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  • Prince Ringard: No age limit in the rebellion

    Prince Ringard: No age limit in the rebellion

    Notebook:

    When I was 17, I did not want to work so I did the sleeve, I sang and a friend accompanied me on guitar. A guy offered us to go to his cabaret, we accepted and I continued to sing in unlikely places often in front of a sparse audience. I was paid by the hat. It wasn’t much but it was still better than unloading 50kg bags of cement at the freight station with wet towels on the shoulders so as not to get burned. I sang alone accompanied by an orchestral band, fellow musicians did me a favor for the recordings. My lifestyle was incompatible with a group project. I lived on my sailboat and of course I traveled a lot. In June 1994, Mousse, if I may say so, very advantageously replaced the orchestral band. I duplicated my cassettes myself, which I proposed at the end of my show. The same goes for my books, which are always in self-production. Today we sell albums for free and all tracks are free to download. The punks like me and this feeling is shared but I have never been punk either in the music or in the appearance. I have always kept my independence. I have nothing against producers, managers, turners etc. But the artistic world has always been completely foreign to me. In short, I’m not part of the family, that’s how it is and that’s fine. Moreover, I do not consider myself an artist in the noble sense of the term, for me the show is the only way to live without working, that’s all. We are self-managed and this mode of operation suits us perfectly. And don’t forget that I have an advantage over most of you: I can no longer die young.

    Jean-Claude Lalanne AKA le Prince Ringard.

    Alerta antifachista – PRINCE RINGARD

    “Anti-racism and anti-fachism are a necessity and humanism and brotherhood a priority”

    Prince Ringard, whose real name is Jean-Claude Lalanne, spent his childhood at the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul orphanage in Issoire (Puy-de-Dôme), with a certain Gérard Lenorman. A period he describes as happy. A gifted child, he passed his baccalaureate at the age of 14, joined the faculty of Nanterre where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in law.

    With a discography of twenty-four albums, Prince Ringard performs a hundred times a year in France, but also in Belgium or Switzerland. For more than twenty years, it has been Marianne Bily, his companion, known as Mousse, who accompanies him with guitar, harmonica, kick drum and snare drum. Friday, at the Entreme, the two artists seduced the public with their protest repertoire.

    Jean-Claude Lalanne has been singing and playing music for several years now. Rue Mouffetard in Paris, while he was doing the round, he was spotted by the manager of the cabaret Le Bateau ivre, who offered to play there. He also makes some appearances in theater and cinema.

    He also wrote his first book, which he wrote at the age of 12. Twenty-five others followed. “It’s a way to channel my emotions, a therapy to stabilize me. By writing, I balance myself and feel useful, ”explains the anarchist.

    Returning from military service, he looks for himself and decides to go to the rescue of the young Republic of Biafra, newly self-proclaimed, the Igbo minority seceding from Nigeria, resulting in three years of war. Injured, Jean-Claude was quickly repatriated. “The French government has recognized the humanitarian nature of these operations and now pays me 65.31 euros per quarter for services rendered,” he announces with a touch of irony.

    Back in France, Jean-Claude continued his commitment. Considering himself now an anarchist, he frequented the Federation of the same name. “For me, who feels humanistic above all, I finally found a more open environment” His uncompromising lifestyle earned him a few stays in prison, for having returned by car to the window of a bar with far right regulars, for a breakage that went wrong, and some damage to a gendarmerie van.

    In the France of the 1970s, he found his equilibrium, carried by the breath of the post-68 era. On the one hand the concerts, alone on stage with pre-recorded instrumental band, and on the other long sailing trips, first in Corsica and Gibraltar, then in Senegal, Burkina Faso and even further, in French Guiana and the West Indies. Antoine’s side of the underground… “For the music, I could not have integrated into a group. I love my freedom too much and I would never have been able to take all these trips. ”

    In the influence department, Prince Ringard rather claims those of Dylan and Neil Young. However, it is especially appreciated by punks. Moreover, he remains the first surprised. In 1977, when he arrived in front of the old Dunois theatre where he was to perform, punks waited for the doors to open. “I thought, they must have been wrong. So, I went to them to tell them. But no, it was me they had come to see. “

    The punks’ passion for this old Anarchist Father will never leave him. He sympathized with the members of Bulldozer, a short-lived punxploitation group set up by musicians from the rock band Martin Circus, or with the guitarist from Métal Urbain and later the singer from Parabellum. To mark his discrepancy with the movement, he nicknamed himself cat punk.

    Since 1994, he has been accompanied on stage by his partner, Mousse, who enriches his tart diatribes. His songs, part of a very French tradition, are full of bourgeois, priest, politician and of course fascism. Every year, the prince and Mousse make a hundred dates, a semi-acoustic recreation in the middle of the decibels of the anarcho-punk and hardcore groups. “Even today, I still find it strange: the years go by but I still have a young audience under thirty. Out of time, out of modes and out of competition.

    “My life is that of an ordinary man who has risked his skin a little more often than others, that’s all. About Prince Ringard I am not an artist in the noble sense of the word. I sing like a prostitute stalking the sidewalk. I have no artistic or audiovisual references. I’m just yelling at what I’ve been through: violence, misery, prison, and the street. For this type of text, marketing is not necessary. I’m an independent whore, I say no to pimps, SACEM and other pimps can go and get hanged. The tenderness I show to the cops has sometimes been misinterpreted, the consequences are the result of an ordinary procedure: an eight square meter cell and that fucking smell of badly washed human meat. For the rest, I manage with my death instinct and my desire to love. My brothers and sisters on the pavement know what I’m talking about. Perhaps one day the homeless will no longer die of cold and despair. The only right we have left is to die shouting: neither god nor master!” ✪

  • On the invariance of reading performance

    On the invariance of reading performance

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  • David Ivison: Why I Am Not An Anarchist

    David Ivison: Why I Am Not An Anarchist

    Why am I not an anarchist? Not for the same reasons as a police commissioner, churchman, a politician, or any authoritarian might give, but because I am anti-authoritarian. The quick answer to the question posed by my title is that I am not an anarchist because I am on the side of freedom, that is, just because I am an anti-authoritarian, a libertarian.

    I do not want to attack any specific group of anarchists as such, but rather I want to discuss traditional anarchist thought, the tradition to which people such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin belong. First, I want to sketch briefly what I take to be the classical anarchist position. Second, I want to discuss what I take to be weaknesses or inconsistencies in this position and to point out how these might lead to anarchist authoritarianism. And, finally, I want to indicate how I think an anti-authoritarian or libertarian position differs from classical anarchism.

    The anarchist position. As against state socialists, anarchists have always emphasized a social rather than political revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat is seen, in Bakunin’s words, as saying “to free the masses it is first necessary to enslave them,” and he pointed out cogently that the State is not an instrument to be used in whatever way one likes but an institution with its own ways of working which will nullify any attempt to destroy it from within. As Kropotkin said, you cannot make an historical institution go in any direction you would have it, it must go its own way. Even those who sincerely want to capture power for the sake of bringing about freedom never get past the first objective. In many ways, then, the anarchists, in their critique of State socialism, foreshadow the political sociology of Robert Michels whose book, Political Parties first appeared in English in 1915.

    So far, so good. In denying the possibility of bringing about the free society by working within the State apparatus, the anarchists emphasized the need for the destruction of the State machinery and its associated power relationships. But it is here that the theory becomes rather vague. The most usual notion is that convinced anarchists, as a revolutionary vanguard, will educate the people to come to see their “real” interests. Man, it is said, is a rational animal and, once he sees the light, he will join in a general strike which will destroy the power of the State and usher in a free society in which various groups will “ organize and combine into federations, in accordance with their natural tendencies and their real interests” (Bakunin.) If it seems a bit risky to rely so heavily on the innate anarchism of human nature, then Kropotkin tried to show, that by nature, man is cooperative and altruistic.

    PROBLEMS: But if everyone is so good and “really” wants an anarchist society, then why have we not got one by now? Why do we have politicians and a State apparatus after well over a century of anarchist propaganda? If everyone’s real interest is in free, cooperative living, then why do we have people who staff institutions like jails, prisons, courts and parliament?

    In their more realistic moments, even the anarchists see some flaws in their argument, which boils down to saying if you want a thing strongly enough, all you have to do is to convince everyone else and it will come about – as if there were no conflicts between people’s interests.

    Some anarchists, for example, have attempted to set up anarchistic communes within the present society without waiting for the social revolution. But Fourier, who tried setting up what he called phalansteries was criticized by Bakunin who claimed that it was an error to believe that peaceful persuasion and propaganda will touch the hearts of the rich to such an extent that they would come themselves and lay down the surpluses of their riches at the doors of the phalansteries. That is, like the State socialists, the anarchists so have some notion of class conflict – at the very least, some sections of society, such as politicians and bosses, are not in favor of anarchism; that is to say, their real interests lie in maintaining their privileged status quo.

    However, once you make a break in the notion of social solidarity, the whole theory of social revolution gives way. If you admit that some people are not interested in freedom but rather in maintaining authoritarian power structures, then you cannot assert that EVERYONE’s real interest is in anarchism and that all is needed is education by a revolutionary vanguard for rational men to realize their own interests.

    There are actually two weaknesses here – first, a factual error, and second, a covert authoritarianism or moralism. The actual fact of class and other conflicts in society, the social fact that not all persons share the same interests, points up the utopianism of the classical anarchist tradition with its blind faith that reason will carry the day. The fallacy of Godwin. And this fact also points up the utopianism of the social revolution, of the notion that a state of affairs (the “free society”) could ever occur when all lived in harmony. It is just not true that there is one “real” interest which everyone shares, let alone that this interest is in freedom. Not only there is no way of determining that one interest is more real than another – one could never tell a real interest from a so-called unreal interest, if the interest exists it is real and only special pleading can make out that one interest is somehow more real than another – but also, apart from this problem of what one might mean by a “real” interest, it is a brute fact, admitted by the anarchists, that there is social conflict, that not all persons want the same thing. Then the notion of a social revolution ushering in a free society is impossible, it is a wish fulfilling fantasy which is factually incorrect because people do have conflicting interests – even the workers seem more concerned with job conditions and wages than with freedom.

    If one accepts that not everyone wants freedom, then the anarchist position involves not only telling disbelieving souls that they ought to want freedom, it also involves imposing freedom on people who do not want it – surely a contradiction in terms – if you impose something on someone, then they are not free. This sort of attempt to impose your policy on others in the guise of knowing what is best for them better than they themselves is unmistakably authoritarian, a typical moralistic trick.

    The hallmark of moralism is the claim that something ought to be done for its own sake, that it is self-obviously obligatory, is our duty or our real interest – without ever explaining why one ought to do one’s duty, what is obligatory, what is in one’s free interest, This technique is used in an attempt to overcome the problem of people having different interests and wishes. If the moralist were straightforward, he would say something like, “If you do don’t want to go to jail (or be shot or whatever the hidden sanction is), you ought to do as I tell you,” and then it would be one for someone to say that he would rather go to jail (or rather be dead than red, or whatever), just as if the anarchist said, “if you are interested in freedom, you should do as I tell you,” and the person addressed said that he was not interested in freedom (or pointed out the inconsistency of a person interested in freedom doing as he was told). So, like any politician, the anarchist falls back on what has been called the notion of the common good, the kind of appeal made in the name of the welfare of the community. Mr. Chipp tells us that smoking cannabis will ruin the moral fiber of the nation, anarchists say that coming out in a general strike against the State will improve the moral fiber of the nation. But there is not such thing as the common good, as something which is in everyone’s “real” interest, and even if there were, nothing is said about why we should do what the common good requires.

    As anarchists admit in their more realistic moments, a glance at history or anthropology or at our own contemporary society shows that there are and always have been in any society various, different, and opposed groups – opposed, for example, over the Vietnam war, marijuana and censorship, to name but a few of the recent issues – each claiming to speak in the name of the common good. In fact, appeals to the common good are usually made precisely in these cases where there is manifest diversity and opposition as with Chipp on cannabis, or Nixon in Indochina. The function of appeals to the whole of society is to conceal both the fact of disagreement and the attempt to advance the special interests of some particular group such as the breweries or the military-industrial complex.

    But as well as the factual error and the moralistic weakness, there is a further problem. Not only do anarchists attempt to coerce others into becoming free, but they have argued that no one can be free until the State and its attendant power relationships are destroyed. There is no freedom except total freedom and so the utopia of the free society is placed firmly in the distant future. Two further points can be made here. Firstly, as no one can be free here and now, the utopia of the future justifies all kinds of authoritarian practices in the present, as long as they are held to promote freedom “after the revolution.” So that anarchists may be authoritarian, moralistic, and coercive if they consider that their activities may promote the conditions of freedom in the future – and there certainly have been professed anarchist groups which operated along almost military lines.

    Secondly, even if anarchists are not overtly authoritarian, it does seem to be a mark of servility, of being un-free, to work for the freedom of future generations rather than for one’s own freedom. Although here the servility may be toward unborn generations rather than to one’s contemporaries, it is still self-denying and self-frustrating, the marks of an un-free personality. It is of the same order as the self-denying Christians exhorted to avoid sin in the hopes of entering a glorious like hereafter. For anarchists, liberty is not something to be found at present but rather something that will really come only in the future. So, because they cannot be free here and now, they enslave themselves in the hope of the future utopia.

    Perhaps, it is in the insistence on total freedom, on the possibility of a utopian society with no authoritarian power relationships, which leads anarchists to be authoritarian and moralistic in the present ; but certainly a supporter of freedom-in-the-future can find much to oppose in the utopianism, millenarianism, and false solidarist social theory of anarchism.

    A LIBERTARIAN POSITION. By freedom, by libertarianism, I do not mean a doctrine of free will. I am a determinist and I believe that all our actions are completely determined by necessary and sufficient antecedent conditions. If nature were not completely deterministic, one could never delimit the area of free will, just because it is not determined, and no science or knowledge would be possible – what happened one day might not happen again and who knows, States might promote freedom!

    No. I take it that a libertarian position has something in common with what anarchists, in some of their more realistic moments, seem to recognize. Kropotkin once wrote, “Throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian position.”

    If we free ourselves of anarchist moralism, we can see that freedom is not a question of a future society and a total (and impossible) change in social relationships. Rather freedom is not a characteristic of whole societies at all but of certain sub-groups or ways of life within any society – and even then probably no one person or group is entirely free all the time. Supporters of freedom will always meet with opposition, will always be opposed by authoritarians, and will have to fight for freedom here and now, not in some nebulous future utopia, with no illusion that we can somehow make the world safe for freedom – such seeking for security is a hallmark of servility, not of freedom just as trying to force others to be free is authoritarian.

    The libertarian or freedom-lover recognizes that there is a constant conflict between freedom and authority. But libertarianism itself has no special claims, no moralistic notion that the path of freedom must or should be followed. Libertarians are on the side of freedom, but those who see their interests to lie in the maintenance or promotion of power relationships, such as securing their position with the aid of authority, will obviously and rightfully reject libertarian values. Unlike the anarchists, the libertarian does not seek to coerce others into supporting him in the name of real interests or a common good or of a future utopia. He does not seek to force freedom onto a whole society. Rather, the libertarian is an anarchist without ends, his is a role of permanent opposition to authority, what Max Nomad called permanent protest, with no illusion that freedom can ever be secured once and for all by a social revolution or by any other means. He displays his freedom here and now and others who have similar interests may assist him in the struggle. He engages in free activities because he likes them, not for what he or unborn generations may get out of them.

    Being free involves the rejection of ultimates of all kinds – the rejection of any single ultimate on which all things depend for their existence (such as a God), the rejection of any ultimate reality (so that nothing is more real than any other) in favor of ordinary, everyday existence, the rejection of any ultimately simple things as opposed to complex historical things. The libertarian is a realist, an empiricist and a pluralist – for him, occurrences are good enough.

    It may be that it is this fact which makes one free, that the hallmark of freedom is freedom from moralist, from deluded notions about things which ought to be done, so that one is not dependent, obedient and servile, not self-denying, self-frustrating and self-deluded about the interests of those who manipulate him, just because one has a realistic awareness of what is being done to one, of what the actual motives of the authoritarians are and of what one’s own interests are. If seeing through moralism is a condition of freedom, then we will have to fight for freedom within ourselves, against the illusions ingrained in us through the moralistic upbringing which we have all received in this culture. Then there is a permanent mental struggle within ourselves as well as a permanent social struggle against the authoritarians without.

    However we define freedom, the lover of freedom, the libertarian, will not, as long as he is being free, retreat into moralism, utopianism, or millenarianism, into the errors of anarchism. Rather he will fight for freedom in the present, distrusting both his bosses and his would be saviors, prepared for a never ending struggle against authoritarianism, engaging in free activities for their own sake, because he is the kind of person who is interested in freedom, not because of what he or future generations can get out of them ; and remaining as objective and realistic as possible with no illusion that everyone ought to agree with him.

    ReIssued from: David Ivısion – Why I Am Not An Anarchist (1972)  ✪

  • Makanin’s Asan: Dark myth of in Chechnia

    Makanin’s Asan: Dark myth of in Chechnia

    AcaH (Asan), the winner of Vladimir Makanin’s Big Book prize, appears to be a stream-of-consciousness chronicle of the happenings in the life of a Russian manager of a military storehouse in Chechnya. However, the book is actually much more than that. Asan is less a book about Russia’s Chechen battles and more of an unsatisfied, jittery novel that shows how war pushes participants and observers to piece together narratives that explain or justify actions. The novel shows how war forces people to piece together narratives that explain or justify actions.

    The major Aleksandr Sergeevich Zhilin who narrates Makanin is a character whose name has appeared in several works of literature. His initial name and patronymic are both taken from Pushkin, and a major Zhilin is the primary character in the short story Prisoner of the Caucasus written by Lev Tolstoy. His patronymic is also taken from Pushkin. Makanin’s Zhilin is given the moniker Asan because, in the novel, Asan is the name of a Chechen deity that a general learns about while devouring books about Chechnya’s history. Asan becomes a nickname for Makanin’s Zhilin. There is, of course, additional importance to the name Asan; it is similar to a few Russian nicknames for Aleksandr and may even refer to Alexander the Great. As a Russian officer with a questionable moral compass, Zhilin also becomes a questionable hero of his time. He is a 21st century descendent of Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin, the main character of Hero of Our Time, which was written in the 19th century.

    Zhilin shares experiences from his life, such as how he made extra money by selling Russian fuels on the side, how he talked to his wife (who remains anonymous) on the phone about building a house with money obtained through illegal means, how he saved the lives of some soldiers but was responsible for the deaths of others, how his alcoholic father paid him a visit, and how he encountered two shell-shocked soldiers. The plots of a couple of these episodes show promise, but very few of them actually grow into very much. For instance, the younger Zhilin’s visit from his grandfather, who is an avid fan of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry, is heartwarming, but it feels more like a haphazard attempt to give the younger Zhilin a past than a way to develop his character.

    Of course, it’s possible that Asan did this on purpose: he pieced together several pieces to make a messy novel about clumsy subjects. There are even a few instances in which the narrator switches between the first person and the third person perspective. Makanin-Zhilin’s stories are repetitive and self-referential; he adds… to the beginning of each sentence, then adds… to the beginning of each subsequent sentence, and finally ends each sentence with!. At first, this mode of expression felt a little bit exciting, and it even had an addictive quality…

    To the reader’s relief, the shell-shocked soldiers inject the book with some much-needed continuity. The troops provide Makanin and Zhilin with a focus: the soldiers wish to return to their unit, and Zhilin is tasked with finding a convoy to transport them away. Makanin is given the responsibility of protecting Zhilin. The soldier lays the responsibility on “sun bunnies,” which is a phrase used here for dappled sunlight and is also the name of a camouflage pattern, as well as a large sum of money that was not honestly obtained. Zhilin spins a web of shifting narratives, or lies, that he and the other troops may use to justify their actions and make sense of what took place.

    War is, of course, a pointless endeavor, as Makanin points out to the readers of Asan on multiple occasions throughout the book. Zhilin claims that there is no logic to it, which makes it impossible for you to comprehend. In a nutshell, while Zhilin strives to make sense of the events, his actions, and his life, the truth begins to slip away and myths acquire momentum.The kinds of war truths that are discussed in Asan are not those that are typically found in newspapers. It is about how humans attempt to bring order out of chaos by turning the realities of war, which are commodities as elusive as sun bunnies, into fiction. It was Makanin’s intention for the book to be clumsy rather than graceful. ✪

  • Review: Doom-filled invocations of Earthbong

    Review: Doom-filled invocations of Earthbong

    Label: Black Farm Records | Evil Noise Recordings
    Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

    In fact, the third album from German cannabis lords Earthbong completes a hazy, dreamy trilogy of sorts, following 2018’s One Earth One Bong and 2020’s Bong Rites. The word “bong” is used in both the band and album names, suggesting that this must be stoner connected in some way. Tomorrow, August 25, Church Of Bong will be released through a partnership between Evil Noise Recordings and Black Farm Records (for the vinyl version) (for cassette).

    The rumbling, mesmerizing Bong Aeterna gets off to a wonderful start with a cry of feedback that gradually develops into a lumberingly legendary doom theme. A complementary blend of earth shattering riffs and dreamy, psychedelic moments that drift and swirl around clean guitar hypnotics fill the first track of the album’s two, which clocks in at more than eighteen minutes. The obvious inspirations are all present, including Bongzilla, Sleep, and Electric Wizard. The swelling apocalyptic “breakdown” that begins at around twelve minutes is a brilliant mirage of stoner doom joy, while the structure and style always feel a little samey in this genre. The vocals are strong; they remind one of Matt Pike but occasionally have more deathly roars.

    The second portion, Dies Bongrae, is a little longer, but you hardly notice. You’d be too occupied getting engulfed in never-ending waves of churning dread, Boris-like levels of fuzz, and an overall tone that is considerably deeper. Dies Bongrae appears to be that shadowy area under the pulpit where all of our uncertainties congregate if Bong Aeterna were this Church’s stained-glass windows.

    The song’s continuous march towards eternity is accompanied by powerful riffs and roars, and after around twelve minutes, you briefly believe you’ve arrived. Similar to the first tune, a reflective and peaceful portion gives you a glimpse of life between RIFFs. Yet you can’t get away from the RIFF, as we’ve seen time and time again. The RIFF returns swaggering into a ripping solo atop a moaning background, proclaiming itself to be our God at this point. An enormous undertaking in more ways than one.

    The Church of Bong appears to represent the pinnacle of Earthbong’s efforts, where the old Mary Jane’s devotion has evolved into a place of worship. Earthbong are really getting into the weeds with this one, promising a couple of hefty, doom-filled invocations as the foundation for this new universe. To experience Church Of Bong to its fullest, you might need to use illicit drugs, but I can assure you that the trip is worthwhile when I’m sober. Maybe it’s a church where we can worship Bong? That kind of religious zeal is something we could support. ✪

  • Documentary about Jean-Luc Godard’s final days before his farewell

    Documentary about Jean-Luc Godard’s final days before his farewell

    The intellectual circle of friends that Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battagia, Nicole Brenez, Mathilde Incerti, and Mitra Farahani formed around Jean-Luc Godard during his final months on earth.

    Now we learn that Farhani was filming a documentary during Godard’s final creative phase thanks to her strong friendship with him.

    The CNC announced funding for its most recent quarter on June 30, 2023, and one of the projects chosen was the new Godard movie directed by Farahani and made by Écran Noir Productions.

    According to the synopsis, Farahani followed JLG’s final months of life as he worked on his final film, “Scenario,” up until his assisted suicide in Switzerland on September 13, 2022.

    Synopsis:

    When Jean-Luc Godard left the world on September 13, 2022, it was following a script written by him, voluntary death. For two years he had been working on a final film titled “Scénario”, produced by Écran Noir Productions in co-production with Arte. [The doc] traces the fragile schedulinh of these last few months of creation. As agony fills the horizon, the work resists to the final limits. The day before his voluntary death, Jean-Luc Godard addresses his last words in front of a camera, the final instructions for an unfinished work. ✪

  • Coincidence and Miracle: Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai

    Coincidence and Miracle: Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai


    If László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel is part of the continuation of his greatest texts, War & War and The Melancholy of the Resistance, he manages to make the world differently, through an extraordinary multiplication of perspectives and enunciations. 

    Funny and serious story of a universe that dislocates around an idiot (baron) and a madman (scientist), but whose writing tirelessly recombines the pieces. How to create infinity with finite.

    Text: Bastien Gallet

    Translated from AOC.media: Le hasard et le miracle – sur Le baron Wenckheim est de retour de László Krasznahorkai by Ramona Frost for Futuristika.

    It all begins with a thwarted will. In spite of himself, the man must resolve to approach the window, move the Styrofoam panel, look outside, because outside there is a young woman, his daughter, who, with a megaphone in her hand, is shouting, denouncing his faults, demanding accountability. We learn that he’s a famous professor, an unlikely world specialist in mosses, that he’s gone mad, that he’s left everything behind, that he’s taken refuge in a cabin in the middle of a bramble grove, to isolate himself as completely as possible from human affairs.

    This first movement, which forces the professor to leave his cabin and wander the outskirts of the city, eventually leading him to the country’s capital, and which brings him back into the world against his own will, contrasts almost exactly with the book’s other great movement, that of Baron Wenckheim, who returns.

    What does the sentence do? Several things. It makes heterogeneous perspectives coexist, holds them together, passes them seamlessly through one another, and thus equalizes and confronts them.

    A departure versus a return, two opposing movements, both forced. The professor leaves because he’s being hunted by a local militia. The Baron returns because, threatened with imprisonment, he has had to flee Argentina, his adopted country. These movements, however, end up being willed, becoming wills, even desires: the professor’s immobility in a Budapest square as he listens to his daughter’s speech, which he didn’t dare look at through the window of his cottage; the Baron’s desire for Marika, his childhood sweetheart, whom he would so much like to see again. Whatever their driving force, these movements disturb the course of the world, moving crowds, arousing appetites, revealing connivances, enraging, inspiring dreams and delirium – in short, they produce a myriad of effects that László Krasznahorkai describes in great detail and from multiple points of view.

    His writing becomes perspectivist. The third chapter, which describes the city on the eve of the Baron’s arrival, is one of the most virtuoso in this respect. Each paragraph embodies a new enunciation, sometimes blending several, using both first and third person, the whole composing a heterogeneous, dissonant chorus traversed by the Baron’s idiotic perspective, which all the others try to decipher without success. His ability to magnetize the most disparate movements around him reaches its acme in the welcome ceremony which, in the next chapter, brings together the entire town in front of the station: mayor, chief of the gendarmerie, motorcycle gang, carriage, choir, crowd and banners.

    Of course, there’s a reason for this craze: everyone believes that the Baron is returning to donate his fortune to the town, a fortune he has in fact lost entirely in Argentina. His death, and the consequent discovery of his destitution, will produce an opposite movement of dispersal, culminating in the city’s annihilation. The idiotic movements of the Baron, whose journeys through the city defy all logic, become the very movement of the world, a world gone mad. With his death, which seals the victory of chance – he dies on a railroad track, struck by a crane car at full speed – the line of the universe becomes massively entropic.

    Towards the end of the book, in the penultimate chapter, a gendarmerie sergeant assigned to the archives and a lover of the great Latin authors is reading a passage from Tacitus’ Annals when he is summoned by his captain. For several days, the town has been the scene of a series of unrelated events, crimes and depredations that have shaken public order. Unable to make sense of what’s happening, i.e., to correlate events with reasons and causes, the captain (and head of the gendarmerie) is ready to turn to Caesar, Tacitus and Cicero. Unfortunately, the sergeant, who certainly knows Latin but only wants “a few days off without pay”, can’t see how these authors could be of any use to them. The passage in question, the beginning of chapter 28 of the first book of the Annales – one of the few quotations in the book, along with that of the Hungarian poet Attila Józseph, to which I’ll return later – recounts an episode that would have provided the gendarmerie with the means to apprehend an unprecedented and highly uncertain situation.

    “Tacitus was telling him: the night was threatening and would bring out the crime; but chance served as a calming influence. The moon was seen in a serene sky, suddenly ready to fade. This phenomenon, the reason for which he did not know, was for the soldier [Drusus] an omen relating to his present situation; he equated the eclipse of this star with his misery, and imagined that what he was pursuing would have a happy success, if the goddess resumed her brilliant brilliance. So they make the sound of bronze, the accents of trumpets and horns, alternately joyful or sorrowful, according to whether she appears brighter or duller to them; then, when the rising clouds hid it from their sight, they believed it to be buried in darkness, and, as one easily passes to superstition when one’s mind is once stricken, they lament and cry out that this is for them the harbinger of eternal misery and that the gods turn away from their crimes.”

    The year was 14 AD. The legions of Pannonia have revolted. Drusus, dispatched by Tiberius, was unable to put down the revolt. Chance comes to his aid in the form of a lunar eclipse. For Drusus, the eclipse was a good omen, but it also terrorized the legionaries and enabled him to put down the rebellion. What they interpreted as a sign of destiny (fatum) was merely an effect of chance (fors), i.e. the natural order of things in all its unpredictability. Whether fate or chance, the eclipse eludes the grasp of human affairs, but influences its course. As Tacitus writes in the sixth book of the Annals: “For myself, I cannot decide the question of whether it is by destiny and its inexorable fatality that human things are governed, or whether it is to chance that their vicissitude is abandoned.” One of the historian’s tasks will be to preserve the weak power of human freedom between what astral configurations predict and what chance imposes.

    Tacitus’ appearance at this point in the story is all the more interesting in that it, too, seems to be a matter of chance; unless we decide to relate them. Like the legionnaires described by the Latin historian, the city’s inhabitants are distraught by what is happening, even if what is happening has little to do with the effects of stellar movements. What is happening is that nothing seems predictable any more. Chance, which in Tacitus is the effect of an unknown order, becomes in Krasznahorkai that of a disorder that extends to the whole world. “Everything is falling apart,” he [the priest] wrote to the parish bishop, “we can no longer perceive the correlating link between things, what I mean is that everything that has stood up until now no longer stands up, we hear about horrible events but nothing is certain, we have no certainty that they really happened […].”

    A disorder which, given what ultimately happens – the burning down and total destruction of the city with the exception of a concrete water tower – could very well be interpreted as fate, the sequence of unconnected events leading a posteriori to the disintegration of all existence within the city’s borders. Emancipated, chance becomes indistinguishable from destiny, a destiny that can be found under different guises from one of the author’s books to the next. For destiny cannot exist without agents, forces or characters, fools and prophets, who produce, reveal or amplify it. In Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, the rise of disorder is linked to the baron’s return to his hometown and the exaggerated hopes he has aroused in its inhabitants. In The Melancholy of Resistance, it’s linked to the presence of the Prince, who has come with the traveling circus, whose prophecies arouse the crowds and set the town ablaze.

    But these sometimes unwitting agents of chaos are also the physical forces that crush and dislocate all things. The Melancholy of Resistance thus concludes with an extraordinarily detailed description of the process of a body’s decomposition, from the “fortress” it was when it lived to the dissemination of all its constituent elements: “It was all there – although there was no longer an accountant to take inventory of its elements – but the original and truly non-reproducible realm had vanished forever, it had been crushed by the infinite force of a chaos that concealed the crystals of order, shattered by the irreducible and indifferent circulation that governed the universe. “

    Krasznahorkai loves dissonant doubles. The idiot and the scholar, the baron and the professor.

    Yet chance-destiny remains an ambivalent process. Disorder and destruction are just one of its possible slopes. There’s another: the miracle. In an earlier book, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, Krasznahorkai describes the hazardous sequence of events that, “apparently” by chance, produced one of Kyoto’s most beautiful gardens: the journey of the pollen strands from the Chinese province of Shandong to the small courtyard of a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, which, after a thousand twists and turns, gave rise to the eight hinokis in the garden; the journey of the spores which, after several circumnavigations of the Earth, carried away by the jet-stream, landed around the trees and formed a “dazzling carpet of silvery moss”: “an incomprehensible and terrifying miracle”. The erratic movements of the Prince of Genji’s grandson, the novel’s main character, through the meandering monastery follow the same erratic logic as those of the Baron in his hometown. He misses the garden just as the Baron misses Marika, albeit for different reasons. In both cases, chance prevents movement, the grandson from enjoying the garden and the Baron from reaching Marika.

    The “irreducible and indifferent circulation” described at the end of The Melancholy of Resistance also produces miracles: the whale that Janos Valuska visits in the middle of the book in its huge tin box (a reminder of the whale the author saw as a child, as recounted by the lecturer in Universal Theseus) and, more generally, all things whose beauty captures a body on the lookout – a Noh mask, an Andrei Rublev icon, an altarpiece by Perugino, a Bach aria, the Great Egret in Kyoto etc., epiphanies that Krasznahorkai described in Seiobo There Below. Such epiphanies are rare in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming they affect only the baron, the only person who can still be amazed by what he sees. At the beginning of the book, through the window of the train taking him home over the Hungarian border, he observes the landscape, deserted fields and ruined farms, but suddenly the sky opens up and rays of light reach down to earth, a nimbus appears that reminds him of the holy images of his childhood, his heart palpitates, he is dazzled: “his eyes filled with tears, he said to himself: here I am, back home”.

    Alongside the agents of destruction, there are those of beauty and wonder, who resist chaos as much as order, the one often being only the mask of the other. If the baron’s return has such consequences, it’s because it unwittingly reveals the extraordinary vacuity of the powers that be, and the relationships of connivance and corruption that bind them together. The town mayor, the head of the gendarmerie and the members of the Local Forces (a self-proclaimed militia motorcycle gang serving Greater Hungary) are as grotesque as they are dangerous. The targeted violence of the Local Forces and the disorder they cause always prove to be in the service of municipal order, either to reinforce it or to re-establish it. And when disorder causes the councillors to waver, as in The Melancholy of Resistance it’s the army that is called in to re-establish a momentarily defeated order. It is this double game that the aberrant movements of the baron and the professor reveal in all their crudeness. Art – for there is art in the unpredictable sinuosity of their movements – cannot resist chaos without also resisting order, disturbing it, undoing it, exposing it to the disorder it conceals or uses.

    Krasznahorkai loves dissonant doubles. The idiot and the scholar. There’s the baron and the professor, Janos Valsuka and György Eszter in The Melancholy of Resistance, the Prince of Genji’s grandson and Sir Wilfrod Stanley Gilmore in A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East. The fool marvels and wanders, the scholar knows that there is no infinity (the title of Gilmore’s live book, which the senior monk left behind when he abandoned his residence, is Infinity is a Mistake), that events follow one another without reason (everything is separate, i.e. g. all is ruin) and that all existence is governed by fear (it is at this point in his reasoning that the professor quotes Attila József: “our life is governed by fear”). This point of view is perfectly summed up by the Prince-Prophet of The Melancholy of Resistance: “He says: he is always free. He is in the midst of things. And in the midst of things he sees everything. And everything is total ruin. To his followers, he’s a prince, but to him, he’s the greatest prince. He’s the only one to see everything, to see that everything is nothing. And that’s what Prince needs… always… to know.

    Partisans, they trash everything because they understand what he sees. They understand that things are deceptive, but they don’t know why. Prince, he knows that not everything exists The scientist becomes a prophet when he reveals to the world that everything is ruin, fear and finitude, and that everything else is illusion, deception and lies.

    But this is only part of the truth, or rather only one perspective on the truth. The other being that there are also miracles and wonders, that sometimes the Japanese goddess Seiobo descends to earth, just as sometimes light shines through the lead of the Hungarian sky. It also happens that movement emancipates itself from order as well as disorder, that it becomes acrobatics or a solar system, that the erratic or regulated movements of the characters are arranged in an ephemeral choreography capable, as much as a masterpiece of art, of resisting the forces of chaos: halics Junior’s spectacular if (or because) drunken act from the railway maintenance department in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, and Janos’s performance-demonstration of the rotation of the stars and the solar eclipse in The Melancholy of Resistance, which Belá Tarr so wonderfully brought to life in The Werckmeister Harmonies. The separate ceases to be separate, the goddess becomes one with her character, the amazed becomes one with the amazed, and the infinite becomes actual.

    As Stanley Gilmore writes, without daring to believe it: “infinity […] could exist in only one case, if there were two things, two elements, two particles, if there were two gods, two birds, two flower petals, if there were two sighs, two gunshots, two caresses, without anything, without any distance between them, such is the one and only case in which we could speak of infinity, if this distance did not exist.”

    This choreography is also, eminently, that of Krasznahorkai’s writing. Each paragraph of the book is almost always a single sentence, often running over several pages. What does the sentence do? Several things. It makes heterogeneous perspectives coexist, holds them together, passes them seamlessly through one another, and thus equalizes and confronts them. Its power is dialogical. It reports what is said, while describing what is done and thought by the speaker, moving from “I” to “she” or “he”, from the voice to the perspective on the voice, to the body, place, person or group it addresses.

    Its power is holistic. It translates complex movements, making them visible, becoming a volume, a multi-dimensional space that includes its spectators, transcribing them into rhythms of syntagms, which stretch or shrink according to the accelerations and decelerations of the moving bodies and the ratios of their respective speeds. Its power is therefore choreographic in the true sense of the word. It thinks, asserts, reasons, argues, contradicts itself, then restores the context of the elocution: how does it speak? to whom? where? from what body? picks up the thread of thought, relates an anecdote, quotes an author, insults another, and so on. Its power is idiotic and speculative. Krasznahorkai’s sentence does at least as much as it says. It constructs and makes possible the reality it represents. It makes the voices or perspectives it embodies coexist, it becomes the movement it describes, it situates what it reports or translates, it thinks at the same time as it follows the course of a thought. But, above all, it carries the reader along in its dance. A dance whose rhythm is set by the sequence of chapter headings, which must be said in the loudest voice: TRRR RAM PAM PAM PAM PAM HMMM RÁRÍRÁ RÍ ROM.

    Le baron Wenckheim est de retour by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Joëlle Dufeuilly, published on April 5, 2023 by Cambourakis, 528 pages.

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  • From father to son, immutable violence – on The son of the man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

    From father to son, immutable violence – on The son of the man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

    A father, a mother, a son, without a first name, as if they were resonating in each of us, and this trio trapped by violence, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo creates a thriller whose tragic end the reader quickly sees.

    Virginie Bloch-Lainé

    Translated from AOC.media: De père en fils, la violence immuable – sur Le fils de l’homme de Jean-Baptiste Del Amo by Ramona Frost for Futuristika.

    Among all the fathers whose portrait this literary return paints, here is one that is particularly brutal and in many ways, universal. Despite all his faults, the reader recognizes in this man some invariants of the fathers: a way of moving, of exercising his authority, of leading in the child a desire for protection and the hope of looking at the world perched on his shoulders.

    Jean-Baptiste Del Amo knows how to give rise to these desires thanks to his art of describing stealth attitudes and gestures: a jump over a railing, an arm nonchalantly placed on a steel bar are enough to make the child blissful in front of the father.

    The fifth novel by this 39-year-old writer, The Son of Man, designates both a father and a child. This is the story of transmitted, repeated violence, which may recur over several generations. As harsh as Règne animal (Gallimard, 2016), the previous novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo that already drew a genealogy, The Son of Man is inscribed both the genre of the mythological narrative and in the present. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo presents an environment, a misery, but he does it in passing. The writer whose style is austere does not dwell on anything.

    The Son of Man is a tragedy, a thriller, in the manner of Faulkner. A man returns by force in the life of a woman with whom he had a son now nine years old. The returnee requires the mother-child duo to leave the city (never named) and follow it to the “Rocks”, an abandoned house located in the mountains.

    The “Rocks”: this name announces a fall and injuries, open fractures. The father himself lived in Les Roches with his father. We learn that, devastated by the death of his wife, this father, man’s father, has therefore become crazy and dangerous for his son who fled the place at the age of fifteen. By spinning, he saved his skin. He moved to the city where he met “the mother”. They had fun with a “band” of friends, they spent time doing “silt shopping” in the car. When they were talking, they put the beer packs on the hood of the cars. Now, the mother “works in a company canteen in the industrial zone across the city and does housework in a kindergarten at the end of the day. ”

    The departure to Les Roches puts an end to this routine, which was suitable for the mother and son. A former unhappy child, the father puts his step in those of his father, tyrannical, angry. “Hate” and “sentment” inhabit him, he takes revenge on the evil that “the providence” has done to him. As an animal kingdom, The Son of Man does not invent a nature that would be a lost paradise. The descriptions are superb but the landscape is disturbing: “The night now carries in it the expectation of dawn, this tiny variation that detaches the contours of the world without them being yet intelligible, only letting degrees of darkness appear. A previously invisible veil tears up; everything that stood entrenched in the backs of the night is suddenly bathed in a bluish glow that did not seem to come from the outside of things but rather emanate from them. ”

    What about the mother? She gives in to the father knowing that she should resist him and then initiates a round of submissions: the obedient mother demands that the child submit like her to this man: “Doesn’t your father kiss you? “. No. It is also on the child’s neck, as if he wanted to put it down, that the father “places one of his hands” the first time he squeezes it against him.

    None of the three protagonists of the Son of Man – the father, the mother, the son – is designated by a first name, so these characters can represent anyone; all of us, for example. In addition, as a fore of the novel, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo placed a brief short story that is italicized. This is the story of how men and women have survived since the dawn of time. This is not the most successful part of the book as it is solemn and explicit, but it announces the morality of history, which is not cheerful, but which is quite true: violence flows through the veins of certain lines and is exercised against children, small terrorized animals poorly mastering language.

    The Son of Man is a silent book, fury makes no noise. Words that hurt flow away, without comment. And if the mother, however protective she may be, fails to save the skin of her offspring, it is because she lacks physical strength, but it is for another reason: she has the easy concession, she is porous to the words that demean her because she has bathed in this depreciating climate. “No one but me would be willing to offer you anything, do you hear? “, for example, the father says to the mother. She knows it’s wrong but she keeps silent and ends up believing it.

    Jean-Baptiste Del Amo never frontally characterizes the psychology of his characters; it emerges from itself. He reserves the precision of his words to other fields, to other things. Nevertheless, in a few sentences, the character of each member of the trio appears. The reader then gets an idea of it, according to his personal history. Children of terrible parents, unite.

    Fathers and mothers are co-responsible for the repetition of misfortunes: the writer evokes in the middle of the novel the heroine’s mother, “the grandmother”, therefore, who, when she visited him, stood in his daughter’s living room “with her handbag held on her ostensibly tight knees”, like a duègne, and it is understood The heroine adopts this low position with her son’s father in part because of her own mother who has accustomed her to bending her spine. “The old genitrice” from the petty bourgeoisie, closed on herself, wiped her feet on her daughter as if on a doormat. This is the result, thank you.

    Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s language is beautiful, elegant, both refined and rich in precise descriptions of postures. These passages are dazzling because they sound so right. The author records the stealth movements very well: a cigarette that is lit, two hands that rests on the neck so that the head rests, or the “agile jump on the steel ramp” of a track of self-buffers.

    He is careful that the bodies reflect the personality of their owner. We have the body we want and it reflects our depth: the father is thin and sneaks everywhere; so he was probably able to escape from his own father. Conversely, “Everything in the mother’s body has come into resistance against that of the grandmother: her full shapes, her supple skin, her henna-tinted hair that she does not comb and lets dry in the open air. Unlike the duègne, the mother is generous; the slowness of her movements, when she is happy, confirms it. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo devotes a beautiful page to the way the mother moves in front of her son, without “false modesty”.

    The Son of Man is not a burning descent of fathers, and although tragedy is on the way, moments of tenderness punctuate the novel. Before being nothing more than a ball of malevolence and an incendiary, the father tamed his son. A relationship is created between them that the reader discovers from the child’s point of view and that Jean-Baptiste Del Amo wonderfully draws, in a few scenes, a few words. At the fair, the child groped in search of affection. The length and complexity of the sentence reflect the fog through which he makes his way: “He would like to share a little of his joy and borrow from the tenderness that he usually shows to the mother, transposes it towards the father, with the prescience of this impediment, of this embarrassment that always presides over the manifestations of feelings between men, between fathers and their sons And when the man passes his arm over the boy’s shoulders, behind the headrest, no longer directing the car with a flexible and expert hand, it seems to the son has managed to conquer a little of his consideration, that the father, who a few moments earlier, still represented for him an esoteric, hostile block, opens up to him, or tells him by this en ”

    The Son of Man is not a thesis book. He does not advocate a deconstruction of men. He is not pleading for anything. He paints relationships governed by fear, an ancestral marital and parental pattern, which some know they do not reproduce. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo does not throw everything away with bath water: there are precious behaviors between fathers and sons as well as between mothers and sons that are not interchangeable between the sexes. Emmanuelle Lambert in Le Garçon de mon père (Stock) or Marc Dugain in La Volonté (Gallimard) seem to think so too. ✪

  • The Redskins – Neither Washington Nor Moscow

    The Redskins – Neither Washington Nor Moscow

    With their explosive fusion of punk and northern soul, violence and belligerence, this politically driven English band brought the left-wing skinhead movement together. Originally known as No Swastikas, they went to London where singer/guitarist Chris Dean (born c.1963) acquired the name X. Moore. Chris Dean is also a writer for the New Musical Express. Martin Hewes (bass) and Nick King were the other founding members (drums). A flexible brass section, which included Steve Nicol and Lloyd Dwyer as its most enduring members, joined them both in the studio and on stage. They were able to arrange a session for the John Peel BBC Radio 1 show in 1982 after their daring debut, “Peasant Army,” on Leeds-based independent CNT Records, which would be aired five times.

    Gary Bushell, a journalist for Sounds, chose the follow-up, “Lean On Me,” as Single Of The Year. Due to their solely political lyrics (they were all Socialist Workers Party members), they quickly attracted the attention of big musical labels, which led to a deal with London Records. On the eve of the group’s second significant tour, King was replaced by Paul Hookham (ex-English Subtitles, Lemons, Woodentops) due to personal differences. Although ‘Keep On Keeping On’ and subsequent singles fell short of their early promise, by 1984 they had turned into ardent supporters of the striking National Union of Miners, performing at a number of events on their behalf. Although the band’s debut album, Neither Washington Nor Moscow, received favorable reviews, critics continued to label them as underachievers, a destiny they willingly chose when they disbanded in 1986. Hewes went back to working as a motorcycle dispatcher. ✪