Ostensible Reviews: Les particules élémentaires beside 'Ashûrâ’: This Blood Spilled In My Veins
I’m attempting a sort of critical review of both a documentary and a novel that are linked in my mind by common serendipitous reference to the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, whose work and thought I haven’t previously encountered. Here goes.
1) Reading
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq [pronounced as often anglicized Wellbeck] isn’t fun. The story of two, late 20th century half-brothers—one so cerebral he seems emotionally void, the other so emotionally damaged he must “eat” the world—is spare, brutally honest, and entirely unavoidable in its realized ambition. Words here construct a mirror image of our “materialist” culture, offering an unasked-for honesty we’re just barely able to take in, that there’s no escape (as in Sartre? as in Beckett?). What redeems the story is that it’s ostensibly told by a member of a successor race of ageless much-improved human clones, made possible by the millennial, groundbreaking work in biology of one of the brothers, Michel Djerzinski. So struck am I by the classical beauty of some of this prose even in translation, I include the book’s last two paragraphs:
“Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we live on. Men consider us to be happy; it is certainly true that we have succeeded in overcoming the forces of egotism, cruelty and anger which they could not. We live very different lives. Science and art are still a part of our society; but without the stimulus of personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty has taken on a less urgent aspect. To humans of the old species, our world seems a paradise. We have even been known to refer to ourselves—with a certain humor—by the name they so long dreamed of: gods.
“History exists; it is elemental, it dominates, its rule is inexorable. Yet outside the strict confines of history, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love. This species which, for the first time in history, was able to envision the possibility of its succession and, some years later, proved capable of bringing it about. As the last members of this race are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, an homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind.”
2) Blood spilled in my veins, indeed.
‘Ashûrâ’ is a documentary concerning a ritual of Islam practiced annually by the Shiite sect in southern Lebanon. The filmmaker, Jalal Toufic, a few years ago taught at Berkeley and now lectures at a university in Beirut. The film chronicles initial stages of the ritual in which a throng of half-naked men chant while simultaneously raising their arms above and behind their heads, and then bring them down together to beat their breasts. Done in unison, this elicits a loud clap. Cut to an imam reading the holy (pre)text for the ritual, in which the grandson of Muhammad, Al-Husayn (Ali), is slaughtered by enemies in 680 A.D. His immediate audience is a group of clerics, some of whom are moved by the reading to tears.
Next we view prerecorded commentaries on (related?) themes by French intellectuals Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, whom Jalal Toufic has seen fit to graft here. Cut to a graduate seminar in Beirut where the young, attractive Prof. Toufic is holding forth in grand intellectual style to his captive audience of partly enthralled but also apparently mystified students. (I recall Prof. Lotringer lecturing on structuralism theory, after Levi-Strauss: Lesson: French-trained intellectuals admirably convey the idealistic excitement of learning without, in my case anyway, any enduring content. But I am no guide to this material, which, in its abstraction, taxes my feeble mind.) Two points only. In aligning himself with European intellectual lions like Deleuze and Derrida, Toufic contextualizes his ambition and self-regard. The program notes include the following idea (no doubt attributable to one of the three thinkers) I now paraphrase: What no longer causes pain cannot be remembered.
The documentary concludes with the final day of the ‘Ashûrâ’ ritual. In a large, enclosed space, with a floor covered by unrolled white paper, men wearing white paper tunics are continually moving randomly in the space, abrading their foreheads and pates with blades of the short swords they carry. Blood streams from their heads, staining the tunics and the floor. Remarkably, in close quarters no one is stabbed by another’s sword. The men don’t appear to be seriously injured; they seem dazed. Like newly birthed fetuses covered in mothers’ blood they are reborn to their purpose: By remembering the slaughter of Al-Husayn, they prepare for the coming redeemer, the 12th Imam or Mahdi.
Arresting, disturbing, and perhaps ominous recent works. Should you encounter them, let me know what you make of this.
posted by Paul at 10:07 AM
