#14: Gayl Jones, Benjamin Labatut, Cixous & Derrida, Hideo Kojima
What’s up friends. These past couple weeks have been fun and stressful. I wrote a mediocre paper on Jodi Melamed’s conceptualization of contemporary forms of racial capitalism based on her paper “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.” In my paper, I tried to highlight the ways in which liberalism and neoliberalism produce vulnerabilities by obfuscating racism and shuttering economic critiques of race and capitalism. My paper wasn’t nearly as forceful as I would have liked it to be, but it was fun to write and Melamed’s paper is brilliant.
I finally made a LinkedIn because apparently I have to. Everyone in my program has an account. What’s the deal with this thing? Do you just add everyone you know? I don’t understand this platform.
I got hooked on a video game called Death Stranding. I thought it was an outstanding piece of art. It feels like everything people thought video games might someday be when people still had grand dreams about the format. However, it’s probably the reason that my paper wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.
Death Stranding is also the reason I didn’t read as much or as closely these past couple weeks. However, I woke up this morning, shaved my head, and wrote the following for you to read while you lay in bed:
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
When We Cease To Understand The World is a Sebaldian tour through the world of pure mathematics and theoretical physics. Labatut explores the beauty of math, the destruction that results from advances in the field, and the psychological toll it takes on the brilliant practitioners. While reading, I was reminded of my own experience while getting my MS in pure mathematics. Though it seems highly unlikely I was going to contribute to any significant advances in the field, the job options my specific interests granted me outside of academia were the NSA, Visa, or hedge funds. Instead of making the world a better place, it felt like I was only given choices on how I would prefer to make it worse.
Fritz Haber was the first person to invent nitrogen fertilizer, massively amplifying the growth of the vegetal world. Haber used the same process of extracting ammonia from nitrogen gas to give life to the world (literally being responsible for providing the food base for half the population of the world) as he did to destroy it. In World War I, as a German patriot, he became known as the father of chemical warfare, swapping the explosives in shells with poisonous gases. He died in 1934, shortly before the Zykon-B developed in his lab was used to kill his relatives in the gas chambers. In a closing sequence, in which a narrator finally emerges, he meets a ‘night gardener’ who quickly recaps the story of Fritz Haber that Labatut told in much more detail in the first chapter of the book:
The night gardener told me that the man who invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers—a German chemist called Fritz Haber—was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction, namely chlorine gas, which he poured into the trenches of the First World War. His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the poison boiled inside their lungs, drowning them in their own vomit and phlegm, while his fertilizer, which he harvested from the nitrogen present in the air itself, saved hundreds of millions from famine and fuelled our current overpopulation. Today nitrogen is more than plentiful, but in centuries past wars were fought over bird and bat shit, and thieves ransacked the bones of the Egyptian pharaohs to steal the nitrogen hidden in their bones. According to the night gardener, the Mapuche Indians would crush the skeletons of their vanquished enemies and spread that dust on their farms as fertilizer, always working in the dead of night, when the trees are fast asleep, for they believed that some of them—the canelo and the araucaria, the monkey puzzle—could see into a warrior’s soul, steal his deepest secrets and spread them through the shared roots of the forest, where plush tendrils whispered to pale mushroom mycelium, ruining his standing before the community. His secret life lost, exposed and bared to the world, the man would slowly begin to shrivel, drying up from the inside out, without ever knowing why.
The book runs through the lives (followed by withdrawals or psychic breaks) of countless mathematicians and physicists; Grothendieck (my favorite), Mochizuki (including the drama of his ‘abc’ proof), Schrödinger, Schwarzchild, Borel, and, finally, Heisenberg. While all of these scientist unraveled the world in a way that ceased our understanding of it, it’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that caused the schism between lived experience and physics. Labatut doesn’t dwell on the actual mathematics happening, but instead the high drama and the high cost of this often opaque world.
It’s a phenomenally interesting text that is not purely fiction or history. It begins with almost pure history and one fictional paragraph and the book becomes slightly more fictionalized as you continue. It’s not easy to tell what’s history and what’s fiction except in perhaps some sections of Grothendieck’s chapter. You can listen to the author talk about the book here:
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Gayl Jones is an interesting author. Corregidora, her first book from 1975, is famous for being edited by Toni Morrison. She wrote three books around this time, took a ten year break before her next book, another ten year break, and then a 20 year break before releasing Palmares last year. I was drawn to her because of her big, experimental 1999 novel, Mosquito, about the Mexican-American border which I haven’t read yet. I don’t know what the others are about, but Corregidora and her recent Palmares both deal with Brazilian slavery, although Palmares seems to be much more focused on that particular subject. In Corregidora, Brazilian slavery is the production of trauma, the true subject of the book.
The novel follows Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer whose surname is derived from her Gram’s and Great Gram’s owner during the years of Brazilian slavery (actually Gram was born in the year slavery ended in Brazil, but that’s a historical detail Jones doesn’t mention). The line of women in her family are driven by the command from Great Gram to “make generations.” This is in order to bear witness to the evil and brutality of the man Corregidora who burned the documents that tie his name to them. Ursa is made barren after her womb is removed when she is either pushed down the stairs outside her blues club by her jealous husband, Mutt. Or maybe she fell. The language changes with each remembrance (and the novel is one of many remembrances) so that one cannot be sure how exactly it was that Ursa came to be incapable of fulfilling her familial duty. Likewise, one can’t be sure how Ursa feels about this as relief and depression seem to come in alternating waves. Mutt argues in one remembrance that the compelled production of generations is the slave-master’s way of thinking, and he’s not wrong. But this logic butts up against genocidal and eugenicist logics. Trauma can end with the last generation, or it can continue to plague the lives of those born into it.
The book provokes many questions about many things, but perhaps the foremost question is this: what are conditions under which violence gets recognized as violence and not something else?
The first chapter of Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies is an extended reading of the novel that overshadows anything I could possibly say. It’s worth checking out if you’re interested in the novel, Sharpe, or Afropessimism.
As a heads up to those that may be interested in reading the book, the story revolves around instances of two different types of sexual violence which I have avoided writing about here.
Veils by Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida
I read this a few weeks ago and I forgot to ever write about it. I’ll admit that while I don’t remember much of it anymore, that’s only because I failed to grasp much of it while I was reading it. Cixous is a supremely interesting writer and philosopher who brings to mind Clarice Lispector and Djuna Barnes. Cixous, in fact, wrote a book about Lispector which I hope to read someday. These three women, among others, write in a specific way that just does not gel with my brain, but I keep trying because I know they are light years ahead of me and I’d like to catch up.
Cixous writes a story about having her veil removed, in the form of lasik surgery. Cixous, in all of her writing that I have read, doesn’t use notes or mark her references, which is interesting but frustrating for someone who really wants to understand her better. Derrida responds to Cixous’ story with an essay twice as long as her brief story that, I suppose, gets at the metaphysics of the veil. Luckily, his section is riddled with footnotes. I didn’t get much from his part either, but it was really fun to read Derrida in a more first-person, poetic mode.
The translator, Geoffrey Bennington, taught my Literary Theories course last semester. He was a really fun and impressive teacher.
What else? I saw Licorice Pizza and thought it was cute. I saw Jackass and it was beautiful.
I recently watched Christ Stopped at Eboli, the film adaptation of Carlo Levi’s memoir about his time in exile in Aliano (SW Italy) from 1935-1936. Levi’s antifascist beliefs and activism during this time landed him in trouble with Mussolini’s fascist government. The film (expanded into 4 hour-long parts on Criterion) explores questions of history, memory, citizenship between the world wars, and identity. Southern Italy was neglected in this time, hence the title which indicates modernity’s failure to migrate to the arid region of Aliano (Eboli is a region just west of Aliano and is as far as Christ made it). The film is reminiscent of some of John Berger’s fiction, especially his Into Their Labors trilogy which deals heavily with the same sort of peasantry as Levi. Highly recommended if you’re into sexy Italian men who engage in antifascist resistance and decolonization and maybe turn into anarchists by the end of the movie.
I thought about reviewing Death Stranding because I liked it so much, but don’t really feel like it. Briefly, it was a highly anticipated game that disappointed seemingly everyone because all you do is deliver packages to from one side of a huge map to the other. It was a postmodern masterpiece of overwhelming incomprehensibility. It played with quantum physics, social media, and information. It was self aware and pretty funny. Here’s the cover:
And a video of Conan at Kojima Productions’ studio: