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  • Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    a review of Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Verso Jacobin Series, 2016)

    by Anthony Galluzzo

    ~

    Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed British techno-dystopian television series, Black Mirror, returned last year in a more American-friendly form. The third season, now broadcast on Netflix, opened with “Nosedive,” a satirical depiction of a recognizable near future when user-generated social media scores—on the model of Yelp reviews, Facebook likes, and Twitter retweets—determine life chances, including access to basic services, such as housing, credit, and jobs. The show follows striver Lacie Pound—played by Bryce Howard—who, in seeking to boost her solid 4.2 life score, ends up inadvertently wiping out all of her points, in the nosedive named by the episode’s title. Brooker offers his viewers a nightmare variation on a now familiar online reality, as Lacie rates every human interaction and is rated in turn, to disastrous result. And this nightmare is not so far from the case, as online reputational hierarchies increasingly determine access to precarious employment opportunities. We can see this process in today’s so-called sharing economy, in which user approval determines how many rides will go to the Uber driver, or if the room you are renting on Airbnb, in order to pay your own exorbitant rent, gets rented.

    Brooker grappled with similar themes during the show’s first season; for example, “Fifteen Million Merits” shows us a future world of human beings forced to spend their time on exercise bikes, presumably in order to generate power plus the “merits” that function as currency, even as they are forced to watch non-stop television, advertisements included. It is television—specifically a talent show—that offers an apparent escape to the episode’s protagonists. Brooker revisits these concerns—which combine anxieties regarding new media and ecological collapse in the context of a viciously unequal society—in the final episode of the new season, entitled “Hated in the Nation,” which features robotic bees, built for pollination in a world after colony collapse, that are hacked and turned to murderous use. Here is an apt metaphor for the virtual swarming that characterizes so much online interaction.

    Black Mirror corresponds to what literary critic Tom Moylan calls a “critical dystopia.” [1] Rather than a simple exercise in pessimism or anti-utopianism, Moylan argues that critical dystopias, like their utopian counterparts, also offer emancipatory political possibilities in exposing the limits of our social and political status quo, such as the naïve techno-optimism that is certainly one object of Brooker’s satirical anatomies. Brooker in this way does what Jacobin Magazine editor and social critic Peter Frase claims to do in his Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, a speculative exercise in “social science fiction” that uses utopian and dystopian science fiction as means to explore what might come after global capitalism. Ironically, Frase includes both online reputational hierarchies and robotic bees in his two utopian scenarios: one of the more dramatic, if perhaps inadvertent, ways that Frase collapses dystopian into utopian futures

    Frase echoes the opening lines of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto as he describes the twin “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation” that haunt any possible post-capitalist future. While total automation threatens to make human workers obsolete, the global planetary crisis threatens life on earth, as we have known it for the past 12000 years or so. Frase contends that we are facing a “crisis of scarcity and a crisis of abundance at the same time,” making our moment one “full of promise and danger.” [2]

    The attentive reader can already see in this introductory framework the too-often unargued assumptions and easy dichotomies that characterize the book as a whole. For example, why is total automation plausible in the next 25 years, according to Frase, who largely supports this claim by drawing on the breathless pronouncements of a technophilic business press that has made similar promises for nearly a hundred years? And why does automation equal abundance—assuming the more egalitarian social order that Frase alternately calls “communism” or “socialism”—especially when we consider the  ecological crisis Frase invokes as one of his two specters? This crisis is very much bound to an energy-intensive technosphere that is already pushing against several of the planetary boundaries that make for a habitable planet; total automation would expand this same technosphere by several orders of magnitude, requiring that much more energy, materials, and  environmental sinks to absorb tomorrow’s life-sized iPhone or their corpses. Frase deliberately avoids these empirical questions—and the various debates among economists, environmental scientists and computer programmers about the feasibility of AI, the extent to which automation is actually displacing workers, and the ecological limits to technological growth, at least as technology is currently constituted—by offering his work as the “social science fiction” mentioned above, perhaps in the vein of Black Mirror. He distinguishes this method from futurism or prediction, as he writes, “science fiction is to futurism as social theory is to conspiracy theory.” [3]

    In one of his few direct citations, Frase invokes Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, who argues that conspiracy theory and its fictions are ideologically distorted attempts to map an elusive and opaque global capitalism: “Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” [4] For Jameson, a more comprehensive cognitive map of our planetary capitalist civilization necessitates new forms of representation to better capture and perhaps undo our seemingly eternal and immovable status quo. In the words of McKenzie Wark, Jameson proposes nothing less than a “theoretical-aesthetic practice of correlating the field of culture with the field of political economy.” [5] And it is possibly with this “theoretical-aesthetic practice” in mind that Frase turns to science fiction as his preferred tool of social analysis.

    The book accordingly proceeds in the way of a grid organized around the coordinates “abundance/scarcity” and “egalitarianism/hierarchy”—in another echo of Jameson, namely his structuralist penchant for Greimas squares. Hence we get abundance with egalitarianism, or “communism,” followed by its dystopian counterpart, rentism, or hierarchical plenty in the first two futures; similarly, the final futures move from an equitable scarcity, or “socialism” to a hierarchical and apocalyptic “exterminism.” Each of these chapters begins with a science fiction, ranging from an ostensibly communist Star Trek to the exterminationist visions presented in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, upon which Frase builds his various future scenarios. These scenarios are more often than not commentaries on present day phenomena, such as 3D printers or the sharing economy, or advocacy for various measures, like a Universal Basic Income, which Frase presents as the key to achieving his desired communist future.

    With each of his futures anchored in a literary (or cinematic, or televisual) science fiction narrative, Frase’s speculations rely on imaginative literature, even as he avoids any explicit engagement with literary criticism and theory, such as the aforementioned work of  Jameson.  Jameson famously argues (see Jameson 1982, and the more elaborated later versions in texts such as Jameson 2005) that the utopian text, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, simultaneously offers a mystified version of dominant social relations and an imaginative space for rehearsing radically different forms of sociality. But this dialectic of ideology and utopia is absent from Frase’s analysis, where his select space operas are all good or all bad: either the Jetsons or Elysium.

    And, in a marked contrast with Jameson’s symptomatic readings, some science fiction is for Frase more equal than others when it comes to radical sociological speculation, as evinced by his contrasting views of George Lucas’s Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  According to Frase, in “Star Wars, you don’t really care about the particularities of the galactic political economy,” while in Star Trek, “these details actually matter. Even though Star Trek and Star Wars might superficially look like similar tales of space travel and swashbuckling, they are fundamentally different types of fiction. The former exists only for its characters and its mythic narrative, while the latter wants to root its characters in a richly and logically structured social world.” [6]

    Frase here understates his investment in Star Trek, whose “structured social world” is later revealed as his ideal-type for a high tech fully automated luxury communism, while Star Wars is relegated to the role of the space fantasy foil. But surely the original Star Wars is at least an anticolonial allegory, in which a ragtag rebel alliance faces off against a technologically superior evil empire, that was intentionally inspired by the Vietnam War. Lucas turned to the space opera after he lost his bid to direct Apocalypse Now—which was originally based on Lucas’s own idea. According to one account of the franchise’s genesis, “the Vietnam War, which was an asymmetric conflict with a huge power unable to prevail against guerrilla fighters, instead became an influence on Star Wars. As Lucas later said, ‘A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now carried over into Star Wars.” [7]

    Texts—literary, cinematic, and otherwise—often combine progressive and reactionary, utopian and ideological elements. Yet it is precisely the mixed character of speculative narrative that Frase ignores throughout his analysis, reducing each of his literary examples to unequivocally good or bad, utopian or dystopian, blueprints for “life after capitalism.” Why anchor radical social analysis in various science fictions while refusing basic interpretive argument? As with so much else in Four Futures, Frase uses assumption—asserting that Star Trek has one specific political valence or that total automation guided by advanced AI is an inevitability within 25 years—in the service of his preferred policy outcomes (and the nightmare scenarios that function as the only alternatives to those outcomes), while avoiding engagement with debates related to technology, ecology, labor, and the utopian imagination.

    Frase in this way evacuates the politically progressive and critical utopian dimensions from George Lucas’s franchise, elevating the escapist and reactionary dimensions that represent the ideological, as opposed to the utopian, pole of this fantasy. Frase similarly ignores the ideological elements of Roddenberry’s Star Trek: “The communistic quality of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Starfleet, which explores the galaxy and comes into conflict with alien races. But even this seems largely a voluntarily chosen hierarchy.” [8]

    Frase’s focus, regarding Star Trek, is almost entirely on the replicators  that can make something,  anything, from nothing, so that Captain Picard, from the eighties era series reboot, orders a “cup of Earl Grey, hot,” from one of these magical machines, and immediately receives Earl Grey, hot. Frase equates our present-day 3D printers with these same replicators over the course of all his four futures, despite the fact that unlike replicators, 3D printers require inputs: they do not make matter, but shape it.

    3D printing encompasses a variety of processes in which would-be makers create an image with a computer and CAD (computer aided design) software, which in turn provides a blueprint for the three-dimensional object to be “printed.” This requires either the addition of material—usually plastic—and the injection of that material into a mould.  The most basic type of 3D printing involves heating  “(plastic, glue-based) material that is then extruded through a nozzle. The nozzle is attached to an apparatus similar to a normal 2D ink-jet printer, just that it moves up and down, as well. The material is put on layer over layer. The technology is not substantially different from ink-jet printing, it only requires slightly more powerful computing electronics and a material with the right melting and extrusion qualities.” [9] This is still the most affordable and pervasive way to make objects with 3D printers—most often used to make small models and components. It is also the version of 3D printing that lends itself to celebratory narratives of post-industrial techno-artisanal home manufacture pushed by industry cheerleaders and enthusiasts alike. Yet, the more elaborate versions of 3D printing—“printing’ everything from complex machinery to  food to human organs—rely on the more complex and  expensive industrial versions of the technology that require lasers (e.g., stereolithography and selective laser sintering).  Frase espouses a particular left techno-utopian line that sees the end of mass production in 3D printing—especially with the free circulation of the programs for various products outside of our intellectual property regime; this is how he distinguishes his communist utopia from the dystopian rentism that most resembles our current moment,  with material abundance taken for granted. And it is this fantasy of material abundance and post-work/post-worker production that presumably appeals to Frase, who describes himself as an advocate of “enlightened Luddism.”

    This is an inadvertently ironic characterization, considering the extent to which these emancipatory claims conceal and distort the labor discipline imperative that is central to the shape and development of this technology, as Johan Söderberg argues, “we need to put enthusiastic claims for 3D printers into perspective. One claim is that laid-off American workers can find a new source of income by selling printed goods over the Internet, which will be an improvement, as degraded factory jobs are replaced with more creative employment opportunities. But factory jobs were not always monotonous. They were deliberately made so, in no small part through the introduction of the same technology that is expected to restore craftsmanship. ‘Makers’ should be seen as the historical result of the negation of the workers’ movement.” [10]

    Söderberg draws on the work of David Noble, who outlines how the numerical control technology central to the growth of post-war factory automation was developed specifically to de-skill and dis-empower workers during the Cold War period. Unlike Frase, both of these authors foreground those social relations, which include capital’s need to more thoroughly exploit and dominate labor, embedded in the architecture of complex megatechnical systems, from  factory automation to 3D printers. In collapsing 3D printers into Star Trek-style replicators, Frase avoids these questions as well as the more immediately salient issue of resource constraints that should occupy any prognostication that takes the environmental crisis seriously.

    The replicator is the key to Frase’s dream of endless abundance on the model of post-war US style consumer affluence and the end of all human labor. But, rather than a simple blueprint for utopia, Star Trek’s juxtaposition of techno-abundance with military hierarchy and a tacitly expansionist galactic empire—despite the show’s depiction of a Starfleet “prime directive” that forbids direct intervention into the affairs of the extraterrestrial civilizations encountered by the federation’s starships, the Enterprise’s crew, like its ostensibly benevolent US original, almost always intervenes—is significant. The original Star Trek is arguably a liberal iteration of Kennedy-era US exceptionalism, and reflects a moment in which relatively wide-spread first world abundance was underwritten by the deliberate underdevelopment, appropriation, and exploitation of various “alien races’” resources, land, and labor abroad. Abundance in fact comes from somewhere and some one.

    As historian H. Bruce Franklin argues, the original series reflects US Cold War liberalism, which combined Roddenberry’s progressive stances regarding racial inclusion within the parameters of the United States and its Starfleet doppelganger, with a tacitly anti-communist expansionist viewpoint, so that the show’s Klingon villains often serve as proxies for the Soviet menace. Franklin accordingly charts the show’s depictions of the Vietnam War, moving from a pro-war and pro-American stance to a mildly anti-war position in the wake of the Tet Offensive over the course of several episodes: “The first of these two episodes, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever‘ and ‘A Private Little War,’ had suggested that the Vietnam War was merely an unpleasant necessity on the way to the future dramatized by Star Trek. But the last two, ‘The Omega Glory‘ and ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ broadcast in the period between March 1968 and January 1969, are so thoroughly infused with the desperation of the period that they openly call for a radical change of historic course, including an end to the Vietnam War and to the war at home.” [11]

    Perhaps Frase’s inattention to Jameson’s dialectic of ideology and utopia reflects a too-literal approach to these fantastical narratives, even as he proffers them as valid tools for radical political and social analysis. We could see in this inattention a bit too much of the fan-boy’s enthusiasm, which is also evinced by the rather narrow and backward-looking focus on post-war space operas to the exclusion of the self-consciously radical science fiction narratives of Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, among others. These writers use the tropes of speculative fiction to imagine profoundly different social relations that are the end-goal of all emancipatory movements. In place of emancipated social relations, Frase too often relies on technology and his readings must in turn be read with these limitations in mind.

    Unlike the best speculative fiction, utopian or dystopian, Frase’s “social science fiction” too often avoids the question of social relations—including the social relations embedded in the complex megatechnical systems Frase  takes for granted as neutral forces of production. He accordingly announces at the outset of his exercise: “I will make the strongest assumption possible: all need for human labor in the production process can be eliminated, and it is possible to live a life of pure leisure while machines do all the work.” [12] The science fiction trope effectively absolves Frase from engagement with the technological, ecological, or social feasibility of these predictions, even as he announces his ideological affinities with a certain version of post- and anti-work politics that breaks with orthodox Marxism and its socialist variants.

    Frase’s Jetsonian vision of the future resonates with various futurist currents that  can we now see across the political spectrum, from the Silicon Valley Singulitarianism of Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk, on the right, to various neo-Promethean currents on the left, including so-called “left accelerationism.” Frase defends his assumption as a desire “to avoid long-standing debates about post-capitalist organization of the production process.” While such a strict delimitation is permissible for speculative fiction—an imaginative exercise regarding what is logically possible, including time travel or immortality—Frase specifically offers science fiction as a mode of social analysis, which presumably entails grappling with rather than avoiding current debates on labor, automation, and the production process.

    Ruth Levitas, in her 2013 book Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, offers a more rigorous definition of social science fiction via her eponymous “utopia as method.”  This method combines sociological analysis and imaginative speculation, which Levitas defends as “holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes.” [13] But that attentiveness to concrete social institutions and practices combined with counterfactual speculation regarding another kind of human social world are exactly what is missing in Four Futures. Frase uses grand speculative assumptions-such as the inevitable rise of human-like AI or the complete disappearance of human labor, all within 25 years or so—in order to avoid significant debates that are ironically much more present in purely fictional works, such as the aforementioned Black Mirror or the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, than in his own overtly non-fictional speculations. From the standpoint of radical literary criticism and radical social theory, Four Futures is wanting. It fails as analysis. And, if one primary purpose of utopian speculation, in its positive and negative forms, is to open an imaginative space in which wholly other forms of human social relations can be entertained, Frase’s speculative exercise also exhibits a revealing paucity of imagination.

    This is most evident in Frase’s most  explicitly utopian future, which he calls “communism,” without any mention of class struggle, the collective ownership of the means of production, or any of the other elements we usually associate with “communism”; instead, 3D printers-cum-replicators will produce whatever you need whenever you need it at home, an individualizing techno-solution to the problem of labor, production, and its organization that resembles alchemy in its indifference to material reality and the scarce material inputs required by 3D printers. Frase proffers a magical vision of technology so as to avoid grappling with the question of social relations; even more than this, in the coda to this chapter, Frase reveals the extent to which current patterns of social organization and stratification remain under Frase’s “communism.” Frase begins this coda with a question: “in a communist society, what do we do all day?”  To which he responds: “The kind of communism   I’ve described is sometimes mistakenly construed, by both its critics and its adherents,  as a society in which hierarchy and conflict are wholly absent. But rather than see the abolition of the capital-wage relation as a single shot solution to all possible social problems, it is perhaps better to think of it in the terms used by political scientist, Corey Robin, as a way to ‘convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.’” [14]

    Frase goes on to argue—rightly—that the abolition of class society or wage labor will not put an end to a variety of other oppressions, such as those based in gender and racial stratification; he in this way departs from the class reductionist tendencies sometimes on view in the magazine he edits.  His invocation of Corey Robin is nonetheless odd considering the Promethean tenor of Frase’s preferred futures. Robin contends that while the end of exploitation, and capitalist social relations, would remove the major obstacle to  human flourishing, human beings will remain finite and fragile creatures in a finite and fragile world. Robin in this way overlaps with Fredric Jameson’s remarkable essay on Soviet writer Andre Platonov’s Chevengur, in which Jameson writes: “Utopia is merely the political and social solution of collective life: it does not do away with the tensions and inherent contradictions  inherent in both interpersonal relations and in bodily existence itself (among them, those of sexuality), but rather exacerbates those and allows them free rein, by removing the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation [since] it is not the function of Utopia to bring the dead back to life nor abolish death in the first place.” [15] Both Jameson and Robin recall Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression: while the latter encompasses all of the unnecessary miseries attendant upon a class stratified form of social organization that runs on exploitation, the former represents the necessary adjustments we make to socio-material reality and its limits.

    It is telling that while Star Trek-style replicators fall within the purview of the possible for Frase, hierarchy, like death, will always be with us, since he at least initially argues that status hierarchies will persist after the “organizing force of the capital relation has been removed” (59). Frase oscillates between describing these status hierarchies as an unavoidable, if unpleasant, necessity and a desirable counter to the uniformity of an egalitarian society. Frase illustrates this point in recalling Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, a dystopian novel that depicts a world where all people’s needs are met at the same time that everyone competes for reputational “points”—called Whuffie—on the model of Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets. Frase’s communism here resembles the world of Black Mirror described above.  Although Frase shifts from the rhetoric of necessity to qualified praise in an extended discussion of Dogecoin, an alternative currency used to tip or “transfer a small number of to another Internet user in appreciation of their witty and helpful contributions” (60). Yet Dogecoin, among all cryptocurrencies, is mostly a joke, and like many cryptocurrencies is one whose “decentralized” nature scammers have used to their own advantage, most famously in 2015. In the words of one former enthusiast: “Unfortunately, the whole ordeal really deflated my enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies. I experimented, I got burned, and I’m moving on to less gimmicky enterprises.” [16]

    But how is this dystopian scenario either necessary or desirable?  Frase contends that “the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based in the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles…over scarce resources” (67). His account of how capitalism might be overthrown—through a guaranteed universal income—is insufficient, while resource scarcity and its relationship to techno-abundance remains unaddressed in a book that purports to take the environmental crisis seriously. What is of more immediate interest in the case of this coda to his most explicitly utopian future is Frase’s non-recognition of how internet status hierarchies and alternative currencies are modeled on and work in tandem with capitalist logics of entrepreneurial selfhood. We might consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural capital in this regard, or how these digital platforms and their ever-shifting reputational hierarchies are the foundation of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” [17]

    Yet Frase concludes his chapter by telling his readers that it would be a “misnomer” to call his communist future an “egalitarian configuration.” Perhaps Frase offers his fully automated Facebook utopia as counterpoint to the Cold War era critique of utopianism in general and communism in particular: it leads to grey uniformity and universal mediocrity. This response—a variation on Frase’s earlier discussion of Star Trek’s “voluntary hierarchy”—accepts the premise of the Cold War anti-utopian criticisms, i.e., how the human differences that make life interesting, and generate new possibilities, require hierarchy of some kind. In other words, this exercise in utopian speculation cannot move outside the horizon of our own present day ideological common sense.

    We can again see this tendency at the very start of the book. Is total automation an unambiguous utopia or a reflection of Frase’s own unexamined ideological proclivities, on view throughout the various futures, for high tech solutions to complex socio-ecological problems? For various flavors of deus ex machina—from 3D printers to replicators to robotic bees—in place of social actors changing the material realities that constrain them through collective action? Conversely, are the “crisis of scarcity” and the visions of ecological apocalypse Frase evokes intermittently throughout his book purely dystopian or ideological? Surely, since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population, apologists for various ruling orders have used the threat of scarcity and material limits to justify inequity, exploitation, and class division: poverty is “natural.” Yet, can’t we also discern in contemporary visions of apocalypse a radical desire to break with a stagnant capitalist status quo? And in the case of the environmental state of emergency, don’t we have a rallying point for constructing a very different eco-socialist order?

    Frase is a founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He nonetheless distinguishes himself from the reformist and electoral currents at those organizations, in addition to much of what passes for orthodox Marxism. Rather than full employment—for example—Frase calls for the abolition of work and the working class in a way that echoes more radical anti-work and post-workerist modes of communist theory. So, in a recent editorial published by Jacobin, entitled “What It Means to Be on the Left,” Frase differentiates himself from many of his DSA comrades in declaring that “The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It’s about those things. But it’s also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.” Frase goes on to sketch an emphatically utopian communist horizon that includes the abolition of class, race, and gender as such. These are laudable positions, especially when we consider a new new left milieu some of whose most visible representatives dismiss race and gender concerns as “identity politics,” while redefining radical class politics as a better deal for some amorphous US working class within an apparently perennial capitalist status quo.

    Frase’s utopianism in this way represents an important counterpoint within this emergent left. Yet his book-length speculative exercise—policy proposals cloaked as possible scenarios—reveals his own enduring investments in the simple “forces vs. relations of production” dichotomy that underwrote so much of twentieth century state socialism with its disastrous ecological record and human cost.  And this simple faith in the emancipatory potential of capitalist technology—given the right political circumstances despite the complete absence of what creating those circumstances might entail— frequently resembles a social democratic version of the Californian ideology or the kind of Silicon Valley conventional wisdom pushed by Elon Musk. This is a more efficient, egalitarian, and techno-utopian version of US capitalism. Frase mines various left communist currents, from post-operaismo to communization, only to evacuate these currents of their radical charge in marrying them to technocratic and technophilic reformism, hence UBI plus “replicators” will spontaneously lead to full communism. Four Futures is in this way an important, because symptomatic, expression of what Jason Smith (2017) calls “social democratic accelerationism,” animated by a strange faith in magical machines in addition to a disturbing animus toward ecology, non-human life, and the natural world in general.

    _____

    Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English language literary cultures of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] See Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

    [2] Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. (London: Verso Books, 2016),
    3.

    [3] Ibid, 27.

    [4] Fredric Jameson,  “Cognitive Mapping.” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 6.

    [5] McKenzie Wark, “Cognitive Mapping,” Public Seminar (May 2015).

    [6] Frase, 24.

    [7] This space fantasy also exhibits the escapist, mythopoetic, and even reactionary elements Frase notes—for example, its hereditary caste of Jedi fighters and their ancient religion—as Benjamin Hufbauer notes, “in many ways, the political meanings in Star Wars were and are progressive, but in other ways the film can be described as middle-of-the-road, or even conservative. Hufbauer, “The Politics Behind the Original Star Wars,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2015).

    [8] Frase, 49.

    [9]  Angry Workers World, “Soldering On: Report on Working in a 3D-Printer Manufacturing Plant in London,” libcom. org (March 24, 2017).

    [10] Johan Söderberg, “A Critique of 3D Printing as a Critical Technology,” P2P Foundation (March 16, 2013).

    [11] Franklin, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era,” Science Fiction Studies, #62 = Volume 21, Part 1 (March 1994).

    [12] Frase, 6.

    [13] Ruth Levitas, Utopia As Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xiv-xv.

    [14] Frase, 58.

    [15]  Jameson, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 110.

    [16]  Kaleigh Rogers, “The Guy Who Ruined Dogecoin,” VICE Motherboard (March 6, 2015).

    [17] See Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left  Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

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    Works Cited

    • Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. New York: Verso.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1982. “Progress vs. Utopia; Or Can We Imagine The Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9:2 (July). 147-158
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1996. “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
    • Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia As Method; The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press.
    • Smith, Jason E. 2017. “Nowhere To Go: Automation Then And Now.” The Brooklyn Rail (March 1).

     

  • Martin Hägglund – Knausgaard’s Secular Confession

    Martin Hägglund – Knausgaard’s Secular Confession

    by Martin Hägglund

    Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has been widely celebrated and the English-speaking world is now awaiting the translation of the sixth and final volume, itself more than a thousand pages long. Drawing on the original Norwegian, Martin Hägglund here presents a reading of My Struggle as a whole, pursuing the existential stakes, philosophical implications, and transformative quality of Knausgaard’s project. 

    This article has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective and will also be published in boundary 2.

    More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine explored the experience of time through a simple exercise. You can still try it today. Choose a song that you love and learn it by heart. Keep practicing until you remember every part of the song and every shift in the melody. As you sing it, you will know how much of the song has passed since the beginning and how much of it remains until the end. Yet—in holding the song together—you will find that it is already slipping away. There is never a moment in which the song is present to you. You can sing it only by retaining the notes that have passed away, while anticipating the notes still to come. Even each individual tone is never present: it begins to recede as soon as it sounds and you have to hold onto it to hear anything at all.

    This experience of time is, according to Augustine, at work in every moment of our lives. You may think that you are present here today. But in everything you do, you are divided between the past and the future. As you get up in the morning, part of the day is already gone and what remains of the day is still to come. Even if you wake up at dawn and just focus on the first hour of the day, you will never be able to seize it as a present moment. “An hour,” Augustine writes, “is itself made of fleeting moments. Whatever part of the hour has flown away is past. What remains of the hour is future” (Augustine 1963: 11: 15).[1]

    You may then try to forget about the hour and direct all your attention to the present moment, concentrating on what you are experiencing right now. Yet, as you grasp the present moment, it is already ceasing to be. As Augustine observes, “if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity” (11: 14). Even the most immediate experience is marked by this temporality. There is never a presence that reposes in itself. Rather, every moment of time is disappearing. This is not to say that the experience of time is an illusion. On the contrary, it is at work in everything you do. Any experience requires that you hold onto a past that is no longer and project yourself into a future that is not yet.

    Augustine dramatically describes the experience of time as a distentio that pulls you apart in two different directions. Living on in time you are always distended, torn between a past that you cannot fully recover and a future that you cannot finally predict. By the same token, there is no guarantee that you can sustain what you love. Happiness consists in having and holding (habere et tenere) what you love. But since both you and the beloved are temporal, your having and holding will always tremble with the anticipation of mourning. The moments you stretch out to keep in memory may be taken away and the possibilities you strain toward in hope may never arrive.

    The result is a life where opportunity and danger are inseparable. The light of bliss—even when it floods your life—is always attended by the shadow of loss. “Either loss of what we love and have gained,” Augustine explains, “or failure to gain what we love and have hoped for” (Augustine 1982: 62). This is the condition of secular life. Augustine uses the Latin word saecularis to evoke how we are bound by time, through our commitments to a shared world and history, as well as to generations before and beyond us. The historical world in which we find ourselves is the saeculum and this world (hoc saeculo) depends on generation across time.

    Instead of pursuing the passions of a secular life, Augustine urges his soul to turn toward God’s eternity as “the place of peace that is imperturbable” (Augustine 1963: 4: 11). This is the movement of his religious conversion. Augustine implores himself not to be “foolish” by trying to hold onto what passes away. Unless the soul turns toward the eternity of God “it is fixed to sorrows” (4: 10), since all things that are temporal will cease to be. With remarkable precision, Augustine locates the risk of mourning not only in erotic love but also in the basic enjoyment of his physical senses. Merely to enjoy the light that illuminates the world is for Augustine a dangerous temptation, since it makes him dependent on something that is transient. “That corporeal light,” he explains, “is a tempting and dangerous sweetness” (10: 34). Enjoying the light of the day leads him to want more light and to suffer when it is absent. Because he loves the light that makes the world visible, “if suddenly the light is withdrawn, I seek for it with longing. And if it is absent for long, I grow sad” (10: 34). Similarly, when Augustine recites and is moved by a song, he warns himself against becoming attached to the sounds and words that vanish in time. “Do no let my soul attach itself to these words with the glue of love [glutine amore] through the sensations of the body. For all these things move along a path toward nonexistence. They tear the soul apart with contagious desires” (4: 10).

    Augustine’s aim, then, is to convert the passion of a secular experience that is bound by time into a passion for the eternity of God. He wants to persuade us that it would be better to enjoy the stillness of eternity than to suffer from the drama of living on in time, torn between the past and the future.

    Yet Augustine’s own account gives us good reasons to reject his appraisal of eternity. The attraction of eternity is supposed to be that “there you will lose nothing” (4: 11). But if you can lose nothing in eternity, it is because there is literally nothing left to lose. Nothing that happens can matter anymore and it is no accident that the activities offered in Heaven turn out to be remarkably monotonous. “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia’,” Augustine explains in one of his sermons, and “we shall praise God not just for one day, but just as these days have no end in time, our praise does not cease” (Augustine 1992: 163). Leaving aside the question of whether one could sing or praise something forever, the real question is why one would want to and how any significant aspect of who we are could survive the transformation to timeless rapture. Being absorbed in eternity, there would be nothing left for you or me to do, since nothing could begin or end. As far as I am concerned, I would be dead.

    To pursue the latter perspective would be to write a secular—as distinct from a religious—confession. Such a confession would take up Augustine’s explorations of how the identity of the self depends on the fragile operations of memory and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. Like Augustine in his Confessions it would declare: “See, my life is distended” (Ecce distentio est vita mea). But unlike in Augustine, the distention of time would not be regarded as a fallen state from which we need to be redeemed by a religious revelation of eternity. Rather, the distention of time would be seen and felt as the opening of life itself. The task would be to “own” the fact that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. While Augustine denounces the “glue of care” (curae glutino) that binds us to the world, a secular confession would maintain that it is only through finite bonds that we can seize our lives and become who we are.

    My aim here is to trace such a secular confession in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. First published in Norwegian and now the subject of wide international acclaim, My Struggle can be read as a contemporary response to Augustine. Ranging over three thousand six hundred pages, the six volumes of My Struggle are framed by Knausgaard’s resolution to tell the truth about his life in detail. Augustine initiated this genre of confessional autobiography with a move that was particularly radical in his religious context. Before Augustine, texts devoted to the lives of holy men (hagiographies) were all written in the third person, with the saint himself withdrawing from the world, leaving someone else to recount his path to transcendence. In contrast, Augustine tells the story of his own life, confessing his doubts, his sexuality, and his sins. Rather than hiding behind the third person, he owns the first person like no one before. We learn about his aging body, his psychological dramas, and even his nocturnal emissions. “In my memory,” Augustine confesses, “there still live images of the past acts that are fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me… in sleep they not only are pleasurable but even elicit consent and are very like the act itself” (Augustine 1963: 10: 30).

    To expose himself in such detail may seem to be risky for an aspiring theological authority, but for Augustine it is part of a strategy. He exhibits his finite life to inspire a sense of how shameful and inadequate it is by comparison to the eternity of God. This is what Augustine calls “making truth” (veritatem facere). To make truth is not only to tell the truth—to confess what one has done—but also to make truth come into being in oneself by relinquishing the sinful attachment to life in this world and instead turn toward God.

    Yet Augustine’s vivid account of the life he is supposed to leave behind also opens the chance for a secular inheritance of his work, where making truth is not a matter of devoting oneself to God but of remaining faithful to a finite life. The great French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to take up this possibility (in his own epochal Confessions from 1769) but Knausgaard pushes it further. Unlike Rousseau, Knausgaard does not claim to be exceptional and he does not hold out the promise of a timeless presence. He is the subject of an ordinary life that will irrevocably end and yet he devotes more attention to its minute details than would have been thinkable for either Augustine or Rousseau. The one obligation he recognizes as the writer of My Struggle is to be true to this life.

    Thus, Knausgaard places himself under the obligation to account for his life as it is actually lived, only writing about things he has experienced while confessing to how he experienced them—no matter how quotidian, painful, or intimate the details may be. As readers, we get to follow the narrator and protagonist Karl Ove (avowedly identical to the author) in the midst of everyday life. At the time of writing My Struggle, he is in his early forties, absorbed and overwhelmed by being married with three young children. While this domestic life keeps getting in the way of his writing, he makes it a centerpiece of the story itself. We spend many pages going grocery shopping, pushing baby prams in the city, and attending to daily exchanges with his children. All is rendered with a fidelity to everyday life that neither idealizes nor deprecates the experiences in question. We become attuned to the weight of waking up too early while trying to meet the demands of family life, the sinking feeling of facing an apartment in chaotic disorder, and the numbness that follows from an endless array of tasks. Yet the same attunement also yields the radiant moments of everyday life. Precisely because Knausgaard perseveres in exploring his mundane existence, he loosens the hold of habit and makes us see the world anew.

    The same holds for when Knausgaard shifts focus from his present life and descends into his past, excavating the world of being twenty-five, or eighteen, or twelve, or seven. His achievement is not simply an act of remembering but of reliving: inhabiting the way the world was given at a time, letting the constraints and the promises, the mistakes and the fortunes, reverberate with the same force they had when first experienced. The impact of falling in love at the age of seven, or despairing over the future at the age of twelve, is here revived with the same depth as the pain of losing a parent or the bliss of having a child in adult life.

    As a result, Knausgaard enables the reader to turn back to her own life with a more profound attention and concern. This effect is one described not only by prominent critics but also by the large number of general readers who have been captivated by Knausgaard’s work. When My Struggle was released in Norway (selling more than half a million copies in a country of less than five million people), readers testified to how Knausgaard—in opening up his life through writing—had opened their own lives to them. The same testimony can be found among many of his readers in the US and elsewhere. The transformative effect of Knausgaard’s writing does not necessarily depend on sharing his cultural background or personal circumstances. You are a potential addressee of his work by virtue of being a time-bound, practically committed agent, who can be moved to explore and deepen the commitment to the life you are leading. Knausgaard’s writing can give you new access to your own life not necessarily because you identify with his experiences but because My Struggle exemplifies a devotion to life as it is lived—a devotion that you can take up and practice in relation to your own existence.

    The key here is the sustained act of attention that characterizes Knausgaard’s writing. When he dedicates twenty pages to exchanges over breakfast with his daughters on a rainy Wednesday morning—or seeks to pry open every sensation and emotion that resonated in his twelve-year old self on the way home from swim practice one particular winter night—he is not simply imposing his life on us. He is teaching us (and himself) how we can remember what we tend to forget. By describing the quotidian in painstaking detail, he opens our eyes to how much is going on even during days when nothing seems to happen. And by resuscitating his former selves, he sensitizes us to all the vanished moments that remain inscribed in us—triggering memories that can open painful wounds but also bring you back to life.

    The appeal of Knausgaard’s writing, then, is not that it forces you to see his life with your eyes. Rather, his writing enables you to see your life with his eyes—with the level of attention he bestows on a life. Thereby, you can come to recognize the myriad ways in which you are indeed alive, even when you seem dead to yourself or lost in the mundane events of everyday existence. As you take care of the tasks at hand, what you see bears the weight of your love and your evasions, the history of who you have been and may turn out to be. Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others that have made you who you are. There are things you cannot leave behind or wish you could retrieve. And there is hope you cannot extinguish—whether buried or insistent, broken or confident, the one never excluding the other.

    Such a distended life is what Knausgaard’s prose invites you to recognize as your own. Stretching toward the past and straining toward the future, an entire world emerges through you. You did not make this world, you were made by it, and now you sustain it. This is your life. There is nothing else. But what there is—and what you do—binds you to the world in ways that are deeper than you can ever disentangle.

    The struggle, then, is how to make this life your own. That is the starting point for Knausgaard’s project. When My Struggle begins, he finds himself detached from the life he is living. He endures what he has to do, but he has withdrawn from being truly involved in what happens. At a remove from his existence, he feels as though he has nothing to lose and by the same token his life appears to be meaningless. “The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it,” he writes. “So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle” (Knausgaard 2014: 67).

    The struggle to make life his own is not a quest to become independent or self-sufficient. His life is not his own in the sense that he would be able spontaneously to decide who he is or what he is going to do. On the contrary, there is a keen awareness in Knausgaard of how we belong to a world we did not create and depend on others who exceed our control. To own your life is not to free yourself from this dependence. Rather, your existence is inseparable from the ways you are engaged in and committed to being in the world. For example, you may find yourself (as Knausgaard does at the beginning of My Struggle) married with children and overcome by a sense that you cannot make it work. You are trying to succeed—trying really to be there for your loved ones—but keep failing and feel yourself disintegrating in the process.

    To disown your life in this situation is to settle for mere perseverance, going through the motions while numbing yourself and dreaming of being somewhere else. Knausgaard is attuned to this temptation and he himself repeatedly disowns his life. Yet the struggle he engages in through his writing is to own his life. He actively seeks to identify himself with what he is doing and acknowledge what he loves. This is an ongoing struggle. To own what you do and what you love is to put yourself at stake, to make your life depend on the fate of your commitments. To own your life is not to own what you love (it is not your possession) but to own that you love what you love. This is the condition for anything to matter to you—for anything to have meaning—but it also puts your life at risk. If you own what you do, you are bound to be deeply affected by how it is received. Precisely because you are engaged in a meaningful activity—precisely because you are doing something that matters to you—you are susceptible to the experience of failure. Likewise, if you own that you love what you love, you make yourself vulnerable to what happens. Your dreams may come true or your hopes may be shattered. You now have something that matters to you, but by the same token you have something to lose.

    To own your life, then, is not to have it as your sovereign property. On the contrary, to own your life is to expose yourself. Only someone who owns his life—only someone who makes his life depend on what he does and what he loves—can have the experience of it being taken away from him.

    Whence the temptation to disown your life: to bury your hopes before they fail to come true, to withdraw your love before it makes you suffer. These are paths of detachment, where you can come to seek protection from the pain of failure or loss by divesting yourself in advance. There are certainly situations where such strategies make sense and some degree of detachment is necessary to endure in our lives—otherwise anything could break us. But as a principle detachment is a dead end: it can lead to nothing but the destitution of meaning or a nihilistic rejection of the world.

    The animating principle of Knausgaard’s writing is rather one of attachment, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The credo of his work, I will argue, is a phrase that recurs throughout the six volumes of My Struggle and is difficult to translate. “Det gjelder å feste blikket,” Knausgaard writes in Norwegian. The phrase could be rendered as “one must focus the gaze” or “what matters is to focus the gaze.” But the Norwegian verb that we would then translate as to focus (“å feste”) literally means to attach and the phrase is clearly a personal injunction rather than a simple statement. So a better translation would be: attach yourself to what you see, focus your gaze by attaching yourself to what you see. This is the imperative of My Struggle.

    The imperative can be understood in three different senses. These senses are intertwined, but it is useful to distinguish them to see different aspects of Knausgaard’s writing. The first sense of the imperative is to focus your gaze on the life you are actually living. This explains why Knausgaard can devote more pages to apparently trivial activities than to transformative life events. If he is going to focus his gaze on the life he is actually living, he cannot just capture the moments of trauma or bliss that glow in the dark (birth, death, love, mourning); he must also capture the stretches of time out of which they emerge and the things he does on days he would not remember: setting the table, cleaning up the house, flipping through books, taking a walk on a gray afternoon, staring out the window. Knausgaard has an extraordinary ability to open up and dilate such moments, making even dull experiences come alive with the sensory, perceptual, and reflective richness of being in the world.

    Yet it is not enough to focus your gaze on what you do, you must also acknowledge the ways in which you are attached to what you see. This is the second sense of the imperative. Accordingly, Knausgaard seeks to render the waves of boredom and elation, ambition and frustration, intense joy and absentminded occupation, which form the rhythms of his days. Above all, he tries to focus his gaze on what means the most to him. Here too it is a matter of acknowledging how he is attached to what he sees, even at the cost of confessing painful ambivalence. We learn of the absorbing love affair that brought him and his wife together but also of the fears, the petty grievances, the daily resentments, and the storming conflicts that almost tear them apart. In focusing his gaze on his children, there can be an exceptional tenderness in attending to their unique personalities and the daily dramas of their vulnerable, growing selves. But there are also detailed, excruciating accounts of how he loses sight of who they are and what they need—of parental love clouded by anger, exhaustion, or resignation.

    Knausgaard’s writing could here be described as a form of mindfulness, but one must then separate mindfulness from Buddhist meditation, with which it is often associated. According to Buddhism, you should focus your inner gaze and attend to your attachments with the aim of detaching yourself from the struggles they entail. By paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that arise in your consciousness, you are supposed to learn to disengage from them—to not identify with what you think and feel. The goal is to attain a state of pure consciousness, where there is perfect serenity because you have ceased to care. Thus, while certain meditation techniques can be adapted for the secular purpose of reengaging with the world—helping you recover from negative experiences or simply increasing your concentration and energy—the religious aim of Buddhism is quite different. On a secular understanding, meditative detachment is a relative and temporary means employed for the sake of being able to better engage the struggles that follow from being attached to life. In Buddhism, on the contrary, absolute detachment is an end in itself. Since all attachments entail suffering, only absolute detachment can bring about the elimination of suffering that Buddhism holds out as your salvation. What ultimately matters is not who you are or what you do, what ultimately matters is that you attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter—so that you can rest in peace.

    The aim of Knausgaard’s mindfulness is the opposite. By attending to the struggles that emerge from his attachments, he seeks to identify more deeply with them: to become more attached to the life he is living. This is the third sense of his imperative. You must attach yourself to what you see—even at the cost of suffering—because without attachment there is no meaning: nothing to care for and no one who binds you to the world. To counter such nihilism is the animating ambition of Knausgaard’s secular confession. “Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life,” he writes at the end of the second volume. And in the final, sixth volume he presses home the stakes of being able to focus your gaze, attaching yourself to what you see:

    I know what it means to see something without attaching yourself to it. Everything is there, houses, trees, cars, people, sky, earth, but something is missing nonetheless, because it does not mean anything that they are there. They could just as well be something else, or nothing at all. It is the meaningless world which appears like that. It is possible to live in the meaningless world too, it is just a matter of enduring, and that one will do if one must. The world can be beautiful… but it does not make any difference to you, it does not affect you. You have not attached yourself to what you see, you do not belong to the world and can, if push comes to shove, just as well leave it. (Knausgaard 2012: 365)

    This is the position of someone who has disowned his life. What renders the world meaningless—or meaningful—is not an objective feature of what there is but proceeds from the degree of your attachment to what you see. This does not imply that you are free to decide the meaning of the world. But it does entail that any meaningful engagement depends on your attachment to others and to being in the world. Your capacity to attach is not simply up to you—it can be enabled or disabled by what happens to you—but whether and how you attach makes all the difference in the world.

    The difficulty of owning such a life is an integral part of Knausgaard’s writing. He struggles with the temptation to disown his life and dwells on the many ways in which we may come to give up on our existence. The quotidian way is the slow death of a gradually increasing indifference, but prominent in his work is also the reckless renunciation of obligation at the depths of alcoholism, the short-circuiting of emotion at the heart of depression, or the ultimate self-destruction of suicide. Knausgaard explores these forms of disowning one’s life without recurring either to moralizing judgment or to condemnation. Yet, in and through these explorations, he recalls us to the fact that it is only by owning our lives—as essentially being in the world—that we have a chance at a meaningful existence. This is the secular conversion at work in Knausgaard’s confessions. By focusing his gaze on his life and attaching himself to what he sees, he turns us around: not toward eternity but toward our finite lives as the site where everything is at stake. Like all conversions, this is not one that can be achieved once and for all: it is a continuous struggle to own our lives. But unlike in a religious conversion, the goal is not for the struggle to come to an end. Rather, to own our lives is to acknowledge that struggle belongs to the very life we want to lead. If we want our lives to matter, we want to have something that we can lose.

    Nevertheless, Knausgaard himself is liable to devalue his life from a religious perspective. At one point in the final volume, he is reading the Church Fathers (of whom Augustine is the most prominent) and comes to feel that his own experiences are impoverished in contrast to their mystical ecstasies. Knausgaard now maintains that his own search for meaning is pathetic compared to “the devotion of the mystics” (Knausgaard 2012: 610) and condemns himself as “one of the world’s many soulless and banal human beings” (611). This is in line with the sense of shame Augustine hoped to inspire. From a religious point of view, a finite life without redemption is indeed soulless and banal. This view is inherited even by many who do not have religious faith—regarding their lives as futile because they lack a sense of the eternal—and Knausgaard is tempted by it in a number of the essayistic reflections that pervade My Struggle. He repeatedly argues that art aspires to retrieve a sense of the holy, while lamenting that we can no longer attain it. “The longing and melancholia that Romantic art expresses is a longing for this,” he writes with reference to a religious sense of the holy, “and a mourning of its loss. At least that is how I interpret my own attraction to the Romantic in art” (610). On this conception, art would strive to open a world that is “holy” in the sense of being untouched by time and finitude, a world where everything is present in itself, but which we cannot enter because we are “fallen”: incapable of living in “the indifference of the divine” and “the all extinguishing light of the good” (409).

    Since these religious ideas are so familiar—and supposedly profound—they are likely to be taken as a guide to Knausgaard’s work. Yet that would be a mistake. Throughout My Struggle (and particularly in the final volume) there are numerous statements or small essays that appear to present the philosophy of the book. Many of them are in conflict with one another or internally contradictory and to take them at face value would be to miss almost everything that is important in them. Knausgaard is a tremendous essayist, but his particular talent is to allow his essays to emerge as part of the narrative. The theoretical reflections exist on the same plane as the practical actions; they reflect how someone thinks and feels at a particular time rather than expressing the perspective of someone who is outside the narrative and in control of its meaning.

    To understand the philosophical poetics of My Struggle, then, we must attend to what happens in the narrative alongside the many and often contradictory statements of intent. The view that our secular lives are soulless and banal—that we need to be saved from our time bound existence—belongs to the tendency to disown his life. While this tendency persists throughout My Struggle, the very writing of the book goes in the opposite direction. Far from regarding his life as soulless or banal, the writer of My Struggle depends on the faith that there is enormous significance and depth in the experiences of a finite life, one worthy of being explored down to the most subtle nuances and emotional reverberations. The aim is to attach himself more deeply to his life, rather than transcend it. From this perspective, it is Augustine’s mystical ecstasies that are soulless and banal, since they seek to leave the world behind in favor of an eternal presence where nothing happens. What is profound in Augustine is not the ascent to heaven but the descent into time and memory. It is the latter, descending movement that Knausgaard follows in his practice as a writer.

    The key issue here is time. By using the first person like no one before, Augustine dramatizes what it means to be torn apart by time. Even his abstract philosophical speculations in the Confessions are marked by his concrete existence as he is longing and languishing, seized by hope or fear, elated by an insight or frustrated by an impasse. Accordingly, when Augustine pursues his philosophical analysis of time-consciousness in the Confessions, he also makes his reader feel how the problem of time is an intimate, personal concern. The investigation of time must itself be carried out in time and Augustine foregrounds the effort to articulate his own arguments, as an ongoing line of thought that at any moment may be broken. Likewise, when Augustine analyzes the work of memory, he does so by descending into “the caves and caverns” of his own memory (Augustine 1963: 10: 17), exposing the ways in which the integrity of his self is breached by a past he cannot fully recover. Moreover, as Augustine is writing his Confessions, he is still vulnerable to change and this drama becomes a part of the book itself. Intensifying the sense of his own vanishing presence, Augustine even highlights the fleeting time in which he composes his text: “Consider what I am now, at this moment [in ipso tempore], as I set down my confessions” (10: 3).

    The same turn toward his own passing presence is pursued by Knausgaard in My Struggle. “Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m.,” we read early on in the first volume, as he records the night when he begins to work on the book (Knausgaard 2013: 25). A couple of pages later we learn that six days have passed for Knausgaard at the time of writing, as we find him at his desk again: “It is now a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning. It is March 4, 2008. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling, listening to the Swedish band Dungen while thinking about what I have written and where it is leading” (28). These explicit marks of time recur throughout My Struggle, returning with a particular frequency in the final volume, when he is trying to complete the book. “I am sitting all alone as I am writing this. It is June 12, 2011, the time is 06:17 a.m., in the room above me the children are asleep, at the other end of the house Linda is asleep, outside the window, a few yards out in the garden, angular sunrays descend on the apple tree. The foliage is filled with light and shadow” (Knausgaard 2012: 227).

    These apparently simple observations encapsulate the poetics of My Struggle. Knausgaard’s writing develops a careful attention to the time and place where he finds himself. The fundamental form of such attention is the turn toward what is happening at this very moment—trying to capture life as it unfolds right now. The aim is to slow down the experience of temporality, to dilate moments of time and linger in their qualities. This movement does not yield a stable presence but, on the contrary, a stronger sense of how the present moment is ceasing to be and has to be held in memory, as it opens onto a future that exceeds it. By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily intertwined with a sense of finitude. It is because his life is finite that he cannot take it for granted and his desire to linger in a moment is animated by the awareness that it is passing away. Indeed, the sense of transience is an essential part of the radiance of the moment itself. Seeing the world anew is inseparable from the sense that the world you see anew is finite. It has not always been, it will not always be, and therefore it must be seized before it vanishes.

    Knausgaard’s great predecessor here is the modern writer who explored the experience of time more deeply than any other: Marcel Proust. Knausgaard recalls that he not only read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “but virtually imbibed it” (Knausgaard 2013: 29) and My Struggle bears the imprint of many passages from Proust. The influence is visible already in the basic form of the project. In Search of Lost Time devotes seven volumes, stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. My Struggle apparently follows the same model, devoting six volumes, also stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. While Knausgaard transforms the Proustian project in an important way—to which I will return—it is illuminating to dwell on what he learns from Proust. The protagonist Marcel is himself in the process of learning throughout In Search of Lost Time. From early childhood, he wants to become a writer, but he is plagued by doubts about his talent and not until the end does he discover what the subject of his book should be, namely, his own life. Rather than a transcendent topic of writing, which has always left Marcel’s imagination blank, it is “this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy” (Proust 2003: 208) that he comes to see as the basis for his book. “The greatness of true art,” he argues, “lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize…this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life” (204).

    Accordingly, Marcel emphasizes that his work will be devoted to “the thing that ought to be most precious to us,” namely, “our true life, our reality as we have felt it” (459). This is why he can dwell on the experience of falling asleep for more than thirty pages, or seek to distill every nuance of an erotic touch, a flickering memory, an awakening sensation. Through the power of his prose, he wants to sharpen our perception and refine our senses. The aim is not to transport us to another life, but to make us genuinely experience the life we are already living. And as Marcel understands, to achieve this aim we must transform our relation to time. If habit tends to deaden and dull our experience, it is because it reduces the impact of time on our senses. Even though every day is different and there is no guarantee that there will be another one, habit makes us feel as though our life has been all the same and will continue indefinitely. Thus, when we get used to seeing something we love, we tend no longer to notice its details or marvel at its existence. Likewise, when we get used to living with someone we love, we run the risk of taking him or her for granted and no longer appreciating his or her unique qualities.

    The key to breaking habit, then, is to recall that we can lose what we love. Far from devaluing life, the dimension of loss is part of what makes it emerge as valuable. We may know that we are going to die, but the role of art is to make us feel what that means and thereby intensify our attachment to life. Accordingly, when Marcel comes to narrate his own life, he is all the more attentive to the impact and nuance of his past experiences. Even many events that were unremarkable or unhappy return with a luminous quality in his memory, since they appear as irreplaceable in the light of loss. The value of a past experience may thus be enhanced when it is infused with the pathos of being lost, just as the value of a current experience may be enhanced by the sense that it will be lost.

    Yet Marcel pursues his insight only in relation to a distant past and not in relation to his ongoing life as he is writing. In Search of Lost Time ends with the revelation that leads Marcel to become an author and to write the book we have been reading. Nevertheless, we never learn under what circumstances Marcel is writing the seven volumes, how much time it takes, and what he is struggling with as he is trying to complete the book. To be clear, In Search of Lost Time is not Proust’s autobiography. It does not tell the story of Proust’s life but is the autobiography of the fictional character Marcel, who within the frame of the novel writes the story of his life. We know that Proust worked on In Search of Lost Time for more than thirteen years and was unable to finish the book before his death, struggling to enter revisions in the galley proofs up until the end. Within the frame of the novel, however, we do not get to witness an analogous struggle on the part of Marcel as the supposed author of the pages we are reading. Indeed, we have no sense of what his daily life is like as he is writing, or what happens to him during the years it takes to compose his autobiography. All his efforts are devoted to giving meaning and significance to his past, not to his ongoing life.

    This is the structure that Knausgaard transforms. Within the frame of My Struggle, the current life of the narrator Karl Ove is itself part of the story and we are even told exactly how long it takes for him to write the six volumes. He begins to work on the first volume at 11:43 p.m. on February 27, 2008, and he completes the last volume at 07:07 a.m. on September 2, 2011. To be sure, the beginning and end of the narration cannot be dated with such complete precision, but what is important is the ambition to situate his writing as part of an ongoing life. We learn in detail about how his work on the book is interrupted by child care, practical worries, relationship troubles, and personal anxiety. All of these things belong to the subject matter of the book itself. The struggle is not only to recover the past, but also to grasp hold of and engage with the life that continues.

    Knausgaard thereby reveals a difficulty that Proust tends to conceal. If you only focus on the distant past (as Marcel does) it is relatively easy to gain a new appreciation of your life, since you can transform the past into an object of contemplation that no longer makes any direct demands on your engagement. You can dwell on details you previously overlooked, absorb the impact of events you did not understand at the time, and even feel a surge of nostalgia for things you did not enjoy when you first experienced them. Indeed, the sense that all these things are irrevocably gone can make them appear more precious than they actually were. Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived. It is telling that In Search of Lost Time ends with Marcel withdrawing from the world to write his book. His life is effectively over and the only thing that remains for him is to tell his story. Of course, Marcel still has to live, but we are supposed to forget about this in favor of an immersion in the past. Thus, the few times we catch a glimpse of him in the act of narration, it is the image of someone who has reduced his engagements to a minimum and apparently places no value on his current life. “I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness” (Proust 2002: 371).

    In contrast, the structure of My Struggle looks like a deliberate inversion of the one that shapes In Search of Lost Time. While Marcel’s book ends with him becoming an author through the decision to write the story of his life, Karl Ove’s book begins with him already being an author who decides to write the story of his life and ends with the declaration that he is no longer an author after the completion of his book. “I will enjoy, really enjoy, the thought that I am no longer an author,” are the last words of My Struggle (Knausgaard 2012: 1116), followed by a separate page with two sole sentences that address his wife and children: “For Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John. I love you” (1117). Where Marcel ends by retreating from life into literature, Karl Ove ends by retreating from literature and turning toward life. This is not a strict opposition, since Marcel retreats into literature to understand and appreciate life, while literature is an essential part of Karl Ove’s ability to understand and appreciate life. Nevertheless, the way he transforms the ending of In Search of Lost Time indicates the challenge Karl Ove poses to himself. The retreat into writing is supposed to lead back into his actual life and not out of it. Indeed, he explicitly wants to change and become a better person in his daily existence. In addition to recovering the past, his task in My Struggle is to keep faith with what he is seeing and living now—not years later when he is looking back on it.

    By the same token, he has to confront the difficulty of appreciating his life and sustaining his deepest attachments. Loving his wife and children is not something that can be accomplished once and for all; it is an act of devotion that has to be sustained every day and one that can always fail, with joy giving way to tedium, loving care compromised by indifference or frustration, and the sense of wonder lost in deadening habit. The aim of My Struggle is not to purify one from the other, but to confront the daily, interminable battle between the two. This is why we find the narrator in the midst of life, rather than at a remove from life as in the case of Marcel. Karl Ove is never at rest and even when he retreats to the writing desk he is caught up in the practical engagements of everyday life. The engagements may be painful or passionate, tedious or elevating, but the point is to make them all glow in their particularity.

    Thus, at different intervals in telling the story of his life, Karl Ove transitions from recounting the past to depicting himself at the time of writing. Within the space of a sentence, we can move from a young Karl Ove in action to his older self recollecting the events several decades later. The first time this happens is early in the first volume, when we learn about his current life situation on the evening in February when he begins to work on the book. After an immersive description of one night when he was eight years old, Knausgaard looks up from his desk and speaks to us in ipso tempore—at the very moment of writing:

    As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.

    What has engraved itself in my face?

    Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m. I who am writing, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and I am accordingly, at this moment, 39 years old. I have three children, Vanja, Heidi, and John, and I am married for the second time, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö, where we have now lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window. (Knausgaard 2013: 25-26)

    This is not only the night when he begins to write the book; it also marks the degree zero of his project. The man who looks at himself here is someone who can barely recognize himself. He has withdrawn from the world, but by the same token he has disowned his life and lost hold of himself. The writing of My Struggle is an attempt to reverse this process, to turn him back toward his own life. He who never says what he really thinks and really means will now do so for thousands of pages. And he who does not want anyone to see him, who does not want anyone to get close to him, will now expose himself and make his life visible for anyone to see. This is not to say that he has a hidden kernel of identity that is independent of others and ready to be revealed at will. On the contrary, the difficulty of owning his life is that he is inseparable from the way he is acting in the world. Even withdrawing from others is a form of being with them and seeking to leave the world behind is itself a way of being in it. To own his life is to acknowledge this dependence, to recognize—for better and for worse—that he is attached to what he sees.

    The project of owning his life, then, begins with a literal self-reflection. He sees his face in the dark window and has to grapple with what has happened to him. In a way, all of My Struggle can be seen as an attempt to answer the question he asks here: “What has engraved itself in my face?” He descends into the past to recover his life, but also to be able to engage the present and the future.

    Consequently, he has to confront what Proust calls “embodied time” (temps incorporé). Embodied time designates how we carry the past with us, even when we are not aware of it or in control of how it affects us. This embodied time is for Proust the very condition of writing an autobiography. Because the past is inscribed in our bodies, we have the chance of reconnecting to our former selves, recalling not only what we did but also how it felt and thereby retrieving a genuine sense of our lives. For the same reason, however, our connection to the past is tenuous. We may never gain access to many of the experiences that are stored in us and—even when we do—the meaning of the past is never given in itself but refracted through our current sense of self and our projections of the future. Moreover, if our memories are embodied it means that they can be damaged or effaced by what happens to the body. The duration of the past is not secured by an immaterial soul, but depends on the retention of time in a frail and material body.

    Thus, when Marcel discovers the importance of embodied time, he is haunted by an awareness of all the factors that may eradicate the memories that are retained in his body. “I felt the present object of my thought very clearly within myself… but also that, along with my body, it might be annihilated at any moment” (Proust 2003: 345-46). The discovery of embodied time inspires him to write In Search of Lost Time, but it also marks the precariousness of his project. At the end of the last volume, on the verge of beginning to write, Marcel worries about how brain damage or various accidents may prevent him from composing his autobiography. And indeed, before starting to work on his book, Marcel falls in a staircase and suffers from a memory loss that heightens his anxiety over not being able to write. “I asked myself not only ‘Is there still enough time?’ but also ‘Am I still in a sufficiently fit condition?’” (345). In pursuing the implications of embodied time, Marcel is thus finally led to the dead body, which underlines the finitude of the lived time to which he is devoted. “After death,” he writes on one of the last pages, “Time leaves the body, and the memories—so indifferent, so pale now—are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them” (357).

    While the problem of the dead body only appears at the end of Proust’s novel, it is foregrounded from the beginning of My Struggle. Like Proust, Knausgaard wants to evoke the depths of time in our lives; how we go far beyond our physical location in space by bearing the past with us and projecting ourselves into a future. It is this distention of time that allows us to have a history and a lived experience. Yet, in Knausgaard there is a strong parallel awareness of how the dimension of lived time—with its hopes and fears, hidden riches and emotional upheavals—depends on a material body that will remain after the distended life has expired.

    Thus, with a remarkable incision, the first sentences in the first volume of My Struggle force us to witness the very transition from a living to a dead body:

    For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action ceases of its own accord and the blood begins to run toward the lowest point of the body, where it gathers in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain… The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to spread through the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they tried only a few hours earlier they would have met with immediate resistance, but now everything around them is still, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity for which its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, one may imagine, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside. 

    The moment life departs the body, the body belongs to the dead. Lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of the nonliving. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered in the ground or cremated in the oven. (Knausgaard 2013: 3-4)

    For a novel that is so devoted to the first-person perspective, it is striking to begin with a view of life that only can be given from a third-person perspective. No one can experience the moment of death that Knausgaard describes. We can infer it when we observe another body at the moment of death, but when it happens to ourselves we are already gone. And yet we belong to this body that is not under our command. We are altogether dependent on our body—cannot exist without it—but our body is not dependent on us. After we are gone, it can remain as an object in the world, indifferent to our absence. Presumably, this is why the dead body is so uncanny and tends to be hidden away. The dead body reminds us that we are not only in the world but also of the world, made of materials that will degrade and decompose.

    The materialist reminder runs throughout My Struggle. Specifically, Knausgaard employs a bifocal vision, where every existential phenomenon is seen both in its own right and as dependent on a physiological machinery. The paradigmatic example is the heart, which is the major and apparently conventional metaphor in My Struggle. The heart in Knausgaard is explicitly a metaphor for the living principle of his existence, expressed most forcefully in the intuitive experience of love. “The heart is never mistaken,” is the phrase he employs repeatedly, to explain his life changing decisions. The heart, then, designates his deepest and most intimate sense of self. At the same time, the heart is treated not metaphorically but literally. As in the opening paragraph quoted above, Knausgaard repeatedly lays bare the heart as a physical mechanism that is utterly indifferent to his sense of self. The heart beats and then it stops beating, whether he wills it or not. The dissection of his heart becomes not only an intimate confession but also an exploration of his own biological-material constitution, as though he were opening his heart in both a romantic and a chirurgical sense.

    Knausgaard thus pushes the notion of embodied time to a stark conclusion. Looking at pictures of himself as an infant, he asks:

    Is this creature [his infant self] the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day—in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system—be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in the morgue. Still known as Karl Ove. (Knausgaard 2015: 8).

    Both the tenuous connections and the ultimate fragility of embodied time are here underscored, as he contemplates the radical changes of his body across a lifetime. In composing his autobiography, Karl Ove has to reckon with physical decomposition and is haunted by the absolute termination of his life that will take place when his body is transformed into a corpse. Alongside the existential commitment to his first-person perspective, there is an equally strong third-person perspective, where his life runs from the newborn child to the dead body in the morgue.

    The key to Knausgaard’s writing is that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but interdependent. Knausgaard persistently recalls us to the automatic functions of our bodies, the decaying matter that we are made of, and the geological time that dwarfs the span of our existence. Yet this materialist perspective does not serve to diminish the importance of our lives. The fact that the duration of your existence is but a speck on the scale of geological time does not mean that it is insignificant. Likewise, the fact that your first-person perspective—the unique experience of your life—depends on a set of physical properties does not mean that it is an illusion. It only means that your life is finite.

    Such finitude does not devalue your life, but is an essential part of why it can matter and take on significance, against the backdrop of its possible dissolution. “Death,” Knausgaard writes in the final volume, “is the background against which life appears. If death had not existed, we would not have known what life is” (Knausgaard 2012: 596). Death is the background against which life can light up as something cherished and irreplaceable, but it is also the background that can extinguish all light. “Death makes life meaningless, because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious” (Knausgaard 2014: 98).

    Death is here understood as an existential category but it also opens onto the organic death of the body. Indeed, to confront the corpse—in its material existence—as the fate of everyone we love is a challenge Knausgaard repeatedly poses to himself and his reader. As we have seen, the first volume of My Struggle begins by depicting the moment of death in bacterial detail and the final paragraph of the same volume returns to the corpse, as Karl Ove visits the morgue to see the body of his deceased father one last time:

    Now I saw his lifeless state. That there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I had always regarded as the most important dignity in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. (Knausgaard 2013: 441)

    This is a strict materialist view of death. A body has stopped breathing and thereby ceased to function as a living being, instead becoming an object among other objects in the world. “Dad was no longer breathing,” we read a bit earlier. “That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa” (350). To see the living body thus reduced to its dead counterpart is to see that nature is indifferent to our interests and desires, leaving the body to wither away when we can no longer draw on the world to sustain ourselves. “He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world” (350). This ability to interact with the world—and project yourself into a future—is precisely what is lost in death. No longer poaching the air but simply subject to its physical pressure, the individual body decomposes and is incorporated into a cycle of matter in transformation.

    There are two traditional ways of addressing this material death and the anxiety it may provoke. The first is to argue that we have an immortal soul that is separate from the decomposing matter of our bodies. Even though our bodies perish, we do not really die but ascend to a higher existence, independent of any body or endowed with an incorruptible body. The second strategy is to argue that we are continuous with matter and therefore have no reason to fear death. Because the matter of our bodies is transformed into something else, nothing substantial is actually lost but only takes on another form. This is, for example, the Stoic view of death. “Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need,” as the Roman Stoic Epictetus holds in an influential argument (Epictetus 1995: 215).

    While these two perspectives are apparently opposed, they are united in their denial that death entails the loss of a life we should try to hold onto. In the first case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of an immortal soul. In the second case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of the continuation of matter. Both perspectives thus deny the tragedy of death. Only a secular faith—which remains committed to a life that irrevocably is lost in death—can counter these two forms of denial. Indeed, only a secular faith can account for why death is a tragic loss at all. The sense of tragic loss depends on keeping faith in the irreplaceable value of a life that is gone forever. Nature does not care whether we live or die, but that makes it all the more imperative that we care and remember what has been taken away.

    Precisely in and through a materialist vision of death, Knausgaard’s writing is devoted to secular faith. In forcing us to look at the dead body, he makes vivid what separates the dead from the living. For the living, time is distended: we recall a past and project ourselves into a future. This is the time of our lives, the time that Knausgaard is dedicated to exploring. The dead no longer see anything or feel anything, no longer recall a past and project a future. Our fidelity to the person who has died requires that we acknowledge this absolute loss of life. When faced with a dead body, we can remember that this body belonged to someone who lost everything in death—someone who is absolutely gone—and thereby we remain faithful to the memory of a person who is irreplaceable. Moreover, we can anticipate our own death—run ahead into the risk of losing everything—and thereby bring our own finite life into focus.

    The remarkable thing with Knausgaard’s writing is how such mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The fear of death is not something that should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be.

    Likewise, being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world.

    Even in the most serene moments of bliss, then, Karl Ove is aware of how the precious existence of those he loves is bound to their precarious and limited physical conditions:

          I looked at Linda, she sat with her head against the seat, with her eyes closed. Vanja’s face was covered by hair, she lay like a tussock in her lap.

          I leaned forward a little and looked at Heidi, who gazed back at me uninterestedly.

          I loved them. They were my crew.

          My family.

          As pure biomass it was not very remarkable. Heidi weighed perhaps ten kilos, Vanja perhaps twelve, and if one added my and Linda’s weight we reached perhaps one hundred ninety kilos. That was considerably less than the weight of a horse, I would think, and about as much as a well-built male gorilla. If we lay close together our physical range was not much to brag about either, any given sea lion would be more voluminous. However, regarding what cannot be measured, which is the only important thing when it comes to families, regarding thoughts, dreams and emotions, the inner life, this group was explosive. Dispersed over time, which is the relevant dimension for understanding a family, it would cover an almost infinite surface. I once met my grandmother’s mother, which meant that Vanja and Heidi belonged to the fifth generation, and fate permitting they could in turn experience three generations. Thus, our little heap of meat covered eight generations, or two hundred years, with all that entails of shifting cultural and social conditions, not to mention how many people it included. A whole little world was being transported at full speed along the highway on this late spring afternoon…. (Knausgaard 2012: 916-17)

    The gentle happiness here is all the more radiant because of the bifocal vision. On the one hand: the tender evocation of an intimate love, where each member of the family is seen as an origin of the world, with “thoughts, dreams, and emotions” that distend beyond anything that can be measured. On the other hand: the reminder that this entire world depends on a limited “biomass” with a determinate weight and height, here even described as a “heap of meat” that is being “transported” along the highway. Remarkably, the latter perspective does not serve to denigrate the value of the lives that are woven together. They can be lost forever if the car meets a fatal accident on the highway, transforming their biomass into a heap of dead meat. Yet this risk is not held out as a morbid fantasy, but as a reminder of how their lives are a treasure that cannot be taken for granted. Anticipating death in the midst of life is a way of focusing his gaze on the ones he loves, attaching himself to what he sees, making their unique existence vivid.

    The love that radiates here is the love of a life that is secular in Augustine’s sense: bound to time, marked by history, dependent on generations that have come before and may come after. Throughout My Struggle, this temporal dimension is shown to hold the key to the passions of our lives. The distention of time marks every moment, but it can be stretched out in different ways and discloses the depths of who we are. Thus, Knausgaard explores the sedimentation and resuscitation of events in an individual body, the crystallization of a moment through memory and anticipation, the texture of time in a love relationship, intervals of pleasure and pain, the dead time of trauma and the elation of bliss.

    These are all forms of embodied time, through which we distend our lives beyond a physical location in space. But they are also bound to a limited body that cannot be left behind. The wager of My Struggle is to hold these two perspectives together. We are spirit but also matter and the former depends on the latter. We can compose our lives—give them form and meaning—but in the end we will disappear in a meaningless process of decomposition. Knausgaard makes us confront such decomposition, while keeping faith in the value of finite existence. He turns us back to our lives to see both form and formlessness, integration and disintegration.

    My Struggle thus moves in the opposite direction from the book whose title it takes over. Knausgaard’s Norwegian title Min Kamp is a direct translation of Mein Kampf, the title of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography. This may seem like a gratuitous provocation, but the choice of title is motivated in the final volume, when Knausgaard devotes more than four hundred pages to Mein Kampf and its context. Knausgaard gives a detailed account of the crisis of the times, as well as the complications of Hitler’s childhood and early adulthood, while showing how Mein Kampf systematically subordinates Hitler’s life story to ideology. The grittiness of everyday life is veiled by euphemism, the complexity of persons reduced to a typology of characters, and everything that is failure or suffering integrated in a narrative of gradual purification. Most importantly, all ambivalence, all doubts and hesitations, are dissolved in a discourse of certainty.

    In a remarkable move, Knausgaard here shows how Hitler excludes a second person mode of address. In Mein Kampf, there is an I, a we, and a they, but there is no you that would allow for an intimate relation. Hitler does not allow himself to be seen in any form of frailty and he does not obligate himself to anyone else in his or her frailty. He merges himself with a strong, idealized we and projects all weakness onto an external they. Hitler’s way of narrating his life is thus bound up with his larger ideological scheme for making sense of the world. In Hitler’s universe, there is a pure, good “we” that is in peril of being corrupted by “them”: the impure and evil others who most prominently are figured as the Jews. To the extent that we are in trouble—to the extent that our lives are unresolved or difficult—it is because of them, because of their corrupting influence. If only they (the evil forces) could be eliminated, we would be saved.

    Nazi ideology is thus another version—a particularly sinister version—of the religious longing for purity. Knausgaard acknowledges and reckons with such longing for purity, but his writing is an active resistance to any temptation of purification. Indeed, My Struggle is devoted to the imperfection that Mein Kampf sets out to erase. Nothing will save us, since irresolution, difficulty, and frailty are an essential part of the lives we care about. And no one can offer us a final salvation, since everyone who enters our lives are themselves finite. To own our lives is to acknowledge this essential finitude, as both the chance of being together and the risk of breaking apart. This is why My Struggle—which apparently is so devoted to the I—ultimately turns out to be dependent on you. In turning toward you, Karl Ove exposes himself in his dependence on a world that is beyond his control. But he also trains you to see and to acknowledge your own dependence and the dependence of others. This recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible life and take better care of each other. But without the recognition of finitude the question of responsibility and care would not even take hold of us. To turn toward you—to focus our gaze on another and attach ourselves to what we see—is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives, not as something that is our property but as a form of existence that is altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning.

     

    Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), and Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (2002). The essay on Knausgaard published here is a part of his next book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.

     

    References

    Augustine. 1912. Confessiones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Augustine. 1963. Confessions, translated by Rex Warner. New York: New American Library.

    Augustine. 1982. Eighty-three Different Questions, translated by David L. Mosher. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

    Augustine. 1992. Sermons 148-183, translated by Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press.

    Epictetus. 1995. The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by Robin Hard. London: Everyman.

    Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2012. Min kamp. Sjette bok. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober.

    Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2013. My Struggle. Book One, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

    Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2014. My Struggle. Book Two, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

    Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2015. My Struggle. Book Three, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

    Proust, Marcel. 1988a. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume III, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

    Proust, Marcel. 1988b. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume IV, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

    Proust, Marcel. 2002. Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin.

    Proust, Marcel. 2003. Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. New York: Penguin.

     

    [1] All citations of Augustine’s Confessions are given by book number and chapter number respectively. I employ Rex Warner’s translation (Augustine 1963), while sometimes modifying it in light of the original Latin (Augustine 1912). In a few places, the cited translations of Proust have also been modified in light of the original French (Proust 1988a and 1988b). All translations from the original Norwegian of volume 6 of Min kamp (Knausgaard 2012) are my own, since this volume has not yet been translated into English.

  • Adrian Nathan West – A Review of Achille Mbembe’s “Critique of Black Reason”

    Adrian Nathan West – A Review of Achille Mbembe’s “Critique of Black Reason”

    by Adrian Nathan West

    Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.

    The question of Blackness, of what it might or ought to mean, lies at the fault line between timeworn notions of race as a biological destiny, rechristened for the resurgent right as “human biodiversity” or “racial realism,” and identity theory in its various permutations. If the first is generally acknowledged to lack scientific fundament, the second’s refusal to dispense entirely with race, coupled with its difficulty in establishing strict criteria as to who may and may not claim a given ethnicity, has provided fodder for advocates of dubious identitarian positions from transracialism to White Lives Matter. Yet the alternative of avowed post-racialism has frequently served as a cover for the diminishment of the historical suffering of marginalized groups or an excuse for the advocacy of policies that work to these groups’ detriment. Amid the snares of these various approaches, is a different thinking of Blackness possible?

    This is the question posed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose impressive body of work has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves in the English-speaking world. Critique of Black Reason, his most accomplished book to date, opens by positing Blackness as a historical conception of a kind of being, neither entirely subject not object, elaborated over the course of three successive phases: first, the “organized despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade,” which transformed black flesh into “real estate,” in the words of a 1705 declaration of the Virginia Assembly, and led to the codification of racial difference following Bacon’s Rebellion in the seventeenth century; second, the birth of black writing, which Mbembe traces from the late eighteenth century, as an examination of blacks’ condition as “beings-taken-by-others” to its culmination in the dismantlement of segregation and apartheid; and third, the confluence of market globalization, economic liberalization, and technological and military innovation in the early twenty-first century (Mbembe 2017, 2-4). In this last, grim episode, the concentration of capital following the saturation of global markets, accompanied by processes of efficiency maximization, has led to the seclusion of the black subject on the irrelevant fringes of society and to a consequent “production of indifference,” or “altruicide,” that helps render this barbarity psychologically cost-efficient for the privileged (Mbembe 2017, 3). “If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” he states, “the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.’ Capital hardly needs them any more to function” (Mbembe 2017, 3; 11). This novel arrangement, according to Mbembe, has given rise to “new imperial practices” that tend toward a universalization of the black condition that he refers to as the “Becoming Black of the world” (Mbembe 2017, 6).

    Mbembe defines race as a system of images tailored to the demands of rapacity that forestalls any encounter with an authentic subject. The briefest glance at the early literature of African exploration, from Jobson to Olfert Dapper, shows the extent to which fantasy superseded reality and public desire for the salacious and hair-raising left little room for ethnographic rigor. These accounts dished up the archetypes of those tropes of sloth, intellectual inferiority, wiliness, and concupiscence that remain in vigor even today and that would provide eventual justification for colonialism and enslavement. “To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and a body of extraction,” Mbembe affirms, and, being constituted far in advance of any earnest investigation of African history, sociology, or folkways, these primitive notions of Black life responded less to enlightened curiosity than to the question of “how to deploy large numbers of laborers within a commercial enterprise that spanned great distances” as a “racial subsidy” to the expanding plantation system (Mbembe 2017, 20).

    The question of Black reason proposed by the book pertains, first of all, to the body of knowledge concerning things and people “of African origin” that came to stand in for primary experience thereof and served as “the reservoir that provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial domination” (Mbembe 2017, 27). Black reason categorized its more or less willfully misunderstood African subjects through a series of exemptions to normalcy that mutated in conformity with the scientific reasoning of successive eras, leaving them morally and juridically illegitimate, unfit for human endeavor, suited only to forced labor. The traces of Black reason, according to Mbembe, persist in the search for Black self-consciousness, the founding gesture of which is the question: “Am I, in truth, what people say I am?” (Mbembe 2017, 28). Against this grappling with the oppressive image of Blackness, Mbembe will propose, in the book’s later chapters, an engagement with tradition for the sake of a “truth of the self no longer outside the self,” with Aimé Césaire, Amos Tutuola, Frantz Fanon, and others as his guides (Mbembe 2017, 29).

    A brief caveat concerning language is in order. Translators from French frequently grapple with the word nègre, and the results are rarely ideal. It remains common in standard French as a term for ghostwriter (nègre) and in the now off-color expression travailler comme un nègre (equivalent to the once-current work like a nigger in English), but when used disparagingly, there is no doubt as to its intent. Mbembe’s title, and his use of nègre throughout the book, are not meant to be provocative, but they do draw on a long tradition of recalcitrant self-assertion embodied in Aimé Césaire’s famous phrase, “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterais,” which has its complement in the reappropriation of the word nigger by H. Rap Brown, Dick Gregory, and others (Césaire, 28). All this is elided in Laurent Dubois’s excellent translation; in his defense, there is no happy alternative.

    For Mbembe, the racialization of consciousness takes root with the legal effort to distinguish the greater rights and privileges owed to European indentured servants with respect to their African slave counterparts in America in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the growth of scientific racism and its subsequent application to African peoples in the heyday of colonialism, which coincided with the “capitulation to racism” in the southern states as described by C. Van Woodward, Blackness was reconstituted as an Außenwelt or “World-outside” in the Schmittian sense: a zone in which enmity was paramount, rapine permissible, and the supposition of reciprocity suspended (Woodward, 67-110). Though the rationalization of scientific racism granted the field an appearance of objectivity, as an ideology racism was never independent of “the logic of profit, the politics of power, and the instinct for corruption” (Mbembe 2017, 62). This is evident from the massive wave of resettlements starting in the 1960s in South Africa, the organized attacks on Black businesses and appropriation of black-owned lands in the United States after the Civil War, and the introduction of foreign land ownership in Haiti under Roosevelt. Whether predicated on Blacks’ irreparable inferiority, in the American case, or on the civilizing mission, in the French, the principle of race, as a “distinct moral classification,” educated the populace in “behaviors aimed at the growth of economic profitability” (Mbembe 2017, 73; 81).

    In the book’s second half, Mbembe turns from racism as such to an eloquent account of the development of Black self-consciousness, which necessarily takes over and diverts the discourse of race:

    The latent tension that has always broadly shaped reflection on Black identity disappears in the gap of race. The tension opposes a universalizing approach, one that proclaims a co-belonging to the human condition, with a particular approach that insists on difference and the dissimilar by emphasizing not originality as such but the principle of repetition (custom) and the values of autonomy […] We rebel not against the idea that Blacks constitute a distinct race but against the prejudice of inferiority attached to the race. The specificity of so-called African culture is not placed in doubt: what is proclaimed is the relativity of cultures in general. In this context, ‘work for the universal’ consists in expanding the Western ratio of the contributions brought by Black ‘values of civilization,’ the ‘specific genius’ of the Black race, for which ‘emotion’ in particular is considered the cornerstone (Mbeme 2017, 90).

    This notion of a peculiar set of Black values has informed the praxis of evocation essential to Pan-Africanist thinkers from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey, whose thought has special importance for Mbembe despite his own universalist principals. While praising the aptitude of what he terms “heretical genius” to promote a self-sustaining understanding of the African condition, Mbembe admits that this understanding itself is a falsification to be transcended (Mbembe 2017, 102).

    For Mbembe, Blackness resides above all in the individual’s inscription in the Black text, his term for the accrual of the collective recollections and reveries of people of African descent, at the core of which lies the memory of the colony. Memory he defines as “interlaced psychic images” that “appear in the symbolic and political fields,” and in the Black text, the primordial memory is the divestment of the subjectivity of the Black self (Mbembe 2017, 103). His discussion of Black consciousness in the colonial setting leans heavily on Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Here again, Mbembe’s dialectical proclivities show forth: while looking toward a future in which a new humanism might divest historical memory of the trappings of race, he pays homage to thinkers who insisted on the necessity of a specifically Black memory to combat colonial distortions; at the same time, without advocating violence, he quotes Fanon approvingly to the effect that violence, for the colonized, may prove the lone recourse able to establish reciprocity between oppressor and oppressed.

    Since his 2006 essay Necropolitics, death has been the axis on which Mbembe’s political philosophy turns, and its invocation in Critique of Black Reason makes for some of the book’s most resonant as well as exasperating passages. Mbembe is no doubt correct in positing the border between the capacity of the sovereign to kill and that of the subject to bring his own life to an end as the furthermost border and defining conflict of the experience of subjection, and its relevance is beyond debate in the political discourse of the present day, especially as it impends upon those regions of the world where weakened civil institutions have allowed for a merging of private and public power and their subordination to moneyed interests. Yet his frequent linkage of these considerations to theoretical concepts of French coinage is at times belabored. In particular, the concept of the remainder (le reste), the heritage of which stretches from Saussure to Derrida and Badiou, and which Mbembe relates to the Black subject’s life-in-death through Bataille’s notion of the accursed share, muddies rather than illuminates Mbembe’s ordinarily lucid prose.

    Mbembe concludes Critique of Black Reason with an examination of the prospects for overcoming the idea of Blackness in the service of a world freed of the burden of race, yet unbothered by difference and singularity. Considering négritude as a moment of “situated thinking,” borne of and proper to the lived experience of the racialized subject, he calls for the contextualization of Blackness within a theory of “the rise of humanity” (Mbembe 2017, 161; 156). Blackness, in the positive sense Mbembe’s favored thinkers impart to it, would then become “a metaphysical and aesthetic envelope” directed against a specific and historically bound set of degradations and toward a humanism of the future; and the question that emerges for all liberatory struggles is “how to belong fully in this world that is common to all of us” (Mbembe 2017, 176). It is curious to read his sanguine meditations on the dialectical transcendence of Blackness against the collapse of the ideal of a post-racial America, particularly toward the end of Obama’s second term, and the re-legitimation of overt racism in the Trump era. Whereas Mbembe largely dispenses with the fictions of race to conceive of Blackness in political terms, present-day racism on the right has held onto the Black person as a biological subject while discrediting the political implications of ethnicity. Mbembe is not blind to the consequences of this decoupling of ethnic origin and political status, which has given impetus both to the annulment of protections afforded to African-Americans as well as to a revival of stereotypes of thugs and welfare cheats whose alleged malfeasance is undetermined by history or circumstance: he decries post-racialism as a fiction, advocating instead for a “post-Césairian era [in which] we embrace and retain the signifier ‘Black’ not with the goal of finding solace within it but rather as a way of clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (Mbembe 2017, 173).

    Increasingly, the diffusion of Blackness into the common human heritage may devolve as much from oppression and destitution as from any humane disposition toward fraternity. In his 1999 essay “On Private Indirect Government,” Mbembe spoke ominously of the “direct relation that exists between the mercantile imperative, the upsurge in violence, and the installation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional authorities” (Mbembe 1999). Mbembe was writing specifically of Africa, and well in advance of the economic crisis in the West that permitted an unheralded transfer of wealth into the hands of a minuscule proportion of the global elite. Since then, Americans have witnessed a newly militarized police force engaged in profiteering via civil asset forfeiture, the yields of which now exceed total losses from burglary; at the same time, privatization of education, public services, and infrastructure has made a growth industry of what once were thought of as human rights. The escalation process of capital mentioned by Mbembe in the book’s preface has meant that the citizens of countries that once dictated the brutal debt adjustment regimes imposed on the Third World now find themselves burdened by austerity as the global periphery expands and the core grows ever more restricted.

    In the epilogue, “There is Only One World,” Mbembe characterizes the progressive devaluation of the forces of production, along with the reduction of subjectivity to neurologically fixed and algorithmically exploitable market components, recently criticized by philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han, as a not-yet complete “retreat from humanity” to which he opposes “the reservoirs of life” (Mbembe 2017, 179; 181). For Mbembe, this situation confronts the individual with the most basic existential questions: what the world is, what are the extant and ideal relations between the parts that compose it, what is its telos, how should it end, how should one live within it. To conceive of a response, it is necessary to embrace the “vocation of life” as the basis for all thinking about politics and culture (Mbembe 2017, 182). Mbembe closes with a layered reference to “the Open,” which draws on Agamben, Heidegger, and finally Rilke to specify a state of plenitude, an absence of resentment, in which a care is made possible beyond the distortions of abstraction through the acknowledgement and inclusion of the no-longer other. The “proclamation of difference,” he concludes, “is only one facet of a larger project––the project of a world that is coming” (Mbembe 2017, 183).

    Adrian Nathan West is author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature.

     

    Bibliography

    Césaire, Aimé. Nègre Je Suis, Nègre Je Resterai. Entretiens avec François Vergès. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013.

    Mbembe, Achille, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

    Mbembe, A. 1999. “Du Gouvernement Privé Indirect.” Politique Africaine, 73 (1), 103-121. doi:10.3917/polaf.073.0103.

    Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

    Works Consulted

    Agamben, Giorgo. L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

    Dapper, Olfert. Umbständliche und eigentliche Beschreibung von Afrika, Anno 1668. https://archive.org/details/UmbstandlicheUndEigentlicheBeschreibungVonAfrikaAnno1668

    Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

    Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

    Feldman, Ari. “Human Diversity: the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right. Forward, 5 August 2016. http://forward.com/opinion/national/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/

    H. Rap Brown. Die Nigger Die. New York: Dial Press, 1969.

    Han, Byung-Chul. Im Schwarm. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013.

    Ingraham, Christopher. “Law Enforcement Took More Stuff from People than Burglars Last Year.” Washington Post, 23 February 2015.

    Hallett, Robin. “Desolation on the Veld: Forced Removals in South Africa.” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (1984): 301-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/722350.

    Heidegger, Martin. “Wozu Dichter?” in Gesamtausgabe Band 5: Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977.

    Jobson, Richard. The Golden Trade. 1623. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/jobson/

    Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

    Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duineser Elegien. Leipzig: Insel, 1923.

    Rucker, Walter, and James Nathaniel Upton, eds. Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenfield Press, 2007.

    Schmitt, Carl. Politische Romantik. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919.