gave Hitler the pretext to act decisively.” (27) The Reichstag fire, as you recall, provided the emergency for Hitler to annihilate not only the Communists but other elements the Nazis deemed obstacles to their path of power. Hindenberg signed the decree of 28 February “which gave Hitler a completely free hand to deal with his enemies, and which announced the reign of arbitrary, unconstrained terror that would persist until the end of the war” (27). The Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 “formally handed constitutional and legislative power to Hitler so that from then on his seizure of complete power was only a matter of taking the necessary steps”. Acts of treachery and murder could now be retrospectively declared legal by decree of his Cabinet (28). Pages 28-32 outline the events of the 20 July 1932 coup d’etat, which resulted in the displacement of the Prussian government. It serves to reinforce the claim that anti-democratic forces did indeed conspire to destabilize the country and install authoritarian measures. The terror and brutality of the Nazis and their paramilitary elements left the German government to bow to open acts of political terror (32). The constitutional appeal against Papen’s assumption of the Prussian commissionership was rejected, and as Dyzenhaus points out, had the court stood up against the unconstitutional coup, the “cloak of legality, under which Papen and Schleicher had attempted to establish government by decree” would have been torn apart (32).

In the final section 1.4 of Chapter 1, Dyzenhaus provides the full text of Article 48 to analyze the court decision (33). His analysis posits that Papen justifies the coup mainly on the first paragraph of Article 48, while never justifying how public safety and order of the Reich was endangered in Prussia, which are the grounds for the suspension of fundamental rights. Dyzenhaus articulates his central point very lucidly. “In short, although Prussia did stand on the brink of civil war between the Nazis and the communists, Papen’s Cabinet had done its best to push Prussia to that brink.” (34) The political motivation behind these machinations were simple, to cobble together a rightist alliance between the Nazi Party and German Nationalists to control the Prussian government. “Such an alliance,” writes Dyzenhaus, “subject to the control by the barons of the right, would of course be one in line with what the presidential Cabinet wanted to achieve. But the achievement, far from upholding the Constitution of the Reich, was precisely Gleichschaltung, that is to say bringing Prussia into line by total, elimination of its democratic institutions.” (34) “Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung,” he adds, “had more than a clear precedent in the coup of 20 July.” (34) The court reasoned that “the President was entitled to take the measures he had in fact taken – assuming control of not only the Prussian police but also the entire machinery of state in Prussia”, citing that Article 48.2 had indeed been invoked during “a time of manifest breakdown in public safety and order” (35). In examining the details of the decision, it becomes obvious that this is the point of discussion for the rest of the book. “We still have to deal with the question of the merits of the decision. There are three possible answers to that question, each of which is given by the legal philosophy of one of my three figures, Schmitt, Kelsen, and Heller. For Schmitt, the decision is correct but confused because it avoids a full acknowledgement of its radical basis. For Kelsen, the decision is confused in part because of weaknesses in the Constitution…The answer is ultimately a political one (for Kelsen) and to be judged by the criteria of politics not law. For Heller, the decision is fundamentally wrong and what confusion it exhibits shows that the judges failed utterly in their duty to uphold the Constitution, but tried to cover this up by offering Prussia a form of legal protection which lacked entirely the democratic substance which the legal form was meant to protect.” (37)

Chapter Two starts off with a list of the themes apparent in Schmitt’s critique of liberalism found in modern political philosophy, many of which are familiar (38). Liberalism conceals its politics, according to Schmitt; a politics of getting rid of politics. “Liberalism’s stance of neutrality, far from being neutral between different conceptions of good, would undermine all those in conflict with it, thus bringing about its own kind of homogeneity – the homogeneity of a society composed entirely of market-oriented egoistic and hedonistic human beings, that is to say, the liberal individuals.” (39) Schmitt, as Dyzenhaus notes, was never clear about the point of his critiques, nor indeed about the precise nature of his target (39). This leaves three interpretative possibilities according to Dyzenhaus. The first interpretation is that Schmitt urged liberals to grasp “the political component of legal positivism and its particular expression in the Weimar Constitution” (40). “Only if they did so, would they be able to defend liberal legal order against the forces of extreme left and right.” (40) This is an apologist account, as he rightly points out. The second interpretation is that Schmitt holds liberalism and legal positivism as being, or becoming, inherently contradictory (40). “For liberalism to wake up to this fact, to its contradictory politics, would be self-destructive: the moment of awakening is the realization of the impossibility of liberalism.” (40) This account, adds Dyzenhaus, can also form part of an apologist account. The third interpretation, that “liberalism is Schmitt’s main target and his polemics against it are designed to prepare the way for a decision for a new sovereign order that will thwart liberalism’s struggle for dominance”, appears to be most congruent to Schmitt’s own concept of the political, as we shall see (40). This third interpretation most avidly implicates Schmitt surrender to the logic of his own arguments, insofar that the Nazis fulfilled his criteria of a sovereign order that can displace liberalism. At the bottom of page 40, he cites Schmitt’s Concept of the Political as substantiating this interpretation. “It is on this distinction (between friend and enemy) that his philosophy of law and politics is founded and he deploys it to bind together the main elements of that philosophy – decision, sovereignty, and situation.” (40) The first part of 41 outlines the premise of the friend-enemy distinction, no different from the conventional accounts of it. Dyzenhaus admits that Schmitt’s thought is “deliberately unsystematic”. “Since for him a systematic development of thought presupposes a commitment to a set of beliefs that are possible only against the background of substantive homogeneity, and since such homogeneity was not in his view in existence during Weimar, his arguments must be, by his own criteria, unsystematic.” (41) He concludes that the incongruence of theory and practice applies to Schmitt’s own unwillingness to provide decisive clarification of his conclusions (41). Dyzenhaus provides a sketch of what he aims to do in the chapter on page 42. Pages 42-51, as Dyzenhaus promised, deliver the basis of Schmitt’s thought primarily through the texts of Political Theology and The Concept of the Political. Dyzenhaus leaves the reader with three pressing questions at the end of the section.

“First, there is Schmitt’s sense that even if liberalism wins the day this will not be political victory properly so called. It will not, that is, amount to a decision, but to an act of self-subjection to an alien people. But on what grounds did he disqualify the decision for liberalism given that it seems that there are no criteria over and above those that informed the making of any particular decision?” (51) This first question address basically asks whether decision, as conceived by Schmitt, is absolutely incompatible with liberalism.

“The second question arises because Schmitt maintained that politics, on his understanding of authentic or genuine politics, is necessary in order to establish the normality of legal order. But, given Schmitt’s apocalyptic description of politics, how is that description reconcilable with an allegiance to the normal?” (51) This question seeks to clarify the grounds that link the norm with the exception. If politics is derived from the friend-enemy distinction, is there any space for the norms?

“Third and most pressing is the question of what the criteria for authenticity, genuineness, and so on are. This question arises out of the ambiguity I identified in Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty. Most of the time, he seemed to claim that these criteria cannot be determined other than existentially, that is, in the very struggle about what their content is. But at other crucial moments, most notably in his stipulative exclusions of liberal content, he did seem to want to give some advance, albeit negative, specification of authenticity or genuineness.” (51) This question appears to be most pertinent to any discussion of democracy.

From 51-56, Dyzenhaus provides exposition of Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory. The work centres on questions regarding identity and representation, at least from what Dyzenhaus touches upon. On page 56, Schmitt, Dyzenhaus argues, posits the ideal of equality must be distinguished from a liberal universal one, because it is inherently political. “When there is no such homogeneity, there are various peaceful methods of creating it, for example, separation or assimilation. ‘Other methods are quicker and more forcible: abolition of the alien component by repression, resettlement of heterogeneous populations and other similar methods.’ The methods required to create homogeneity demonstrate for Schmitt the antithesis between democracy and the liberal ideal of freedom and equality of all individuals with each other. ‘A democratic state would be robbed of the substance of its public life and public law by a systematic recognition of universal individual equality.’” (56) For Schmitt, the central concept of a democracy is the people and not humanity. The people by and large is a particular concept, specifically defined. Humanity, on the other hand, is a universalized concept, and Schmitt, following the logic of his friend-enemy distinction, considers this all-inclusive concept apolitical precisely because it circumvents the need for decision. But Dyzenhaus summarizes the section very succinctly.

“So Schmitt’s theory of constitutional democracy, as he himself made explicit, rests on a series of equivalences. The state is the political unit of the people, the representation of their political identity, which means their substantive homogeneity. And as we know from Concept of the Political, the authentically political decision is on which brings about substantive homogeneity. Only such a decision can make the distinction between friend and enemy. The loss of the political is thus one and the same thing as the loss of the friend/enemy distinction. And that loss, Schmitt supposed, is more than to be regretted. It is the loss of all that is noble and worthwhile. Thus, for Schmitt dictatorship and democracy are hardly antithetical; rather, they are the two sides of the same coin.” (57) He states this point even more clearly on the next page. “As Schmitt told us in Political Theology, what is important in the sense of creating value is not the content of the sovereign decision that is made, but that a sovereign decision is made. Authority and not truth makes law” (57) Autoritas, non veritas facit legem – refer to page 52 of Political Theology.

“His final understanding of liberalism’s metaphysical system was, I think, that liberalism’s metaphysics resides in its aspiration to be or to appear to be without metaphysical commitments. In politics, the complex structure of a system which wishes to appear as such manifests itself in the politics of appearing to be a- or even anti-political. In particular, liberalism in order to become and maintain itself as the dominant ideology, had both to establish itself publicly and to find some means of maintaining its public presence.” (58) The development of liberalism, in its ‘nascent’ stages, was a reaction to monarchy, taking steps in curbing sovereign power (59). But the need to assert itself publicly, liberalism reveals its own inherent contradictions. This, argues Dyzenhaus, is the key to Schmitt’s understanding of liberalism. “But a public presence, on Schmitt’s view, is in contradiction with liberalism’s allegiance to the primacy of private order. It is not that liberalism is in itself contradictory, but that, in the attempt to actualize itself, to assert and maintain its control over the public, it becomes contradictory.” (58-59) Page 59, once again, explicates how liberalism’s political struggles led it into two different directions. First is the requirement that any exercise of state power be in the name of the law or authorized by statute (59). In other words, this is the emergence of the rule of law. Second is the extension and amplification of the parliamentary powers and jurisdiction until the monarch is substantively excluded from the legislative process (59). In other words, this is a depersonalization of sovereignty. Although Schmitt thought that liberalism only in the course of its development had “as intense of a political existence as it is capable of having” (59), the two directions that stemmed its own political struggle obscures the presence of the decision. The conflation of democracy with the Rechtsstaat leads to confusion. “The peculiar feat of liberalism is to replace any substantive idea of the will of the people with a formal notion of the will of Parliament. The statutes produced by the legislative assemblies of the Rechtsstaat are henceforth assumed to represent the will of the people. Schmitt thought that from his vantage point in history one could see how the conflation of the Rechtsstaat with democracy led to the confused situation of his time.” (60)

To put it simply, Schmitt contends that liberalism merely displaces monarchical absolutism with a parliamentary absolutism. “In accordance with his general assumption that all concepts of law are fundamentally political, he seemed at times to want to disinter the politics of the liberal concept of law from this confusion. He seemed to want to show that the liberal commitment to form is based on something material or substantive. For a completely formal concept of statute, one that says that all there is to statue is that which is enacted by the legislature in accordance with the appropriate procedures, would turn the rule of law into an absolutism of the legislature. In that case, Schmitt, said, the whole of the bourgeois battle against monarchical absolutism would have been useless: it would have resulted in the many-headed absolutism of the actual parliamentary majority.” (60) This section is key to understanding the contradiction that arises in liberalism, mentioned earlier on. From 60-62, Dyzenhaus looks at Schmitt’s discussion of fundamental individual rights in relation to the Rechtsstaat. On page 61, any statutory encroachment of “pre-political” fundamental rights is regarded as exceptional. “The pre-political and unpolitical nature of fundamental rights means that they are absolute in the sense that their guarantee is not dependent on law, nor do they get their content from law. A statutory encroachment on fundamental rights is, hence, regarded as exceptional, something to be limited by the criteria of form which a statute has to meet to be considered valid.” (61) Dyzenhaus refers the reader to Article 114 of the Weimar Constitution to substantiate this point.

“According to Schmitt, the two main principles around which liberal parliamentarianism are built are the principle of openness or publicity and the principle of the division or separation of powers.” (62) Both principles are methods of taming absolutist power, as Dyzenhaus points out (62). But Schmitt contends that both principles work against each other. “The principle of division of powers weakens the state by dispersing its power with the largest concentration of power residing in the legislature. The principle of publicity seeks to do away with partiality but it has to accept rules of closure for debate, which means that decisions are taken either by simple majorities or, in some special cases, by enhanced majorities. And the interests which form a majority cannot be said to represent a public citizenry, since all that they in fact represent is themselves in temporary alliance with others. A state weakened by the division of powers is further weakened by the conflict between interest groups over its most important institution.” (63) On 63-64, Dyzenhaus notes Schmitt’s critique of the secret ballot, central means of majority decision-making. It is not too surprising to see that Schmitt does not hold this type of decision-making in high regard. “So Schmitt’s argument, given his premise that democracy requires substantive homogeneity, is that the majority decision-making that is the result of the liberal individualism of the secret ballot can never amount to an expression of the people’s will or decision…for the liberal attempt to relativize power through the division of power is antithetical to democracy.” (64) Of course, this should not surprise anyone who has had even a cursory look at Schmitt’s work. Schmitt saw that this division of power would inevitably be exploited by interest groups and coalitions of interest groups dominating the legislative bodies. In addition to the exploitation of the process, Schmitt adds that the particular liberties ascertained would also be used to exert influence. “And they will use the particular liberties that are fundamental to liberalism – personal liberty, expression, association and assembly – to exert their influence, which might well be in the interests of groups whose aims are antithetical to liberalism.” This reinforces the dilemma facing liberalism; namely, that to publicly make itself present, it invariably subverts the liberties it holds integral to itself. On pages 64 and 65, Dyzenhaus discuss two aspects of liberalism: neutrality and self-subverting vulnerability. Schmitt argues that liberal individualism requires a neutral state, “in the sense that the state is neutral in regard to all religions and creeds” (64). The principle that ‘all conceivable opinions, tendencies and movements have an unconditionally equal opportunity to establish a [parliamentary majority]’ is self-subverting (65). “In its attempt to create a neutrality that shuns the distinction between friend and enemy, it subjects itself to any enemy that can command a majority in Parliament. It thus subjects itself to the forces of civil society since the laws enacted by that majority are held to require unconditional allegiance, the renunciation of any right of resistance, because of liberalism’s self-subjection to the parliamentary legislative state.” (65) This is speaking about passivity inherent in liberalism, i.e., the traditional concession speech by the loser of an election, “the country must move on…and so on”.

Schmitt, however, links both of these aspects of liberalism to legal positivism, what he considered the official legal and political philosophy of liberalism. “Legal positivism is thus the ideology developed by liberals both to justify their struggle against the kind and to sustain their political domination thereafter.” (65) For Schmitt, normativism and institutionalism are the two types of legal thought other than positivism. Dyzenhaus notes that after 1934, Schmitt employs the term ‘the idea of concrete order thought’ in place of institutionalism (65). On page 66, Dyzenhaus explicates how Schmitt differentiates between normativism and ‘the idea of concrete order’. Schmitt believes that legal positivism has elements of both normativism and decisionism (66-67) “The decisionist element of legal positivism comes about then because the norm itself is the product of a decision and then, as we have already seen, for political reasons, a decision for the legislature as the incumbent of legal power. This leads, according to Schmitt, to the peculiar position of positivism which makes it a mixed and time-bound mode of thought.” (67) Although it is unclear how the decisionist proponent of legal positivism can be connected to a critique of liberal democratic order, Dyzenhaus provides some clarification.

“Although Schmitt did not make this explicit, it seems that for him the decisionist component of legal positivism has two aspects to it. On the one hand, there was the historical political decision on the part of the bourgeoisie to form an alliance with the democratic forces whose result would be the concentration of legislative power in Parliament. And then there is the continuing and necessary moment of decision, which is supposed to be both preserved and exhausted in the actual decisions made by the Parliament. That is why the legal positivist is put in the impossible position of both subjecting himself unconditionally to Parliament and requiring of Parliament that it itself be subject to law.” (68) Hence, there is another layer to the dilemma facing liberalism. In addition to the ‘impossible position’ that comes about because of this, the decision, as Schmitt conceives of it, is compromised beyond efficacy. “The decisionism that is preserved in the reservation of legislative power to Parliament is in a sense not a genuine decisionism at all. Rather, it is a decision to avoid decisions, an avoidance and postponing of decision, that is characteristic of liberal politics but which also renders it vulnerable.” (68) All of this sounds quite familiar, because it returns to the previous point; namely that Schmitt sees this ‘decision to avoid decision’ as being a fundamental problem with liberalism. In order to assert itself, liberalism invariably subverts the grounds upon which it is based. On the bottom of page 68, Dyzenhaus provides a summation of Schmitt’s point so far leading back to the central thesis. “However, in using parliamentarianism as the public means of establishing itself, liberalism fails to achieve its individualistic aims. Rather, it subjects the individual to the forces of civil society. For these forces exploit the liberties which liberalism guaranteed in order to win power for itself. Liberalism has to make the transition from private to public in its bid to privilege the private, but it cannot do so without subverting itself.” (69)

At the bottom of page 69, Dyzenhaus notes that Schmitt’s look at concrete orders is also a critique of the secularization of theologies. “Schmitt took it to follow that liberalism is also a concrete order where one group, the bourgeoisie, attempts to rule over all others. And in line with his view of the ultimate concreteness of all order, we have seen his claim that all political doctrines are absolutist in the sense that they are secularized theologies in a pluriverse of each ideologies, each seeking to get control of the whole and each claiming that right is on its side.” (69-70) Dyzenhaus attempts to frame or re-frame liberalism’s dilemma. “In short, then, liberalism’s dilemma is between substance, on the one hand, and substancelessness or neutrality, on the other. If its political/legal order, the liberal democratic order, is threatened through use of its own legal mechanisms, it asks judges to withstand the threat,” Dyzenhaus writes (70). He continues later on, “Hence the dilemma is not resolvable for liberalism – it is doomed constantly to recreate the dilemma. Its vacillation between the poles of substance and substancelessness or neutrality is reflected in legal theory in a vacillation between positivist accounts of law and those which attempt to import a normative substance into the very idea of law.” (70)

Section 2.4 entitled “The Guardian of the Constitution?” (70-86) debunks the various apologetic accounts of Schmitt’s implications with Nazism. As Dyzenhaus illustrates near the end of the section, Schmitt’s actions were clearly an extension of his thought prior to 1933. He does this by unfolding the clear continuities between Schmitt’s work prior to 1933 and the works produced during the latter’s “productive phase” while intimate with the Nazi regime. The most notorious of these works, as Dyzenhaus notes, is an essay entitled, ‘Der Führer schutzt das Recht’ [The Führer guards the law], in which Schmitt praised Hitler’s retrospective validation of the political murders of 1933 (83). Dyzenhaus explains that Hitler’s actions reflected those required of a leader within Schmitt’s logic. “Hitler had made the distinction between friend and enemy, as proved in the murders, had established himself decisively as the supreme source and judge of all right and law, and had done away with the liberal and parliamentary fictions of Weimar. Most important of all, he had through his personal representation of the German people as a homogenous unit, brought about the democratic identity which Schmitt prized above all else.” (83) Of course, these are the themes that Dyzenhaus explored throughout the chapter. The thematic of the artist, of the bricoleur strangely is implicit in Schmitt’s own praise of Hitler, as Dyzenhaus explains, “Moreover, there could be no doubt about the popular acclaim, the resounding ‘yes’, that greeted Hitler’s vision – he had brought something into being, made a presence of an absence.” (83-84) Or prior to this on p.81, “Rather the decision would be a moment of representation that made an absence into a presence – that brought the unity of a German people, whose existence until that moment was only immanent, into being. It would be a decision that would be truly democratic on condition that it met with the only test for legitimacy currently available, that is, the acclamation of the German people through a plebiscite.” (81) Hence the election of the President commissioned “an authority that knew no legal boundaries other than those that came out of the political decisive decision of the German people” (80). Refer to the discussion of sovereign and commissarial dictatorship on pages 75-80 for context on these differences. The ‘genius’ of Hitler, according to Schmitt, was this ability to bring into presence absence, a variant on the task of an artist. The violent exclusions necessary for the creation of a homogenous identity, however, is justified by the rigorous logic of Schmitt’s argument. “Hitler’s vision was of course of a German identity that excluded much of the German people, including liberals, communists, socialists, homosexuals, and Jews. But that, as we have seen Schmitt say, is no more than the radical consequence of democratic homogeneity.” (84) The distinction between friend and enemy demands that such radical exclusions be made, because, as Schmitt’s critique of liberalism indicates, the universal category of humanity is weak and flaccid compared to democratic citizenry. Hence, the category of citizen, part of democratic homogeneity, is that requires exclusion by its very definition. Schmitt, never one to ‘lay his cards out’, appears to be a duplicitous character. He is, however, not a mere political opportunist. And as Dyzenhaus points out, his celebration of Nazism is indicative of a deeper tension within Schmitt’s political and legal thought (85). The discussion turns to an examination of Schmitt’s work on Hobbes’ Leviathan.

“Thus Schmitt’s task was to ask whether Hobbes’s absolutism can be rescued from his individualism.” (90) In embarking on this task, Schmitt focuses on two related thought also antithetical places in Hobbes’s construction of the state where individualism manifests itself (90). “First, there is Hobbes’ emphasis on state structures that facilitate individual calculation of the consequences of action and secondly there is his distinction between faith and confession.” (90) It is Schmitt’s contention that “Hobbes failed to establish a truly political mode of thought”, thus preventing the sovereign from making the friend/enemy distinction (93). “Absolutism has to be rescued from Hobbes’s individualism since it is individualism that prevents one making the friend/enemy distinction.” (93) “Like Schmitt, Hobbes viewed the individual as by nature evil and anti-social so that education is not the means to self-mastery but just one way of subduing individuality.” (94)

“Politics, for him (Schmitt), was a matter of elite determination with the aim of eliminating all internal enemies. The glory of politics can then be cultivated in the utter homogeneity of the nation state ready to do battle with other nation states.” (95) The category of the enemy, for politics to exist, must be defined on the outside? “Schmitt was torn between his craving for the vitality of the political, on his understanding of the political, and his desire for stability and order at any cost. He criticized liberalism both for sapping politics (and thus life itself) of vitality and for destabilizing order through its relativism in regard to questions of fundamental value.” (97) Section 2.6 concludes the chapter with a very brief examination of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism. The point Dyzenhaus conveys is that in order to extract anything of value from Schmitt’s scholarship, his anti-Semitism must be dealt with. “Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is tied to his idea of substantive homogeneity, and was produced in a context where, as Schwab recognizes, these ideas had to end in the Jews being excluded from German society in some radical way. Then as now, Schmitt’s categories lead inexorably to a politics that rests either on a blind hatred of the other, or, perhaps even worse, to a cynical instrumentalization and manipulation of the fear of the other in order to blame that other, whoever it might be, for all society’s social and political problems.” (101)