#21: Jacques Derrida & Alfred Döblin
Howdy amigos! How are y’all? I’m good. I’m still addicted to the stupid video game I’m playing, but I’ve been playing less. Quinn’s foot is almost completely healed. She’s now walking around in a big boot and will come out of the boot in a few days.
Quinn and I bought our tickets to Guatemala and are getting excited about our time there. I’ve finally started my job application process with an application to a harm reduction organization in Texas and my graduate research position is almost over.
The pace of this newsletter has slowed down, as I’ve acknowledged before, but I haven't lost interest. I’ve taken the summer to read bigger and more ambitious or challenging books. I find myself avoiding 1000-pagers for the sake of a quick turnaround and more routine letters, but I’m trying to get over that and thus the newsletter may continue to be delivered more randomly. We’ll see.
These past few weeks I continued my foray into Marx with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. After that, I finally stepped to Berlin Alexanderplatz. Lemme tell you all about both books!
Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida
The essays in this volume were delivered at the “Whither Marxism?” conference at UC Riverside in 1993. The conference was put together in order to respond to the gleeful celebration of the ~demise~ of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In many ways, Derrida’s essays here are a sort of response to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a neoconservative text that viewed the end of the Soviet Union and the total rise of Western liberal democracy and its accompanying free market as not just a new era of social organization, but as the crossing of a utopian finish line for humanity and government.
First off, I erroneously thought that having read Capital Volume I would be sufficient to start reading some of the secondary texts. I don’t think Capital is handled explicitly until the very last section of this book. The importance of the specter comes instead from The Communist Manifesto (and Hamlet), which I haven’t read (and which I have read but not as an adult). Though I lacked an intimate familiarity with nearly all the important texts, this was still a joy to read. Derrida is one of the greatest prose stylists in my eyes and the depth of his thought gives so much substance to his aesthetic choices.
The exordium of the book centers on the will to finally “learn to live.” Living is never done alone but always with, by, from others and with, by, from death. We are always learning to live from others and from death. Ghosts may be teachers par excellence. “…ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism…without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be…” Ghosts haunt us, command us. We must do right by them. Derrida takes an explicitly ethical stance, citing Levinas and highlighting the ethical demands of Marx.
Derrida reads Marx through Valéry through Shakespeare. It’s through Hamlet that the term of hauntology finally arrives. “Time is out of joint” and it our responsibility to the ghosts to create jointure and thus justice. The atemporality of these ghosts and of Marxism produce an ontology separate from time. They persist long after their ‘death.’
With the death of communism then, a specter is haunting the earth. Marx is not less relevant with the dissolution of the soviet republic, but more relevant than ever. Derrida writes:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
Specters of Marx is not a text analyzing the fine points of Marx or Marxism, but one that instead highlights the importance of continuing to center the question of life in our thinking and, in the spirit of Marx, to always be ready to undertake our own self-critiques.
I don’t think any readers of this newsletter would be in much disagreement, but the point is, can you really read the news and think we’ve reached the finish line? Can you really even believe in a finish line? I think that today we all know this, but Derrida’s highlighting of the post-cold-war era’s myopia is still of great importance and should be read. We should also be reading Marx.
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Maaaaaaan! Have you read this book? It’s fuckin’ crazy. Take Ulysses and strip it of its beauty, move the cast to Berlin between the world wars. Here, Berlin really feels like a city whereas Joyce’s Dublin still felt a little provincial to me, barring a few scenes. Berlin, especially between the two big wars, was a shitty place to be.
Scratch the Ulysses comparison even, because Berlin Alexanderplatz is an entirely different manifestation of modernity. It’s sarcastic, bitter, pugilistic, and pulpy. The city is a central character here, but it’s a city on the brink of apocalypse.
Franz Biberkopf has just gotten out of Tegel prison after a terrible crime and he only wants to live a simple and straight life, but the crushing weight of economically and morally bankrupt Berlin will not let him. He takes on a few straight jobs, falls back into old habits, suffers a loss, tries again, fails again, suffers a terrible loss, tries one last time, and loses.
It’s an encyclopedic novel, bursting at the seams with little details that exist merely for their own sake. It’s full of medical talk, slang, right-wing political anthems, advertisements, and more. It’s likely that Döblin had an archive much like the ones William Gaddis or Arnö Schmidt used when writing some of their masterpieces.
Walter Benjamin wrote about this montage in his review of the book titled “The Crisis of the Novel”:
Petty-bourgeois printed matter, scandalmongering, stories of accidents, the sensational inci dents of 1928, folk songs, and advertisements rain down in this text. The montage explodes the framework of the novel, bursts its limits both stylis tically and structurally, and clears the way for new, epic possibilities. For mally, above all. The material of the montage is anything but arbitrary. Authentic montage is based on the document. In its fanatical struggle with the work of art, Dadaism used montage to turn daily life into its ally. It was the first to proclaim, somewhat uncertainly, the autocracy of the authentic. The film at its best moments made as if to accustom us to montage. Here, for the first time, it has been placed at the service of narrative. Biblical verses, statistics, and texts from hit songs are what Doblin uses to confer authen ticity on the narrative. They correspond to the formulaic verse forms of the traditional epic.
He also wrote this, which is better than anything I could produce for you:
The answer can be found as early as the second page. "Because he wants more from life than bread and butter." In this instance, not rich food, money, or women, but something far worse. His big mouth longs for something less tangible. He is consumed by a hunger for destiny that's what it is. This man is always asking for trouble in a big way; no wonder it keeps coming to him. The way in which this hunger for destiny is satisfied for the whole of his life, and the way he learns to be content with bread and butter-in short, the way in which the crook becomes a sage-is the nature of the sequence of events. At the end, Franz Biberkopf loses his sense of destiny; he becomes "dear-headed," as the Berliners put it. Doblin made this great process of maturation unforgettable by means of a great artistic device. Just as at a Bar Mitzvah Jews reveal to the child his second name, which up to then has remained a secret, so too Doblin gives Biberkopf a second name. From now on, he is Franz Karl. At the same time, something strange has happened to this Franz Karl, who is now working as assistant doorman in a factory. And we would not swear that this has not escaped Doblin's attention, even though he keeps a pretty sharp eye on his hero. The point is that Franz Biberkopf has now ceased to be exemplary, and has been whisked away into the heaven for characters in novels. Hope and memory will console him in this heaven, the little porter's lodge, for his failure in life. But we do not follow him into his lodge. This is the law governing the novel: scarcely has the hero discovered how to help himself than he ceases to be capable of helping us. And if this truth becomes manifest in its grandest and most inexorable form in Flaubert's L'education sentimentale, we may think of Franz Biberkopf’s history as the “sentimental education” of the crook. The most extreme and vertiginous, the last and most advanced stage of the old bourgeois Bildungsroman.
Now some movies:
Platform by Jia Zhangke
It may be known at this point to those paying attention that Jia Zhangke is kinda my favorite director. The trilogy of underground movies he made before getting in trouble with the Chinese government are all absolute masterpieces. This third one is looser, more expansive, and more ambitious than the previous two. This film was actually conceived before Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures, but was too costly.
The story follows a theater troupe from a rural area of China who, over a decade or so, shift from agitprop performances to modern pop and rock music. It’s two parallel but independent bildungsromans - one centers the people, the other the social geography. When the troupe modernizes, they rename themselves the Shenzhen All Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band, though they are far from Shenzhen, the earliest adapter of capitalism in modern China. The cast of characters are, metaphorically, always waiting on the platform for a train that never comes and never takes them away. Instead, they settle into mediocre lives and those even less fortunate sign away their lives to the new exploitative private mining companies.
Like the other two films in the trilogy, Zhangke, who was younger than I am now when he finished this third film, tells an incredibly nuanced, sad, funny, hopeful, and despairing tale about liminal existence and the terrible pains of uneven development.
If you haven’t watched any of these films, there’s not a wrong place to start, but it’d be wrong if you never started.
Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami
If you haven’t watched much Kiarostami, this is definitely not the place to start. This is the first time I’ve seen him work with a cast of European or American stars, or even professional actors. He works with a lot of similar topics here that never make any sense to me and probably only make complete sense only to him. Obviously, it’s about copies, authenticity, acting, mimesis, whatever u wanna call it. Juliette Binoche and this opera singer William Shimell somehow start kind of roleplaying as a couple with children…but are they acting? Are they really married? You never know. The bit goes further and further until you’re supremely unsure. It’s definitely a moviemaker’s favorite movie type of thing. It’s great really, but as I said, if you haven’t seen Kiarostami, these themes are more interestingly explored in Close Up and even in the end of Taste of Cherry.
That’s all for now! I miss you all, friends. Right now I’m reading a book about Derrida and film theory, next I may read this big experimental Cuban novel I’ve been wanting to read or maybe a Berlant book? Who knows. What are you reading? Text me.