Anyone who is sexually aroused by accounts of murder, torture and domination is demented and dangerous. They should always be suspected as capable of acting out what they've read. As the lives of so many sadistic sex murderers has shown. There, I said it. Any intellectual who presents erotic accounts of murder, torture and domination as anything other than entirely unacceptable is even more dangerous and history proves that, as well. There, I've said that, too.
Needing something to think about, thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini's massively degenerate movie, Salo: 120 Days in Sodom, trying to fill in what I already knew, I've come across a link with the interrupted series about Darwinism I've been working on. The links and strands of history and intellectual activity are extremely twisted and embedded in what are held to be unrelated ideas and ideologies but the more I've looked in the past several days, the more obvious those links are.
As many another piece of stupid and immoral and amoral so-called art, these days, Salo was openly copied from an earlier piece of depravity. That's supposed to mean it's high art, what with the historical referencing and an assumption of research and the opportunity of scholarly papers saying that, and all. Such is a consequence of judging art on the basis of what prestigious critics say, getting talked out of acknowledging what you're seeing and hearing right in front of you.
The book Pasolini used as a model was The Marquis de Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage. I haven't read all of that book, having slogged my way through most of of de Sade's Justine much earlier. I was a teenager and had been told it was naughty, risque art. That book provided enough information about his diseased mind to suffice, what I've seen of his other scribbleage, including Les 120 journées merely confirmed what I had concluded about forty years ago.
The most extensive treatment of his thinking I've read was Simone de Beauvoir's unintentionally revealing, Must We Burn Sade? From that I found confirmation of the conclusion that her brand of existentialism was a crock of silliness. It also led to the inevitable conclusion that what De Beauvoir had to say about the rights of women should be checked for counterproductive features.
_____________
Let me pause to say, intellectual movements and, even more so, movements that aspire to politics and actually changing real life can't both hold assertions of the rights dignity, self determination of women, gay folk and others and also contain an assertion of the rights of the enemies of women, gay folk and others TO COMPLETELY VIOLATE THE BEING OF THE PEOPLE who those goods exist to benefit. De Beauvoir, as a professional writer has the same defect that so many who make their living by writing have, a superstitious belief that all writing is valuable and that words on paper or images and words on a screen have rights superior to those who can be murdered or enslaved or oppressed by those words and images. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France it would seem that the great intellectuals don't seem to get that there is a basic and total difference between the assertion of equality and rights and the assertions made by de Sade and other such promoters of the torture, rape and murder, most often OF WOMEN. As if there wasn't already enough of that happening in every, single country without it being encouraged by decadent intellectuals claiming to be feminists or champions of freedom. You wonder how intellectuals can be assumed to be capable of learning anything from their basis in intellectualism if they've missed those things.
I could change every reference to women in the last paragraph to gay men and exactly the same thing could be said. By an enormous percentage the foremost literary representation of gay men is in pornography, the degradation, bondage, enslavement and sadistic use of a weaker man by a stronger man is one of the most commonly found themes of gay porn. I'm convinced that gay porn has been a force to turn gay men against each other, to become each other's oppressors, presenting gay sex as a pathological expression of self-hatred, murdering the souls of gay men far more effectively than any fundamentalist campaigners have. Struggle against fundamentalist opposition has positive effects, the porn industry does their hateful work without eliciting a resistance. The same can be said of the purportedly "feminist" promotion of pornography, sometimes funded by straight, male pornographer.
The recent statements by a claimant to the mantle of de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter support that idea that any citation of her should not be regarded as above suspicion. As I recently pointed out, if you buy into the identity of a writer and take them as an authority, you might get a lot more than you wanted. To put a point on that, the pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, Camille Paglia, has echoed that earlier piece of insanely over-respected crot about de Sade. Any rational witness can see that feminism had been down taken the same destructive detour into counterproductive futility that gay liberation and, indeed, the entire left has, by such "feminists". Nothing proves that as clearly as the embrace of the most extreme expressions of misogyny in pornography and the sex industry. There are feminist critics of, not only de Sade but the pseudo-feminist support of it, and the far more extensive slamming of those feminist critics only compounds the validity of what they said.
--------------------
The title of the book is worth a post in itself, Like Salo, The 120 days of Sodom or the school of libertinism ends in the death of the kidnapped victims of an orgy of sadistic and degrading homicidal sex, most of them women, on behalf of aristocratic "scholars". The basis of that is the sexually gratifying ability of men with more money and power to turn other people into objects for them to consume. Clearly, de Sade presented his imagined criminal insanity as lessons to be followed. That is the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, Pasolini and other high intellectual champions of the book are promoting as a great blow for liberty, most certainly not for equality, though of a fraternity excluding women and the other victims of fascistic frat brothers such as will take de Sade's course in how to exercise their, exclusive, liberty. Any alleged feminist who would assert that is anything except something to resist and suppress would be self-impeached past the point of ever being taken seriously by an intellectual milieu based in reason and democratic values. The ability of such to survive as an intellectual figure is a general indictment of the culture that allows that survival. Liberty to oppress is something that has always been claimed by oligarchs and aristocrats, it is no accident that the books libertine heroes are aristocrats.
Pasolini produced an intentionally disgusting and depraved simulated snuff porn movie, pretending that it was more than that. He was an intellectual. I read somewhere that one of his circles of hell, "The circle of shit" was calimed by him to be a commentary on the industrial food industry. Which was something I would almost guarantee that not a single person who hadn't read his claim would have gotten from the movie. His transposition of de Sade's depravity to the waning days of fascist Italy is, similarly, a shallow pose to give his piece of pornography a skim coat of intellectual-political polish. And in that Pasolini merely cheapens the literary genre that actually does that.
When I found out, after seeing the movie, that a 17-year-old boy who Pasolini had just had paid sex with was arrested for his brutal murder I can't say that I was terribly surprised or upset. Given what he had presented in Salo, I can imagine Pasolini giving the kid more than enough reason for an enraged reaction. Pasolini was more than three times the boy's age and he was, beyond doubt, far richer and more powerful than the boy was. I can only imagine what might have happened to the boy. I don't believe the cover stories about political and mafia involvement.
The intellectual response to both the book and the movie have been valuable only in showing how dishonest, hypocritical and stupid the intellectuals can be, telling lies that they really don't believe, themselves. It's more true now than ever that a large part of the semi-official intelligensia tell each other things that are known to be acceptable to their common consensus, with small variations as points of view fall, slightly out of style, only to reemerge in retro fashion. Intellectual life has a lot in common with the fashion industry, in which what sells is virtuous because it sells. Perhaps the least viable variations in those fashions are those that contain moral requirements of real equality that could cost the elite, which the same intelligentsia largely, service.
The promotion of sadistic sexual murder, sexual enslavement, sexual torture, sexual imprisonment which is what the entire positive view of de Sade and Pasolini's movie really boils down to is bad enough as an intellectual pose. The entire enterprise has a far wider political and historical presence in some of the most profoundly evil expressions of 20th century history.
--------------
De Sade's manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome, written while he was imprisoned at the Bastille, was lost during the looting of the building at the start of the revolution. De Sade believed it had been destroyed - he said he "wept tears of blood" over it. But it, somehow, survived to be first published in 1905 by the founder of "scientific" sexology, the psycothreapist Iwan Bloch, a colleague of Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld. The NOVEL, the product of a clearly diseased and officially insane mind, was presented as a scientifically important document in that pseudo-science, it should be asked what kind of a base that was to build on. Having just found out about Iwan Bloch's connection to the book, it's a question that is even more important than it first seemed.
Iwan Bloch is a name I'd come across only once before, during my research of Ernst Haeckel, in a short notice about the symposium organized in honor of Haeckel's 80th birthday**, in February 1914.
Bloch said that Haeckel was:
A St. George who has slain the dragon of the maladies of modern man and has fearlessly marked all the dualistic survivals of prescientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity.
Which you might be rather astonished to read if you read much of Haeckel. Anyone who had could hardly have missed such typical passages as this one:*
In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!
Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil” should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterward juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom today among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does, it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease Is it not better and more rational to cut off from first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives bring to themselves and their families?
"Wonders of Life" 1904 Trans. Joseph McCabe
Such were, clearly, the kinds of mental and moral progress that Bloch, the man responsible for first giving the world de Sade's book in published form, meant. As a convinced monist and a scholar of Haeckel, Bloch must have read that as well as almost the same, exact, assertions Haeckel repeatedly made in many books from 1868 down to the end of his writing career. Haeckel repeatedly, on the basis of science, and as an example of the progressive production of increased fitness within species by natural selection, predicted the eventual eradication of entire races of people by those he names as their biological superiors, white Europeans, "Aryans". There is no way that Bloch could not have included that major theme of Haeckel's science in his assertion.
The bizarre and entirely screwed up analysis of recent cultural and allegedly scientific history as seen in these intersecting lines provides a lot to think about.
Any line that could begin with de Sade's depraved concept of "liberty" in which the more powerful can imprison, bind, use, torture and even kill people, mostly women but men as well, victims who are not at liberty but who are presented by their consumers as wanting "it" should carry nothing but warning signs. That his most infamously depraved book - de Sade credited himself with having produced the filthiest book ever written, in it - should have ever been imagined to have "scientific value" would do nothing but impeach the science that made use of THE PIECE OF FICTION as if it constituted scientific data.
Only, as can be seen in Haeckel's passage, he also relied on far from scientific and obviously ideological, anti-democratic lore from ancient Greece in order to recommend mass murder as the hygienic cleansing of the human species. And, as is so often the case in the intellectual and "scientific" promotion of killing, he presents his proposal for mass murder as being "for the good" of those murdered. The more I've delved into Haeckel's writing, the more I have become convinced that what is obvious on first reading is the actual case, Haeckel's science was vital to the development of Nazism. That conclusion is avoidable only by lying about what he said and the clearest connections with him and the Nazis, beginning the very year of Haeckel's death. Vital to that development was the dependence on a simulation of information from real life instead of actual data. When that artificial substitute for data is looked at, its clear, ideological nature is obvious.
That a line of 20th century anti-Nazi, intellectuals, such as de Beauvoir and Pasolini, have taken up de Sade's cause - as some expression of liberty - as well as the proto-Nazis is a general indictment of such an intellectual culture. De Sade was criminally insane, the incarceration of an ARISTOCRAT like de Sade, first in the Bastille and later in various venues, to end up in the Sanitorium at Charenton is kind of a clue that he had real life issues. His writing is depraved, it is the absolute opposite of universal rights, of equality, though it's a good example of the kind of thinking that "liberty" and "fraternity" could become in the absence of equality. In the most telling of events in his life was his election to the National Convention as a radical. His erratic, often contradictory and bizarre performance in that insane governing body didn't exactly stand out in the homicidal, intellectual insanity that was The French Revolution. What his presence in that revolutionary government tells of is the pathological nature of the time and people held up by subsequent radicals as some great advance in enlightenment.
That existentialists, many of them elite Marxists, were pushing de Sade on the basis of "freedom" is entirely consistent with the real political character of genocidal Marxist governments that they were covering up for. An honest analysis of political identity would not fail to see that there was a lot in common between the Nazis and the Marxists. Their real life histories of genocide and mass murder first and foremost. Those are certainly more important than any intellectual abstractions, though it's the intellectual abstractions that carry the most "intellectual" interest. The crucial issue is the consideration of people as merely their material substance, of the denial of the spiritual basis of their rights. As I've pointed out before, in the absence of a real, effective belief in the metaphysical attributes of equality, inherent rights and an absolute moral obligation to respect those rights of all other people, even when someone is able to get away with violating them, is the crucial point in evaluating political ideologies. Both fascism and Marxism deny the reality of those metaphysical attributes and on the basis of their being unscientific delusions they demote them to unimportance, burying them beneath some alleged scientific truth.
Pasolini's life and his family were an odd cross roads between fascism, communism and libertinism. He worked for a fascist literary magazine into the 1940s until he was fired. Drafted into the fascist army, he was imprisoned by the Nazis - for reasons I'm not certain of - and emerged a communist. He is one of those literary types who moved easily from fascist to communist, what is usually taken as opposites on the line of political identity but which are, in reality, first cousins. That's something I've written about several times. It's remarkable how many times that enormous distance on that imaginary line of political identity has been crossed from one to the other in one step, quite often without any real change of content.
It is a tragedy of the political identity of gay folk that it developed struggling against laws created at the behest of institutional Christianity***. It is also a tragedy that that fact led it to be so mixed up with such perversions of sexual love that de Sade and others promoted, the unloving sexual use of people which constantly turns on either indifference or hate. It being impossible to form open, loving relationships, gay people, especially gay men, have had to resort to being part of the demimonde. It is also a tragic and odd feature of being gay that its outlaw definition has made being gay an issue of materialism that denies the very existence of rights that are the only real and reliable basis for the real liberation of any oppressed group. I could go on and on with this piece, trying to unravel and expose the twisted and strange strands of intellectual pathology that finding these weird and seemingly contradictory facts consist of.
Real freedom for gay folk, for GLBT people, for women, for everyone will be found in the rejection of this complete mess, the legacy of pseudo-science, pseudo-liberation, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-enlightenment for the entirely clear insistence on the reality of equality of inherent rights and the really required practice of respecting those rights in real life, not in the mere and impotent assertions of them. The intellectual analyses of the lives of people that has been ongoing from the 19th century till today is morally and intellectually fraudulent. It is based on a worship of power and death, not on the real things in real life that constitute freedom. Those are entirely too every-day and decent to be temporarily titillating and stimulating for superficial, bored intellectuals who don't have to do much but impress other superficial and bored intellectuals, all more interested in protecting their place on the rotting edifice than in the real lives of real people who need real things and real respect for their real rights on an absolutely equal basis.
* For more about Haeckel's advocacy of murdering people who would later be on the Nazi's extermination list, read him.
** The New York Times account of the occasion is notable for it being another instance in which the pre-Nazi depravity of Haeckel's monism is not noticed by someone who, obviously, was familiar with books in which he'd expounded it.
*** It's the great tragedy of Christianity that it ever took on that kind of political power. The greatest aspect of that was the oligarchic necessity of suppressing the real nature of the Gospel of Jesus, the most radical economic justice, through the method of obsessive concentration on suppressing the sexual expression of love. Jesus didn't mention same sex relations even once. He didn't mention abortion or birth control once. He mentioned the moral obligation to do justice continually.
No comments:
Post a Comment