Good and Joyful Hatred, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Killing Nazis: An Attempt at Non-Philosophical Film Criticism

Watching the documentaries of Adam Curtis one gets a sense of the scope in time and across space of movements and the acts of the powerful that lead to certain events like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq (setting aside if 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq are genuinely an events in the philosophical sense). His most recent film [the film, It Felt Like a Kiss, has now been taken down- APS] drops the didactic element of his previous documentaries, but does not completely emulate Chris Marker’s approach, and so there is some vestige of his previous didacticism in the text that punctuates the endless barrage of images, voices, music, and sounds that flow into vision of the viewer. Yet, the loss of this didactic element means that this film one no longer gives a sense of that scope mentioned above that lead to certain events. We are no longer inscribing these images within some wider meaning through which we may escape these images and the endless boredom and violence they invoke. We no longer see a chain of events, but a single catastrophe. We have the sense of seeing, without any hope of escape, from the viewpoint of the angel of history.

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would liked to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. – Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

This single disasters, presented with all the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist, is the only image available to us, the only movement we are in, the only power that is in this film. A melange of images captured by news cameras, ad cameras, home cameras, and the like, all of which are only allowed to film, to bear witness to the single catastrophe.

The genre of World War II films, predominately American in style, have always served as a kind of obscuring of this single catastrophe of history. They refuse to bear the same kind of witness to it that the angel of history does, and instead attempt to inscribe it into a circle of meaning. They attempt to make this war, a kind of transcendental form of war, mean something other than what it is as a moment of this single catastrophe. They not only redeem the violence of war and genocide, but they make that violence consumable (to borrow yet again Haneke’s saying).

Inglourious Basterds is a very different kind of World War II film. Brad Pitt, in a moment of typical bravado, has said of it in relation to this genre,

“The Second World War could still deliver more stories and films, but I believe that Quentin put a cover on that pot. With ‘Basterds,’ everything that can be said to this genre has been said. The film destroys every symbol. The work is done, end of story.”

I think he’s right, and the reason why is because Tarantino’s film, autonomous from anything Tarantino might say of it, refuses both the fixed viewpoint of the angel of history and the circle of meaning that obscures the single catastrophe.

Beyond Monotheism — 11. Divine Multiplicity …

And so we come to systematic theology. Schneider decided that she has to get down to God-talk, and do some doctrine. So this chapter has a bit of theory, followed by some constructive theology in two parts: firstly on water, and secondly on rock. God is fluid and porous. The notion of linguistic competence is in the background throughout.

A thought experiment

Imagine a religion that only accepted adult converts, yet the members were allowed to have children if desired. In this hypothetical religion, it wouldn’t just be a matter of bringing the kids along until some particular liturgical moment was reached where they had adult privileges in the religion — children wouldn’t be allowed to participate at all; their parents would have to find baby-sitters when they went to worship.

Could this really work? Would the childhood exclusion become a kind of de facto liturgical rite of passage? I thought of perhaps positing a rule whereby the parents could not apply any pressure to their children that they wouldn’t also apply to other potential converts, but obviously the parent-child relationship is unique — how could this be handled? Is it possible for any religion to have enough confidence in its message and appeal to forego the indoctrination of their own children?

Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money Reduced in Price

For readers in the UK who are interested in Goodchild’s Theology of Money (likely to be the book for our second book event), SCM is selling it now for nearly 50% off. £13.50 is much more reasonable than £25 and I hope this reduction in price will result in the book being read by more people. It is, to my mind, simply the most ambitious and best treatment of the theological issues behind the current credit crisis and the persistent crisis that is capitalism itself.

Beyond Monotheism — 10. Thinking multiplicity

[The following is a guest post by frequent commenter Andy, who regularly blogs at ad absurdum.]

Schneider is really laying her cards on the table in this chapter, which provides a happy philosophical release from the anticipation built up by all the necessary but preliminary historical work in the first part of the book. Here she weighs in with appraisals, assessments, and expressions of solidarity. The basic question of the chapter is: how to think multiplicity and so work our way out of theology’s dead end?

Cowabunga Cuts

By now readers should have got a handle on how the ‘New Conservatives’ are essentially Blairism 2.0. Further evidence? What they are currently experimenting with in Barnet Council, North London, that likely displays one strand of future Conservative thinking. Modeling themselves along the lines of budget airlines such as Ryanair and EasyJet, Barnet council provides a basic service, while allowing residents to pay extra for additional things. In line with the standard of all market reforms, much of the system is sub-contracted to private companies who will provide these services – companies whose motive is profit, and thus to provide the minimum of service to yield this, unlike a council’s motive which is to run a good system or risk being booted out by the next election. Anyone who has traveled on Ryanair knows precisely how this works. The ‘minimum service’ provided is so laughably minimal that to have anything like a service that is livable, if you want to go to the loo for example, you’ll have to pay. Like Ryanair, those who can pay will trample on most people with their ‘early boarding passes’ where they can choose the seats and most of us who cannot can squeeze themselves in while being advertised at for an hour.

In Barnet, as the Guardian reports, those affected are the most vulnerable. Those in Sheltered Housing, old people, frail and vulnerable,  will now not have a warden to look out for their safety and comfort, as well as promoting community, but a ‘floating warden’ who will impersonally administrate several houses. Don’t worry they won’t starve, they will have an alarm button around their necks so when they take a plunge down the stairs so someone can be around just in time to watch them die. “It is surprising how able even so called vulnerable people are. Helping people help themselves, that’s the new Conservatism” says a local councilor. Helping people die alone, afraid and without the basic care they need and indeed deserve and deserted by everyone is what the new Conservatism is about – empowering people to make ‘choices’ when they would rather have a decent quality of care and real living human beings treating them as persons not statistics where the efficiency must be maximised. The ideological driver behind this model is The Future Shape of Barnet Council group. Reading their interim report, the deep heart of neoliberal public sector reform is revealed, ‘empowering local communities’ means leaving them stranded. This is the beauty of the Tories: sell cuts to people as if they are somehow empowering them. I propose a new idea. When the Tories say radical or progressive, we say cowabunga for the former and tubular for the latter to see just how meaningless their proposals are. Here is George Osbourne:

our commitment to a cowabunga localisation of power, we are the ones setting the tubular pace in politics.

Much more accurate.

New Critical Animal Studies Blog

Just a quick note to direct interested readers to a new group blog focusing on critical animal studies called The Inhumanities and includes long-time blog friend Craig. Here is the announcement of their first book event:

We are pleased to announce our first event, an intervention in and reading of Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. We plan to cover a chapter a week, and the first post on the book will be up this coming Tuesday, 9-1-09. We encourage everyone to participate in comments, or emails. Calarco has been kind enough to agree to follow the discussion, and post a response at the end of the discussion.

Remember, if you want to email us just drop us a line at inhumanitiesblog@gmail.com

I hope to read along and you should to.

Beyond Monotheism — 9. Thinking being? Or why we need ontology . . . again

There is not so much an argument in this chapter as there is a strangely defensive assertion that ontology is gravely important. Theologians, Schneider claims, have over the centuries become increasingly wary of making ontological claims about God (and thus, by extension, about reality). This is due in no small part to their inability of their brightest stars, from Aquinas to Schleiermacher, actually to prove the existence of God; but also because of the theologian’s increased cultural sensitivity to contradictory claims about reality, as well the emergence of philosophical theological models where the ontological reality of God is preferred suspended.

Beyond Monotheism – 8. Starting the Story Again

Schneider’s keen, subtle sense of narrative, of which Clayton made an astute comment a couple of days ago, is especially clear in this chapter devoted to the theological significance of narratives, of narrative’s significance to theology.  Her resistance to the stasis of a frozen theological content, as discussed in last chapter’s reading of Dante, carries over starkly in her resistance to a kind of blinkered theological discourse so self-consumed that it, in effect, brackets out the the very stuff that constitutes its (theology’s) vitality and significance.  “It is,” she writes,

“past time for theologians, storytellers, and poets to listen again to each other and inspire one another.  The disenchantment that the logic of the One now requires along with various estrangements between belief, imagination, story, and credibility in the telling of Christian theology have weakened theology, particularly those theologies that have turned away from poetry, tears, laughter, and deep (or tall) tales.”

The event of appropriation

The topic of theological “appropriations” of philosophy is a frequent topic of discussion here. Anthony’s discussion of Jonas in the context of his translation has reminded me of an essay that I think should be required reading for anyone looking to appropriate: “Heidegger and Theology,” in Jonas’s book The Phenomenon of Life. The essay appears to be mostly available on Google Books.