Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Abdellatif Kechiche's La Vie d'Adèle

A. O. Scott, in spite of his stealthy persona as the New York Times' nice, sensible, movie reviewer, is one of the great English-language critics active today. This fact hit me once again when I read his stunning review of a stunning film, Abdellatif Kechiche's La Vie d'Adèle (distributed in the US under the title Blue Is the Warmest Color).

The film portrays the life of the adolescent Adèle, of Lille, as she falls in love with the slightly older Emma. Most of the talk surrounding it has been focused on the long, graphic sex scene featuring these two women. This scene won for La Vie d'Adèle an NC-17 rating by the censorship board in the US, and it also won the condemnation of the author of the graphic novel upon which the film is partially based. She complained that, for all the film's pretense of authenticity, this was just another 'steamy' lesbian romp, a product of the male gaze. 

I'll get back to this question in a moment, but what I wanted to focus on was more Scott than Kechiche. Scott liked the sex scene ("Um, wow," was his gloss on the elements of the film that made the censors' meters go full tilt). He also understands the problem of the male gaze and how it has limited the sort of things that have been able to be represented in the history of art. And what comes across, in this simultaneous sensual absorption and critical awareness of the limitations of perspective, is a profound humanism, of the sort that art may be hoped to bring about in a person willing to learn from it, and that is entirely at odds with the increasingly conventional pseudo-wisdom that goes under the name of 'intersectionality': the thoroughly anti-humanist idea that one may only know the experience of members of one's own group, and one must preface any talk of the experience of members of other groups with a list of one's own demographic coordinates (cis, straight, white, male...). 

Scott doesn't bother with such a list: 

[O]ver the course of nearly three hours and what seems like about a half-dozen years... Adèle acquires a depth and grandeur that make her equal to some of the great heroines of literature. For a while, as with Anna Karenina or Elizabeth Bennet or Clarissa Dalloway, her life is also yours, and afterward you may discover that yours has altered as a result of the encounter.        

I also had the sense that Adèle's life was mine, and this in spite of the thoroughly contingent features of my identity that define me socially but not, I'm prepared to say, metaphysically. I liked the sex scene (c'est peu dire!), and I felt that it deepened my identification with the protagonist, rather than removing me from her experience and placing me outside it as a voyeur. I took this deepening as a mark of the film's artistic integrity. 

I recognize that my perspective could well be inflected by my particular list of demographic coordinates, but I am not prepared to accept that my belief, that art takes me outside of myself and facilitates Einfühlung into the lives of people who are not me, is only a sort of false-consciousness or rationalization of the male gaze as something loftier than it actually is. It seems to me much more reasonable to suppose that art has such 'feeling-in' as one of its highest aims, but that it will nonetheless always bear the signature of its creator. The visibility of this signature --in the event, Kechiche's own gaze-- is not necessarily an artisitic failure, and especially not --as Scott notes with his sharp interpretation of the significance of the conversations in the film about Gustav Klimt et al.-- when the artist conveys within the work itself a heightened awareness of the limitations of his own perspective. 

In sum: a glorious work of art, and a bold expression of resistance against our era's self-inflicted ghettoization of human experience. 

Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013)

Arthur Danto was one of my two greatest inspirations when I was first studying philosophy (Richard Wollheim was the other). In truth, at the time, when I was considering going to graduate school, I was looking around somewhat desperately for philosophers whose tendrils extended into the world in ways that I found compelling and worth following out. And Danto's work was singular in this regard.

I was rereading last night, after learning of his death, what I was able to pull up online of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. I was struck by this passage:

Nietzsche, who was deeply sensitive to art, began his philosophical cycle with that, but went on systematically to touch base with every major philosophical question, while Kant, who appears to have been singularly insensitive to art, completed his cycle with what stands as one of th major philosophical treatments of art in the entire literature.

Twenty years ago, I think I thought of Danto's own contribution to the philosophy of art somewhat as he sees Nietzsche's: as a sensitivity to art that leads to a philosophy that covers everything, and engulfs the world. Now I would be sooner inclined to think of Danto as closer to Kant: as someone whose actual taste in art I find mostly misguided, to the extent that taste can be misguided, who was far too preoccupied with mid-century hucksterism passing itself off as self-reflexivity and thus as art-become-philosophy, but who nonetheless was great enough as a philosopher to develop profound and enduring insights about art from these unpromising objects.

A Group Letter to the New York Times on the Plight of the Roma in Europe

[This is the complete text of a letter submitted to The New York Times, an abridged version of which will appear in print on Thursday, October 24. --JEHS] 

Dear Editor,

We were dismayed to read Dan Bilefsky's October 19 article, "Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?" The title pretends to present two sides of a legitimate debate, when in fact the first horn of the dichotomy, as stated, has no place at all in civil discussion, in Europe or America. Failing entirely to consider the matter in a critical and historical framework, the article delivers what the title promises, making it appear acceptable to debate as a serious issue whether Roma culture will effectively be a plague on Europe until this culture is renounced by its members through assimilation. 

We are not in the habit of resorting too quickly to that well-known argument-stopper, the comparison to Nazism. But such speech has truly, without exaggeration, not been acceptable in Europe since the time of the Third Reich. Though the Roma and Sinti were persecuted and murdered then, too, the Nazi resort to claims of essential cultural backwardness, and of essential foreignness on European soil, is more familiar from that regime's persecution of the Jews. Can anyone even begin to imagine, today, speaking publicly about any other persecuted and marginalized European ethnicity as 'primitive', as fundamentally unfit for side-by-side existence with the majority groups on European soil? Of course not.

While it might be objected that Bilefsky is only repeating the defense to which the Roma themselves have had recourse before the law in France, this omits to acknowledge that there is no mention at all of 'primitiveness' in their defense, but only of tradition. While some Roma may have decided to appeal to the category of cultural difference as a tactic, we do not see them self-identifying as 'primitive'. Of course they wouldn't self-identify in this way, and in any case the key question the article aims to address has nothing to do with defense strategies in this particular trial, and everything to do with the politics of identity and belonging in Europe.  

Can anyone imagine speaking of economically and historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities in the United States in this way? Again, of course not. It is worth noting here that Roma people were legally enslaved in parts of Balkan Europe until 1856, thus just seven years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the US. Since that time, there has been no civil rights movement, no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, to draw attention to the deep, systematic, engrained injustices the Roma have had to face. 

Overt discrimination against Roma, while technically illegal, remains widespread and widely accepted in Southeastern Europe. Deprived of opportunity there, many hope for better prospects in Western Europe, only to find once they arrive, in many cases, that their status as citizens of the European Union counts for nothing. Roma migrants from Romania or Bulgaria are unable to take advantage of the promise and opportunity European unification was supposed to offer. Though in many cases citizens of a political union which migrants and refugees from all over the world struggle to reach, often dying in the process, the Roma remain effectively stateless, disowned by all European governing bodies as out of place, indeed as invasive. 

Nonetheless, they have a vibrant and resilient culture, with literature worth reading, films worth seeing, and people worth getting to know. This much they have in common with all cultures. Bilefsky's article will certainly not help anyone to realize this, and could very well help to bring about the return of the sort of scenario in Europe that, we fear, now has too many people unreflectively mouthing the words: 'Never again'.

Sincerely,

1. Pantelis Bassakos, Panteion University, Athens, Greece

2. Susan Bernofsky, Columbia University

3. Emanuela Bianchi, New York University

4. Gunnar Björnsson, Umeå University, Sweden

5. Ina Blom, University of Oslo, Norway

6. John Collins, Columbia University

7. Stefano Cossara, Université de Paris-Sorbonne

8. Gergely Csibra, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

9. John Drabinski, Amherst College

10. Ed Emmer, Emporia State University, Kansas

11. Meredith Evans, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

12. Marcie Frank, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

13. Su Friedrich, Princeton University

14. Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

15. Aaron Garrett, Boston University

16. Jorge-Luis Guijarro, Universidad de Cádiz, Spain

17. Christophe Z. Guilmoto, Institut de Recherche Pour le Développement, Paris 

18. Edward Kazarian, Rowan University, Glasboro, New Jersey

19. Julie Klein, Villanova University, Philadelphia

20. Jonathan Kramnick, The Johns Hopkins University

21. Martin Lenz, University of Groningen, Netherlands

22. Alan M. Leslie, Rutgers University; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

23. Hilde Lindemann, Michigan State University

24. Mathieu Marion, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada

25. Christian Munthe, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

26. Alan Nelson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

27. John Protevi, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

28. Anne Reboul, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, France

29. Uta Reinöhl, University of Cologne, Germany 

30. Adina Ruiu, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

31. Eric Schliesser, Ghent University, Belgium

32. Justin E. H. Smith, Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 

33. Jon Solomon, Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3, Lyon, France

34. Dan Sperber, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, France, and Central European University, Budapest

35. Jason Stanley, Yale University

36. Robert Vallier, Institut des Sciences Politiques, Paris

37. Charles Wolfe, Ghent University, Belgium

38. Ines G. Zupanov, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, France

Gerald Dworkin's Philosophy Commonplace Book: A Review

Jerry Dworkin has put together an impressive collection of short quotations, jokes, and aphorisms that together give a vivid picture of the history and current state of the discipline of philosophy, and indeed that also shine light in the search for answers to profound philosophical questions. The purpose is to edify and amuse at once, and in this Dworkin certainly succeeds. Many of the jokes are Jerry's own, and they are some of the best in the collection.

Jerry Dworkin might not be hands-down the funniest person in the history of philosophy, but he's probably the funniest Dworkin. Not that he's had much competition. There was that one who had the line about 'clerking for Learned Hand', which always made me snicker but was probably just a one-off sort of thing, and there was that other who... well, never mind. As for Jerrys, there he's had some stiff competition indeed, and in the same broadly borschty category. But this much can be said with certainty: Jerry Dworkin has survived all the other Jerrys and all the other Dworkins, and now, with this rich epoch-making e-tome, has singlehandedly revived the genre of the commonplace book, and bequeathed to the generations a fine collection that is bound to survive its author. At least if anyone can figure out how to download the damned thing. I had to write and request a review copy, which was duly sent along. Which in turn compelled me, morally, to either fork over the $5.97 a Kindle download would have cost me, or to do a little write-up. Since I am now an employee of a French university and therefore am basically worrying at this point about stocking up enough coal for the coming winter, I decided to do the writing thing.

Let's get something straight right away. Philosophy humour is generally awful: dismal vocational coping, and nothing more, substantially no different from the bumpersticker you might spot on a sagging Econoline that reads 'Electricians Conduit Better'. And if anyone ever again suggests to me that awful Monty Python sketch about the philosophers' football match, I am just going to come clean and tell them that my ideal of humour is rather closer to Redd Foxx's classic routine, You've Got to Wash Your Ass. Even if we limit ourselves to Pythonalia, who can honestly say that that philosophy-football bit is better than, say, the All-England 'Summarize Proust' Contest? But that one is about literature, and fails to elicit squeals of self-recognition. We want Monty Python to be our Dilbert.

But Jerry Dworkin is no Scott Adams, and his compilation is based on the understanding that humour is, or ought to be, more than a coping tool for professional philosophers. Ideally, it serves as a powerful motor for the pursuit of philosophical truth itself, and even as the vehicle by which this truth is delivered. The whole book is a collection of quotations, yet for some reason Jerry has decided to offer some epigrams (thus, quotations) before moving to the collection properly speaking. One of these is from Patricia Marx, who says: "Truth masquerading as a joke is always what I strive for." Drop the 'masquerade' part, and we get closer to what I myself am inclined to suspect, though generally too cautious to say: that truth is a joke, a very serious joke perhaps, but still a joke. This is why 'getting' a joke is, if you think about it, pretty much the example par excellence of understanding. (And yes, this includes the Foxx routine.)

The humour here is mostly American rather than British, thank God, though with due respect paid to Oxbridge deadpan as but one of the sources of our mongrel American sensibility. One appreciates in reading this collection what a huge debt 20th-century American philosophy owes to Jewish popular culture: there seems to be a fluid translation of idiom --which must have occurred sometime in mid-century, which owes much to the singular genius of Sidney Morgenbesser, and which I suppose still awaits its full history-- between the Catskills and the Ivy League. Much of the subsequent humour, then, seems to revolve around the clash of habituses that came with breaking open the stranglehold WASP mandarins once had on higher education in the humanities. 

Some years ago Jerry took a part-time position at the University of California, Davis. This might help us to understand the origins of the commonplace book. You see, one quotation Jerry might have done well to include is Josiah Royce's report in an 1878 letter to William James: "There is no philosophy in California." He did not mean this as a description of the temporary circumstances of his recently founded university at Berkeley. He meant to capture the essence of that place, where "the atmosphere for the study of metaphysics is bad." This is how I tend to explain my own stunted development in matters of abstraction and speculation, being from that distant territory myself and only going back east to learn of the existence of immaterial and eternal entities at a relatively advanced age.

But Jerry went the other way and arrived in California rather late, and the effects of climatic degeneration could not completely eat away the deep learning he had acquired earlier in his life (presumably somewhere cold). Perhaps he began compiling this commonplace book to help him cope with his new surroundings, as an explorer might dose up on quinine before descending into the tropics, or, perhaps better, as a senior will stock up on large-type word-search books before being checked into a senior-care center. I don't know. What I can say is Jerry Dworkin has definitely found all the right words.

---

Philosophy: A Commonplace Book by Gerald Dworkin (Kindle edition).

Aristotle at the Döner Kebap Stand

I have been saying for quite some time that one of the most useful windows into a culture's folk-ontological commitments is the unique way it variously applies mass nouns and count nouns to foodstuffs. Russians see potatoes as a mass: e.g., give me some potato. This is revealing, I believe, of many other things besides.

It is with respect to animals, in particular, that these folk commitments might be thought at once to carry with them significant moral implications. Ordinarily, animals are taken as individual beings par excellence, and this at least since Aristotle said, in the Categories, that what he means by 'substance' is really just 'this particular horse or man' (to paraphrase).

Animals lose their substantial unity in slaughter and preparation, yet even there they frequently maintain their conceptual unity: for Thanksgiving, e.g., a family has a turkey, and that is as much a single, individual entity as the living, strutting tom that preceded it. The further we move down the scale of ritual importance, it seems, the more likely the creature, following its slaughter, is going to be treated as a mass, or, ironically, as a 'substance' not in the Aristotelian sense but in the decidedly modern sense (of which the dreaded 'pink slime' is arguably a limit case, much like prime matter in Aristotle's scheme).

I have been noticing for a while now that 'chicken', long mass-produced on a scale rivalled by no othery poultry, and long considered a very low-status meat, has filtered into German to describe the end product of the process of deanimalization, which is at the same time a process of deindividualization. I think it was the Turkish döner vendors who first started using the word chicken in compounds to describe the stuff they scrape off of those massive mounds of flesh that spin around all day, like brontosaurus thighs, in their tiny sweltering Imbissstuben. I have even seen some döner joints, run by Turks bent on German hypercorrectness, who have taken the first bold steps towards Germanification of the spelling: Tschickendöner.

Now the German language is extremely promiscuous, or at least it has an ongoing unsavory relationship with English, and is often seen to import words for which it would be extremely easy to find a properly Germanic equivalent. Why, oh why, do Germans say Citycall and Departmentstore? Every time I see these abominations I think to myself: this is not what I came here for. These unwanted babies are the product of the same cultural uncertainty that has German parents choosing names like Kevin and Lisa, to the utter disappointment of those of us who have come looking for Heinrichs, Wolfgangs, and Hedwigs. But anyhow, it's a different story with French, and when an English word pierces through the thick membrane of pride that has grown up around their tongue, you will know this is for strong conceptual reasons: there was an idea there that had to be expressed, and only English could do the trick. Enter chicken.

As is well known, French law requires advertisers who use English to include an asterisked translation in tiny text at the bottom (other languages as well, but de facto 90% or so English; most Italian allusions, for tomato sauce and stuff, are taken care of by the suffixation of an -issimo to a proper French word, which does not necessitate an asterisk). The burger chain Quick (and remind me to write another note soon on the word quick and its connection to the word bios, and thus its surprising proximity to the issue currently at hand), has decided to sell a 'chicken' product, and was compelled by law to offer a translation of this word. What did they come up with? 'Chicken' is a 'fried preparation of poulet', where a poulet, in turn, is conceptualized as an integral animal.

As we see with anthropomorphized hot dogs and the like, animals rendered into pure masses can then be reconstituted into something that is conceptualized as an integral being. But chicken, in the continental European sense, seems to be essentially a mass. The implications of this sort of example are tremendous, I think, for the way language shapes our conceptualization of the community of beings (a conceptualization that is ontological and moral at once).   

The Norwegian Far Right Comes to France

[From an article soon to appear...]

The publishing house founded by Gaston Gallimard in 1911, and bearing his name, is an institution that matters to French literary life in a way for which it is difficult to find equivalencies in other countries. Farrar Straus and Giroux? MacMillan? The New Yorker? All of these together do not begin to approach the importance of Gallimard as an arbiter of literary taste, and therefore also, as the French see things, as a guardian of French culture and history. To be among the editors at Gallimard is thus to serve as a high priest and a kingmaker, even as a god who keeps the world going by what Descartes (who died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650) called ‘continuous creation’. By ‘the world’ here, we should of course understand le monde, a fascinating French invention which reduces everything –the planets and stars, the comets, the earth with its core and mantle, and all the plant and animal and human life crawling upon its surface-- to the experience of a certain class of people in a certain smallish country. Gallimard sits atop this world. 

On July 22, 2011, the 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, committed, in Oslo, the worst atrocity in Western Europe since the end of World War II. He murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers and young adults attending a summer camp organized by the Norwegian Labour party. Breivik’s goal was to initiate a war against multiculturalism in Europe, which he saw as inevitably leading to a loss of authentic European existence, a mongrelization at best, and a total Saracenization at worst. He is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law. This comes out to a little over three months for each person dead.

A year or so after the attack, an editor at Gallimard, the well-known French novelist and essayist Richard Millet, would publish what he called an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik: a literary elogy to the Norwegian murderer. The author distinguishes between the 'artistic' quality of Breivik’s mass slaughter, on the one hand, and the political and moral dimensions of it on the other. He stresses repeatedly that he has only come to praise the first of these. It is only the liberal multiculturalist herd, which for him is the same thing as the uncultured, illiterate, un-literary herd, that is incapable of making this distinction.

Millet was born in the region of Corrèze, in south-central France, in 1953, but would spend much of his youth in Lebanon. He spoke Arabic as if natively, and would later complain of not feeling entirely French upon returning to his home country. In the mid-1970s Millet would join up with the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war, a right-wing and ultranationalist organization founded by the Lebanese Maronite leader Pierre Gamayel in 1936. He would later write in his 2009 Confession négative, "I had to kill men back then, and women too, and elderly people, maybe children," though according to the newspaper Libération Millet only spent a few months in the phalanges, and at most had an occasion to fire his Kalashnikov into some sacks of sand...

A Fine Example of an Obnoxious Genre

Gregory Berns has published an 'opinion' piece in today's New York Times in which he opines that "Dogs Are People Too." Articles like this are a constant, unchanging fixture of science journalism, which always presents the evidence for animal emotional intelligence as something new and controversial. This journalism tells us something that was already perfectly obvious to paleolithic humans (even without the help of MRI's!), but that has been denied for the past few centuries, as if it were an exciting new debate still to be had. In fact this is a way of deferring change in the way people relate to animals, not of initiating it.