Category: language

T.J. Clark on Fanon via Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, in LRB.

Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:

Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!

How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn. All those imperative exclamation marks!

The International, Pottier.

Contemplation is crucial for art, philosophy, and politics. It gives one the thinking space to parse out what matters and to discover unexpected connections. It gives thought time to mature. Many philosophers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists have been ardent walkers. Han also notes how contemplative repose can lead to a deep sleep of fecund dreams, another possible source of inspiration or insight. While most philosophers champion a vigilant wakefulness against numb, oblivious slumber, Han is one of the few who champion the generativity of restful sleep. He juxtaposes such sleep against an anxious, restless insomnia on the one hand and an instrumentalized “power nap” on the other, both of which are common in achievement-cum-burnout society and neither of which allows for a deep visit to the “true internal world” of dreams. Han turns to Marcel Proust, who meditates on how both dreams and waking contemplation allow unbidden memories to resurface in epiphanic fashion. Such sleep, like profound boredom, is a state of deep relaxation ready to receive such gifts. Contemplative silence, Han holds, “enables us to say something unheard of.” In contrast with frenetic activity in which one continually reacts, contemplation prepares one to act decisively.

[…]

Han’s brief discussions of a “politics of inactivity” in Vita Contemplativa will likely deepen this frustration rather than dispel it. But Han leaves little doubt in his concern for societal problems and democracy that he is not politically quietist and that he thinks the cultivation of contemplation can be politically transformative. This cultivation is meant to be countercultural, clearing new space and opening a new sense of possibilities, in individual lives but also in communities both small and large.

Byung-Chul Han: Vita Contemplativa by Steven Knepper, Mousse 89.

poetry may not change the world, but might change you – Evie Shockley

Anahid Nersessian reviews Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead (“Cher Connard”) in the New Yorker.

“… the letter, even when it arrives as an e-mail, is the opposite of the social Internet: a medium that invites each correspondent to read carefully what the other has to say, and to respond in a way that will keep the conversation going as opposed to shutting it down. Most importantly, it is not intended for a public audience. We don’t write letters to get clicks or win followers; we write them, as Rousseau suggests, to discover what we think and what we want, to give an account of ourselves and to make it available to others, risking the discomfort of their close attention.”