Our Share in this World

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Our Share in this World

Life of the World

The great utopias of XX century: Nazism and communism, the New World Amero-Order (perhaps?) made us learn (or it just seems so) that Maniheistic and thereby polemically irreconcilable to self (extermination) divisions into omniscient avant-gardes and simple masses; into advanced and slow classes; of heavenly (=angel) and earthly (=demonic) nations are practically king’s roads that start with a projected eventual happiness, with a final aim – paradise on earth (in which people will live in an idyllic welfare and harmony, save from hard efforts and evil), and finish in streams of blood and mass, apocalyptic massacres. Hence, the divisions are a sort of a concealed force (energy) of life; it steps towards a “brighter future”, embodied in the picture of earthly paradise (infra: 153 – 155) that can be called: “God, Future, Structure, the Other”, told with the words of the Edelman (L. Goldman) from Julija Kristeva’s novel Samurai.
However, a certain observation that is described not by Ivan from that novel, but by Cvetan Todorov in the first pages of his book Opposite to Extremity, places under suspicion the vigorous strength of the factor division.
If this factor were the great creator of true life (blissful life, deprived of injustice and evil) it couldn’t be identified with the same evidence at some other (opposite) place, such as, for instance, the field of death. In that field as well there are classes, as there are in life; there are celebrated and anonymous deceased people; there are the ones that deserve more our respect and admiration, as there are such that, already ranked, deserve it less; briefly, there are “classed” and “non-classed” deceased people, and the quality and the forms (=features, marks) of their graves equally speak of this.
The view of the graveyard in Warsaw announced this to the author of the book Opposite to Extremity in its own manner and with its (grave) “language”. In other words, some, the “classed” graves, those of the Polish rebels, retell a celebrated History to their descendants, whose source is humanity with its heroic radiance; others, the “declassed” graves, those of the Polish Jews who, also started an uprising against the violence of nazism in their Warsaw Ghetto, as if they did not have such a source so they keep silent in front of the living progeny: “We understood immediately by contrast”, underlines the visitor (=Cvetan Todorov), that “the other graves were places of life, because there were traces of the presence of the past, whereas here the graves, petrifying of memory, it (the presence) was dying for its part” (infra, 6: I highlight). Therefore, there are procedures; there is a relation of the living towards the “voice of the dead” that constructs two “places” in the world of the dead: a place where the past lives and a place where it dies. When this is the case with the field of death, it is self-understood that it could not be much different with the field of life (the present). The constructor of these two fields is the means – division. This means it enlivens and kills simultaneously; it knows not only how to make the past present (=life), but also make the present (=death) absent.
Who is the one/the ones that so unmistakably handle(s) such a lethal and life-giving means at the same time? In whose hand/hands is it found? Are these chosen, crafty, and fine hands or mass, slovenly and rough ones? Are these invisible (godly) hands of inevitable destiny, or ones that caress and, sometimes, in a fatal rage and error, kill? Eventually, is the caressing only the visible, illusory characteristic of these hands, whereas their invisible, disclosed and crucial characteristic is the capability of killing: methodically, mercilessly?
In this way, approximately and with big moves, could be formulated the themes elaborated in the book Opposite to Extremity by Cvetan Todorov, inspired by a Sunday visit to Warsaw graveyard, from which it sustains an alarming and mystic trace of the division. Here follows how the anxiety and mystics are depicted: “a couple of days later I continued to face with anxiety [Freud ’s angustiae ; P. Sartre’s nausée] engendered by this non-understanding”; “In order to overcome it, I wanted to read several books speaking of Polish events”, “perhaps the key to my puzzle was in those books”; “I plunged into them” (ibid, 6), says the author who looks for an answer to the source of his “anxiety”, and in this persevering and hard search he comes to: epochal constructors of happiness in mankind (Hitler and Lenin; Stalin and Eichmann), who marked the road to that eventual happiness by million dead people and many unknown, invisible and seemingly unimportant assistants, where we as well belong (here is our share!) when we classify and fragment the field of death so as to separate what is living from what is dead past.
The former (living) is desirable, good, and celebrated – it deserves to be “petrified in memory”; the latter (dead) is repulsive, bad, and disgraceful – it deserves to be eradicated. Nonetheless, the author says at some other point, “eradication” is not a contrary to memory: “the terms that form a contrast are eradication (oblivion) and conservation; memory is always and necessarily an interaction of them both”11F; eradication is suppression, an act of moving to a “dark angle” of those pictures (situations/acts) that reveal not only our demonic, but also our angel face.
If we want to remember ourselves in this way only or, more modestly, want to remember ourselves as individuals more often in this way, even for the whole of individuals usually called a group, community, or nation, it would not be possible to remember themselves in any other way. If furthermore, what is valid for (and it really is valid: the motif of “eradication” confirms that!) an individual, group, or nation does not only exist but also is practiced by some general and indelible inertia, for which an evidence is the grave division, then we will need to look hard into the chasm (=soul of every “ordinary” man) called a “dark angle”, so as to see whether a certain hardly visible, to the degree of invisibility, micro-Stalin or micro-Hitler has retreated to this place?
The book Opposite to Extremity makes and recommends exactly such kind of looking. It looks hard into the souls of the ancient, “ideal” heroes, with their modern derivatives: sports champions, politicians, intellectuals, and famous artists. This book reads not only the memories of the normal sufferers that become heroes, but also of their executioners that “delete” their share in those catastrophes, in which the mechanisms “fragmentation” and “depersonalisation” help them, (infra: 124 – 138; 138 – 152). It is done in a way that it focuses its look a) into a great History, that of the totalitarian regimes of the XX century, a look that provides the foremost face of the book’s subject; b) in a small history, the one that puts under a magnifying glass the behaviour of the individual-author in “totalitarian” circumstances – the second face of the same subject, and eventually, c) into the evolution of moral values and their transformation – the third face of the book (infra, 219).
Is this “malicious”, as Julija Kristeva said, when she explained her Ivan/Cvetan from the sixties? Is what we erase joyous, serene, and attractive? – this should be asked as well. It is known that behind the jolly and appealing face of man (and – the world), haunts his malevolent and dark face. This is a patient face, with a longing for and right to appearance and power. We have thought so, which does not mean that we do not think.

Translated by Kristina Zimbakova

#b
11. Les abus de la mémoire. – Paris, Arléa, 1995, 14.

AuthorAtanas Vangelov
2018-08-21T17:23:48+00:00 January 1st, 2001|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 18|0 Comments