Seven Kinds Of Sadness: Part Three

Death by Philosophy (Redux)

Exhibit A: A Deadly Thirst

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - The Death of Socrates (1787)


There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because the judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.

Albert Camus

Exhibit B: The Fatal Game

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - Suicide, 1877


Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here . . . with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from the light . . .

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in a melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble". Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

Albert Camus

Exhibit C: The Burning Question



Thich Quang Duc (June 11th, 1963)


What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of his own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves.

Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that the evidence implies evidence. A priori and and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes". As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think "yes" in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behaviour of those who profess them . . . Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not grievous, but it helps to judge a man.

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world the body's judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body retains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope for another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it . . .

Albert Camus

Musique Du Jour: See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, Diamanda Galas

Addendum XII

A Bloody Bicentenary

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) - The Third of May, 1808

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868–69

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Massacre in Korea, 1951

Yue Minjun (b. 1962) - Execution, 1995

Sex Is Not The Enemy

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - Olympia (detail), 1863


The painting of the nude in the 1860s . . . as the critics of the critics of the 1860s never tired of saying, is . . . curiously hybrid, marked by modernity in an incoherent way. If it is chaste, and it sometimes is, it is rigid and inanimate with its own decorum; and if it engages with sexuality, it does so in ways which verge on violence or burlesque.

Something is wrong here: a genre is disintegrating . . . The nude is not a matter of sexual health but of artistic conventions, and it is these that were foundering in the 1860s. If there was a specifically bourgeois unhappiness, it centred on how to represent sexuality, not how to organise or suppress it . . .

One might expect these problems - especially the way they seemed to invite a reading in terms of some general cultural doom - to produce lot of bad criticism. One might especially predict at the end of a genre, a squad of Cassandras inflexible for truth and purity; and, sure enough, they existed. In the face of Cabanel's Venus and Baudry's Perle, Maxime du Camp put paid to the salon nude in general. "Art", he wrote in 1863, "should have no more sex than mathematics." The mark of the nude in art was chastity and abstraction: "The naked body is the abstract being, and thus it must preoccupy and tempt the artist above all; but to clothe the nude in immodesty, to give the facial features all those expressions which are not spoken of, that is to dishonour the nude and do something disreputable." The nude "ceases to be honest when it is treated so as to intentionally exaggerate certain forms at the expense of others", when its poses are "provoking", its attitudes "violent", and its whole language contorted and unnatural.

The vocabulary is torturous - trying to speak of sex and yet not speak of it - but the message is clear. Desire is no part of the nude: the nude is human form in general, abstracted from life, contact, attraction, even gender.

From Olympia's Choice by T. J. Clark

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition VIII

Not Thinking Of England: Six Centuries Of The Gynecological Gaze

Titian (1485-1576) - Venus of Urbino, 1538

Rembrandt (1606-1669) - Jupiter and Antiope, 1659

François Boucher (1703 – 1770) - Leda and the Swan, c. 1740

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - Olympia, 1863




Pierre et Gilles (b. 1949 & 1953) - Nina Hagen, 1983




Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969) - VB45, 2001

'Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.'

Angela Carter

The Week In Review

Films:

Fanny and Alexander, 1982 - d. Ingmar Bergman
1900, 1976 - d. Bernardo Bertolucci
The Leopard, 1963 - d. Luchino Visconti

Television:

Six Feet Under: Season 4

Books:

The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon - David Sylvester
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation - Gilles Deleuze
The Colour of Time: Claude Monet - Virginia Spate
Constable: The Great Landscapes - ed. Anne Lyles
Monet and Japan - David Broomfield, Gary Hickey, Shigemi Inaga Akiko Mabushi and Virginia Spate
Monet by Himself - Richard Kendall
The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings - James D. Ganz and Richard Kendall

Articles:

Birth of the Seaside - Andrew Lambirth
Impressions of Normandy - Susannah Woolmer
Nature Transforming Itself - Jeffrey Myers
The Sea, The Sea - Laura Gascoigne
The Unknown Monet - Lindsay Rothwell

Music:

Sonic Investigations Into The Trivial - Essendon Airport
Music To See Through - David Chesworth
OHM+: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music - Various
Possible Musics and Music For Airports - Brian Eno

Verso II

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Boating, 1874

'Illusion is the first of all pleasures.'

Oscar Wilde

The Past Isn't What It Used To Be

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe, 1863


'Until the nineteenth century, the word modern had negative connotations, conveying the loss of qualities associated with the Renaissance and ancient times. The positive values many people began to associate with change in the nineteenth century gave the word modern new meanings. Today, modernity is most often associated with some combination of:

• rapid social, economic, and technological change
• industrial, mechanized production and the growth of cities
• individualism as a basic source of cultural expression, political rights, and public and private identities
• struggles over popular sovereignty
• the power of states organized as nations and based on mass mobilization
• bureaucratic routinization and governmental interference in life
• tension between a worldview based on reason and science, and one based on feeling and religion
• nationalism as the primary source of public loyalty and cohesion

Nineteenth-century advocates of modernity often saw these developments as the inevitable results of human progress, as evidence of Europe's superiority, or as justification for European imperialism. This was a powerful perspective that continues to influence the way people think about modernity today. But it distorts the history of the nineteenth century by making modernity seem both preordained and uniform. It suggests that when modernity came, everything else immediately fled.

Recently the concept of modernity has been questioned by historians of European imperialism because it has been used to detract from the experience of non-European countries. These historians argue that when modernity is used as a yardstick with which to measure progress toward some Eurocentric standards of civilization (which European themselves often fail to meet), we miss the unique experiences of those countries and tend to ignore the ways in which Europeans sought to impose modernity on their colonies. This is a useful critique because we have the same problem within Europe itself if we see modernity as a finish line toward which all peoples were inevitably racing. Historians of German and Russia, using modernity in this way, once argued that those countries followed a "separate path", different from "western" Europe, in order to explain the rise of twentieth-century dictatorships there. But in fact, even in the "west" there was not a single country where the practices of modernity appeared in a pure, ideal form.

Two points need to be stressed here. First, there was no single, model "western" path from which some countries deviated to create "alternate" modernities. Second, whenever and wherever elements of modernity appeared, they conflicted with nonmodern or traditional ways of life. Every element of modernity was contested when it appeared and for years afterward among people in different sectors of society, in every society. Everywhere, even in England, which is often seen as the model of western development, some elements of modernity were chosen and embraced, others were imposed by force, and others appeared by accident or as unintended consequences. Continual conflict over modernity as a process is the one common feature shared by all peoples who encountered it in any form in the nineteenth century, whether in England, Russia, Bosnia, or Hungary, or China, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, or Kazakhstan. Modernity is defined by the conflicts it introduced between the old and the new, between the powerful and the powerless, between the privileged and the downtrodden, whether those pockets of modernity within a single country were sizable or small. Even in England where industrial capitalism and popular sovereignty appeared first, the beneficiaries of modernity lived across the street from bastions of tradition, and elements of premodern society coexisted with modernity well into the twentieth century.

...

To a large extent this definition of modernity differs from the way modernity was viewed by nineteenth-century Europeans. Proponents and admirers of change like Lord Palmerston would speak of modernity as "progress", conceiving of modernity as the capstone of human history. But even for its adherents, the positive values associated with modernity in Europe would always be shadowed by modernity's woes: mass poverty, the intrusion of noise and squalor in the modern city, the conflict over democracy, the instability of gender roles, the dark side of imperial conquest and nationalism, the intrusion of the state in individual life through bureaucratization and rountization. Prosperity and mass political mobilization created the new opportunities for self-expression, and self-determination and a dynamic society, in which all changes seemed possible. But in the absence or waning of the absolute power of kings, new modern forms of power emerged, which idealized self-discipline and constraint, bureaucratic controls, and the power of new professional and intellectual elites to categorize and restrict public behaviour and private values. These more diffuse forms of power had significant influences on everyday life in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout the century, and in ways that were increasingly apparent by the turn of the century and on the eve of the First World War, modernity meant stability and conflict, progress and poverty, civilization and savagery, self-expression and self-discipline.'

Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 - Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger

The Girl With Looking-Glass Eyes

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882


'Detail contradicts sentiment.'

Robert Hughes

The Bitterness Of Sweet Memories

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Lemon, 1880


'There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.'

Dante Alighieri

Death By Philosophy: Part Two

The Fatal Game

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Suicide, 1877


'Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here . . . with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from the light . . .

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in a melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble". Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

The Fragile Afterlife Of Images

Edouard Manet - Gare Saint-Lazare (1873)

"It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling."

Edouard Manet

"The young man will smile on the canvas for as long as the canvas lasts. Blood throbs under the skin of the woman's face, the wind shakes a branch, a group of men prepare to leave. In a novel or film, the young man will stop smiling, but he will start to smile again when we turn this page or that moment. Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved itself (quid juris?) , although it actually lasts no longer than its support and materials - stone, canvas, chemical colour, and so on (quid facti?) The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it. The air still has the turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light that it had that day last year, and it no longer depends on whoever was breathing it that morning. If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its "model" from the start, but it is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing the air of this painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who only experience it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved - the thing or the work of art - is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.

Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exits in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

From What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri


". . . the differences which exist between every one of our real impressions - the differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to reality - derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflection of, things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which - here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, a desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; there the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs - the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres."

From Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust