These underpants were, obviously so, not bought by me in the shop. Whether visible or invisible, I detest any form of imaging or printing on the clothes I wear. Respekt on my belly, in German – my ass!
After giving my seize on the firm’s site, not appropriately inspecting their product, the pair in the picture, accompanied by a second pair, was received in a package ordered on line. Once opened, my first impulse was to throw them away; then, they were not ordered because I did not need them.
The notions of pride and respect have always inspired me with great distrust. People, using such words, do so often in the mistaken conviction that it is others who owe them respect; that there is, supposedly, much they can claim which entitles them to such pride in themselves.
Wodehouse’s protagonist in Company for Henry told the man who was complaining about ‘the Irish’: ‘They can’t help being Irish…’ So true; just as one cannot help being an Englishmen or, for that matter, being a Friesian. There is no conceivable reasonable reason to feel proud of being an Englishman, or a Friesian, or for that matter an Irishmen, or a woman, or a Muslim, or intelligent.
Respect for somebody, because of his racial, national, religious, sexual or brainy credentials, cannot be taken seriously; demanding such respect is even more ridiculous. Pride is an issue parallel to respect: one can only be proud of oneself, because of some special achievement. You cannot be proud of what others have done; feeling proud of your children who ‘are doing so well at school’ does not make any sense. Only the child itself can be proud of what it performs, and only if it has taken him effort and discipline. To feel proud of one’s ‘first’, or of one’s ‘A-level’, which is merely the results of a biologically inherited dose of intelligence, is once again ridiculous and even shameful. To be proud of being black or yellow, or of being Friesian, or of being an American, while one is simply born from black, or yellow, or Friesian or American parents, is utterly foolish. One cannot be Friesian, but by being born from Friesian parents – unless one believes in Blut und Boden…; there is no achievement involved – whatsoever. If, for some reason, a child blames his parents for this, or by contrast feels grateful for it – it is as ridiculous, as feeling proud of it.
Which idiot advertisement-man invented those repeated words Respekt on my underpants? According to Roger O Thornhill, the ad-man in Hitchcock’s North-by-North-West, whose extra O in his name literally stands for nothing, stated: “In the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.” Yet, the word Respekt on the elastic rim of my underpants is more than an exaggeration; but what is it?
Would a man who buys such underpants in a shop, after he has already seen the words, feel that in a feminist world at least his undies would show him some respect for his manhood? Is the idea, to raise pride of a man in himself? After all, now that I have grown old, largely impotent because of the combi of old age and the daily chemo-pill against a nasty little cancer, I am the only one who will put them on – and take them off. And what, if that ad-man of the German underwear firm has actually been aiming at me, as if I were a younger man; did he think that a prick-greedy woman, who would tear these pants off me, would take the time to read the message? And if so, would her respect for my prick grow, become even greater than it would already have been without these words?
The semantics of underwear – at some universities, at the faculty of anthropology, perhaps worth a new course… After all, they are now also teaching ‘Taylor Swift’…
To begin, a qualification of what follows, i.e. notes on what the French have come to represent in the mind of your Friesian writer. I have been both a philosopher of sorts, and a social scientist. The word ‘scientist’ needs emphasis; not from pride, but because there are many who do not consider sociology a science.
A case in point. Someone I know, ridiculed the idea of sociology being a science, arguing that at the university where she had studied there had not been such thing as a faculty of social and political sciences. She meant Oxford. Funny it is that, of all things, she had been studying English literature, which may at best be considered unscientific meddling with other people’s language, an interference pimped up by a few hyperbolical ‘theories’ like semiotics and structuralism, and why not, even by a sprinkling of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Language studies do not inform one about what scientific research is all about; and certainly not how difficult it is to do sociological research. What all this the would-be ‘theory of literature’ has to do with literature is a thing that has remained a mystery for me; yet, I have also read my Eco, my Barthes, my Levi-Strauss et cetera – rather extensively so. To ‘study’ literature is basically an essay in using one’s memory; yet, literature has been written to be loved ad appreciated.
That someone, coming from the country where Mrs. Thatcher once ruled, can claim that sociology is not a science, is not at all surprising. According to that unpleasant woman, ‘there is no such thing as society.’ Thatcher had also studied at Oxford: chemistry and law. Thus, she also had not an inkling of what sociology might have taught her, the kind of knowledge which could have prevented her from her disastrous social and economic policies that have, until this day, wrecked the social structure of her country.
Sociology is quite different from law, and from both chemistry and ‘analysing’ literature. The reader might be interested in what in the eyes of a Dutchman it is to be ‘French’, more precisely, in the eyes of a Friesian who has descended from pirates. Thousands of years ago, bands of the Friesian tribe were raiding the Romans who, at the time, were occupying half of Europe’s continent; they made their sorties by water or by land from the wet lands just north of the limes, the Roman frontier which ran from Holland’s Lugdunum Batavorum or Leyden, to the Russian Black Sea where emperor Augustus once exiled his greatest poet Ovid.
For a better understanding of my ideas, it is good to differentiate a stereotype from a sociological generalisation. I won’t go into the marvels of Luhmann’s systems sociology; take it from me, that by reading his work one may understand a few things a bit better. The one thing I would like to stress, is that too think sociologically, one is always generalising. That may be a sin for the student of literature for whom a novel or a poem is always ‘unique’, even though – paradoxically so – their general ‘theories’ are supposed to suspend this uniqueness; yet, to generalise about group behaviour is the only way to think sociologically, even if in this piece I do not use statistics, and I did not perform any real scientific research.
Gauging the French
Gauging ‘the French’ took this Friesian a while. I have lived in this country for twenty-five years; first, four months a year; later, almost half a year; then, the last four years, full time. I shall just touch upon what I have come to consider as the core ‘soul’ of this funny nation. Because funny they are, the French – funny in a way… Just think about the fact that immediately after Brexit, they proposed to re-introduce French as the Esperanto of the European institutions, to replace the English language which everybody is actually speaking, and which is generally spoken there – even by the French, in a way…
Yet, a stereotype is not a generalisation. To make things a little awkward, I quote from Wikipedia: “In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group’s personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are often overgeneralised, inaccurate, and resistant to new information. A stereotype does not necessarily need to be a negative assumption. They may be positive, neutral, or negative.”
This description defines a stereotype as a kind of generalisation; one, that is not necessarily negative, but one that tends to ‘overgeneralise.’ It is also ‘resistant to new information.’ Yet, precisely being capable of correction makes a generalisation as to people’s behaviour sociological, thus not a stereotype. It is also doubtful to speak of ‘overgeneralisation’: generalisation is always stating something about whole groups of people, without taking into account individual specimens, or claiming that one might predict an individual’s specific behaviour. What Wikipedia tries to convey, and where it caters to a widespread prejudice, is that individuals are actually too important to fall under the heading of generalisations. However, no proper endeavour to generalise involves the description of an individual; it can merely tell the probability of how members of a certain group tend to react to certain stimuli. A proper, research-based generalisation also gives a theoretical explanation for this expectation.
From what follows, it will become clear that, re: The French, I did not do any sociological research; thus, my supposedly proper generalisations may turn out to be stereotypes; it is the risk I run. Yet, over my twenty-five years of living here, I did indeed change my view of ‘The French.’ The reason is twofold: first, I changed my status from someone temporarily living in a small hamlet, in which were living only a few Frenchmen most of whom became friends, to living in a small provincial town with lots of other foreigners; secondly, living here as a resident brought me into close contact with many more types of Frenchmen, and what is more, with French functionaries populating the state institutions: tax office, gendarmerie, people at townhall, you name it.
Jealousy and Rancour
My only living French friend has opened my eyes; two years ago, at a Christmas dinner party, he told me that Frenchmen are fundamentally jealous of one another – envious. I simply had missed this before, living and hiding as I had been in my little hamlet. Ever since that dinner, I have spent many an hour pondering the issue which seems to be at the heart of what it is to be ‘French’, and which explains much of their behaviour. Why should jealousy in one nation be rampant, while in another one, for instance in my own country The Netherlands, a generalisation like this could never have been made? The explanation seems to be two-part.
First, we had the French Revolution, which according to the creed finished with royalty by beheading the king and his family. By the time King Louis XVI lost his head, he had already been thrown out of his royal office, demoted to the rank of Citizen, named Louis Capet. Many Dukes, Barons and Marquises had gone before him, their heads rolling in baskets full of sawdust. As a Frenchman puts it succinctly: Tout à coup, by way of a simple political decision supported by a sharp blade, all in one blow, just as speedily as Louis lost his head, as well as his newly acquired title of Citizen – the very moment, humane Madame la Guillotine separated it from his body. Once again, phrased so well by a fellow Frenchman: ‘Speedily – in the wink of an eye.’
Thus, ends life in revolutions. At a quarter past ten, in the morning of the 21st of January 1793, Capet’s orphaned head toppled in the sawdust. We have a picture of the (in)famous ‘ostentation’: the showing of the decapitated head of citoyen Capet to the masses, blood dripping profusely from his severed neck, to prove that it was finally over.
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Yet, paradoxically so, it was not over; the Revolution did never end. The beheading of their king had far-reaching consequences in the lives of the common men and women of France. One of these has been the mentioned pervasive jealousy. After the Revolution, instead of really calling it a day and leaving royalty behind forever, each Frenchman suddenly felt entitled to feel himself a king. The presence in one country of a million kings places each single citoyen in a pragmatic paradox: he is supposed to be ‘equal’ to all others citizens, as well as their broth, but at the same time he feels entitled to royal prerogatives. This implied, that no Frenchman should have a penny more than another Frenchman; nor a larger house; nor a grander garden; nor a higher function – et cetera. The fundamental jealousy of the French was born.
After the Revolution, the French State was, and is still suffering from its Sun King Complex; no revolution could change that. In the French language this is known as le complexe de chef. Since that infamous end of the 18th century, times about which the Irishman Burke wrote so well, every Frenchman wants to be king, or for that matter a queen. This naturally turns the society into a nuthouse. “I am the Queen of France.” “No, Sir, it is I who am the Queen of France” et cetera. Out here, just you try participating in traffic…
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Any Frenchman shits in his pants when he meets a figure with power, whether it is the president himself, a policeman in the street, an official in one of the many state offices, or a politician. Watch French television; when confronting a politician, interviewers become intimidated, as well as visibly horny; obviously, the politician is never really confronted.
This is an utterly formalistic and authoritarian society, and in this Brave New World this may spell the downfall of its economy. Almost nobody here speaks anything but French, even if they think so differently themselves. Any decision here seems to be a French decision; so, fuck the rest of the world. A bit Trump-like, perhaps. In postmodern capitalism, global and flexible as it is, there is no place for such solitary French decision making.
By way of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche has given us the second half of my explanation. Basic jealousy it was from the start; then something decisive happened: it turned into rancour, which is a very different cup of tea or, to phrase it the American way, a whole different ball game.
One should not forget that Nietzsche was first of all a sociologist of morals, not a psychologist. He filleted the ‘English historians of morals’ who were indeed philosopher-psychologists, who had reduced the notion of what is ‘good’ to a utilitarian psychology. Utilitarianism claims that what is considered as ‘good’ has originated in useful altruistic acts. On the contrary, thus Nietzsche, ‘good’ has always been what the powerful, the noble and the higher placed considered as good, that is: everything they stood for. (§2)
Yet, it seems correct to call Nietzsche also a great social-psychologist, as he was interested in how this hegemony of morals, to use a phrase coined by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, has been transformed, how the underlying classes came to experience the upper-class morals, developed by the powerful. What I described as the basic jealousy of the French, has transformed into rancour or ressentiment. I prefer my own metaphor of the pressure cooker, in which jealousy is put to simmer on the fire, heating up, yet not able to get out. Nietzsche phrased it well: ‘The ressentiment of the kind of people who are denied a real reaction – the reaction of the deed, of the act.’ (§10)
People become rancorous, being first jealous of all others and of everything those others own and do, but merely able to observe these differences, without getting a chance to vent their anger. That has been the situation in post-Revolutionary France and ever since: all Frenchmen being considered equal, as well as brothers in freedom, yet all of them feeling like kings, none of them can act out this jealousy, or it must be in devious ways.
Nietzsche claimed that in the common man rancour ‘poisons the eye.’ Which brings us to what I consider the peculiarities of the French. Nietzsche was, of course, writing about 19th-century rabble, ready to revolt like the slaves, ‘full of voluptuous greed, gall-like jealousy and an embittered need for revenge.’ (Zarathustra, part 4) This also applies to the present-day French. In his Genealogy of Morals, he would sum this up: ‘The revolt of the slaves of morality begins with their rancour becoming creative, bringing forth values; the rancour of those, who are denied the true reaction of the deed, who can only consider themselves to be compensated by their imaginary revenge. Whereas a proud, noble ethics consists in a triumphant yes! to oneself, slave morals always imply saying no! to what is not their own self.’ (First Treatise, §10) Nietzsche’s solution to this problem is told by Zarathustra who, with a wink at Sokrates, preached ‘that one should learn to know oneself.’ Self-knowledge will result in a ‘clean, healthy self-love’, a self-love which also implies the recognition of the ‘heaviness of what is one’s own.’ The French lack this ‘healthy self-love’, as well as insight in who they really are. One should not forget that after killing their former king-become-citoyen, the French did not abolish the Guillotine, obviously thinking that, one of these days, their competitor little kings should experience the same fate…
A Nation’s Great Writers
Reading the following, taking into account the difference between prejudiced stereotype and sociological generalisation, one should also acknowledge the wisdom of a nation’s great writers who have tried to give a summa of their own people’s curious characteristics. Reading Molière on the French is an eye opener; the reader should not forget that he already wrote his plays in the 17th century, a century before the French Revolution and before the rancour it produced. That playwright was rubbing it in, highlighting his compatriots’ defects, fileting the general hypocrisy, hypochondria, monetary greed and secretiveness of the French.
When Rousseau, a semi-Frenchman, wrote his notes on the difference between amour propre and amour de soi, he was in fact criticising the French nation – I think – which had not received him well. For argument’s sake, using Karl Marx’s distinction, one might say that self-love as amour de soi is the possession of self, combining the taking care of self and the taking care of others who, being our ‘social context’, are also constituting our own self. By contrast, with the coming of a capitalist-market society, the self became reified and considered as a thing-like entity – a property; a notion which leads to amour propre. Rousseau described amour propre as a constant striving to gauge one’s own ‘comparative worth.’ Likewise, narcissism considers others as things, to be used and abused. Amour propre breeds vanity, mere pride in abstract identities like la gloire Française and ‘being a Frenchman’; this, in contrast with amour de soi, which implies pride in things achieved by oneself.
The French, their State, their Anarchism
The best way to start a description of the peculiarities of French behaviour, is to describe their relationship with socialism. In his La bêtise, André Glucksmann mentions ‘socialism à la Française.’ He claims that it is a pre-Marxian form of socialism, originating in the ideas of Saint Simon with his belief in the beneficent effects of industrialism based on technical progress. However true this may be, Glucksmann seems to miss another important source of the French left, in action often sidestepping its socialism, yet also being an intrinsic: anarcho-syndicalism, which cannot be understood except by reference to the pervasive French ressentiment.
Anarchism is the political creed of revolt; it lacks any capacity to transform from revolt into a revolution, a reason why the so-called French revolutions of the 19th century, and perhaps even The French Revolution, were in fact no revolutions at all. Quoting the American socialist Daniel de Leon on this issue in 1912, a man born in the Dutch colony of Suriname, subsequently emigrated to the USA: ‘Anarchy is the theory of society under which man is a law unto himself. It is a theory of society that finds vastly more affinity with the capitalist class than it does with the Socialist. It is a theory of society that would throw mankind back to the primitive state.’ We might refer in this context to the primitive state which the ancient Greeks called ethnos, the family clan of tribal origin, originating in a purely agricultural/herd-keeping society. At the dawn of classical Greece, ethnos still had primacy over the demos, or the whole of the polis comprising various ethnic entities. Euripides’ tragedy Medea is all about this.
It has become clear from the analysis of the Spanish Civil War, that anarchism is an outgrowth of the farmers’ tendency to revolt – to say no to others, instead of saying yes to themselves. Its support for the democracy, attacked by Franco, was anticapitalistic in a very peculiar way, in that it favoured individual and local freedom over social organisation on the scale of a nation. Even during battle against the army of Franco, anarchists might leave the front to spent a night ‘at home.’ France has fundamentally been, and in a way still is an agrarian nation. By contrast, for example the Republic of the Netherlands was a maritime nation which derived its power from merchants and their shipping business. One might object that by now, a great mass of the French is living in the metropolis; this is true, yet it would not alter my argument. Typically for France is, that even people in larger towns own some property in the country side, a smaller or larger family house in some small village they inherited, something they seriously identify with and to which they will always return when having a holiday of the metropolis. Even in the metropolis the agricultural roots of the French count, including their inherent ‘anarchism.’
Unionism is an important case. At the end of the second half of the 19th century, capitalism in the Netherlands found its ideal-typical form, with a class of capitalists on one side, and nation-wide organised unions of the working class on the other. By contrast, in France unionism has always remained local and dispersed, often leading to strikes in revolt-form, directed against one employer, not evolving into state-threatening general strikes, or becoming a strike against all owners of one type of enterprise. In contrast with England, from the start of French capitalism and its French Revolution, the bourgeoisie has been shut out by the aristocracy, becoming politically closer to the working class than anywhere else, infusing proletarian anarchism with their ‘liberal’ ideas. This combi gave rise to what can be best described as the typical French gilets jaunes type of classless mass revolt; and not to forget, Glucksmann’s ‘socialism à la Française.’
This agricultural base of the French also explains the liaison they have with their state. It is written: God created man in his own image; that may be the case, but in France it was man who created a State of Gods.
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The Brit Hobbes christened the state: Leviathan. Already since the days of Louis XIV did the body of the king coincide with the body of the French State; whoever attacked the State, was attacking Him and vice versa – it was called Lèse-Majesté. The same God ordered Man: ‘Go forth and multiply’; thus, it came to pass. The Body of the French State divided itself in an endless series of State Organs, an immense chain of offices filled with desks, each one of them manned by a mini-God, a functionary who will also be multiplying himself. The Revolution gave all this its extra impetus, the French state bureaucracy had been born. Each of these functionaries of state, each one of these small prothesis-gods, each one of these so-called Civil Servants, is doing what befits a god: in their turn, they create citizens in their image – French citoyens, tamed into subjects, some of them even raised to become their bureaucratic underlings.
In France, whether in each office the computer is working overtime, each god-forsaken resident is permanently bombarded with a never-ending barrage of paper documents which he must fill in and sign with the pen, often in triplo. The French state loves paper. Thus, each citizen becomes a little civil servant himself, risking to commit lèse-majesté by wrongly filling in all the documents, mistakenly or even falsely so – or by simply getting angry at one of the civil servants. Such anger would already be considered as a serious offense against His Majesty, the State. When, after I had bought my ancient house, I had chosen the colour in which my weathered shutters would be painted, petitioned in a 14-page document complete with four photos of the house, the functionary of colours brought out a sample book from the cabinets, which made it clear that my colour was lighter than no. 87, yet darker than no. 88 – it just would not do!
Endlessly making telephone calls to State Organs or helpdesks, plus the filling in of documents have become a Frenchman’s existential obligation, his life’s task. What, in their creative urge, seems to have escaped these little functionary-gods of State, is that their own creatures, the Citizen-Civil-Servants, have yet another task to perform, besides filling in documents and telephoning with State Organs: they must also provide for their livelihood, which for the real civil servants, the lucky ones, coincides with being a civil servant. Here in France, the miserable citizen needs to have a second job. Moonlighting is what the Americans call this; beside the day job of filling in documents, also a night job to make ends meet…
As a result of all this, the French are constantly taking up the hedgehog stance, an antagonistic attitude towards the state, when all prickles are standing out and up: they hate their police force as a real enemy, which indeed treats any citizen in a disdainful way, whatever he does. All functionaries, with the chosen politicians as the most visible amongst them, feel quite aloof from the ones who placed them there, or who voted them in. The French politician will first kiss the arse of the citizen to be elected, to then simply forget about the existence of his constituency and ask them to kiss his arse in turn; once again, amour propre determining their behaviour and attitude. It explains why any Frenchman, once chosen as a politician, changes his behaviour overnight; a real metamorphosis. He starts talking and behaving pompously like de Gaulle did, speaking like an orator in what is supposedly the speech of the gods; he begins with dressing differently, with pomp and circumstance. While they are visibly considering themselves sublime, for an outsider they easily become farcical. Even in the post office, the person ‘helping’ you is acting like a little king/queen, staking out his or her square metre of power, making you unnecessarily wait – rubbing it in that it is a real privilege to be served by them.
French politicians can afford to be aloof, because, as with his vicious objectivity Charles de Gaulle remarked in 1962: ‘The French are each so different, that they are ready to devour one another. It is necessary to find for them a common denominator, which can only be their fatherland.’ But this love of the nation, created by politics, has to be constantly kindled, if not reproduced by that state; it is an artificial love. The same relentless de Gaulle: ‘What has made the free French so exceptional, is the fact that so many of them are property owners. They had to choose between their property – their little house, their little garden, their little shop, their little workshop, their few books or a nice treasure – and France. They always preferred their property. Those who own, are always possessed by what they own.’ Thus, politically and socially, France has been divided into two halves: a vast petty bourgeoisie with, in one way or another, a farmers’ origin, leaning to unpleasant versions of the right; and a working class, also with a farmers’ background, leaning to silly versions of anarchism.
Most Frenchmen, though despising the politicians, would love to be a politician themselves. An example: my neighbour, the great cattle farmer in my hamlet. His father was a famous cyclist, participating in the Olympics, afterwards on the velodrome earning enough on his bike to buy a big farm. He was chosen to be the mayor of our little village. His son, my present neighbour, has always already been talking like de Gaulle, and has had only one purpose in life: to emulate his dad (which he couldn’t) and also to become mayor. The people despised him so much, that they asked the last mayor to come up in one more election; the neighbour was clobbered. Now he despises all others, as well as himself.
The French and their Curious Conviviality
As the same General and President de Gaulle once phrased it cynically: the French are ready ‘to devour another.’ When they gather in protest, they most often form a disorganised crowd of individuals, a mob as was to be seen when the gilets jaunes took the streets; a gathering of people who deem some sort of protest or revolt necessary. The only way in which the French may be subdued into a well-directed, organised multitude, is when the state has taken over the management of their behaviour, transforming would-be anarchists into docile citoyens, as for instance in the army. Paradoxically, the fixing and following of rules in some way linked to the state, is the anarchist-citizen’s heartfelt duty and pleasure; until, of course, his anarchist urge takes over. French behaviour tends to be always propre, docile, clean and befitting, even in the waiting rooms of doctors. Where in any other country of the world, people facing death have lively conversations, the French sit there like wooden ducks to be shot by the ‘man in white.’ Only when people really ‘drop out’, thoroughly bum-like appearance and behaviour take over – decorum ends suddenly and completely.
Non-state social rules show the same paradoxical combi of being strict, as well as manipulable. The typically ‘southern’ notion of clientelism has taken solidly hold of the French soul. The more fixed and inflexible the rules, the more easily they are corrupted by people, happy to oblige friends and family. An exemplary case, archetypal because ‘foreigners’ were involved, and for the French foreigners as such can never be part of the ‘in-crowd’ of relevant others. A Dutch couple had just bought their French summer house. They invited a mason for coffee, when it was agreed that in April special tiles from the Mosa factory in Maastricht would be shipped to their little hamlet, stored inside the house on the main floor, which was then to be tiled by the mason in May. With great expectations, the couple arrived in July and found their house a mess, the ground floor occupied by endless stacks of the special tiles, not one of them placed… A phone call ‘cleared up’ matters; the floor of the brother-in-law of the mason ‘suddenly’ had to be done first – ‘You’ll understand.’
Fundamentally, the French have been postmodern before postmodernity even arrived; rules are there for ‘the others’, not for ‘me’; when under inspection, they follow them, which in an étatist nation like France sometimes means intensely so; or they do not follow them at all. As there is a shortage of police personnel in many of the smaller towns in la France Profonde, having escaped the surveillance of their parents, the younger generation does what it likes to do, which is being a nuisance. Parking behaviour is another case in point. If it is safer for your car not to park on the road, just park it on the pavement, so pedestrians are less safe…
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The contradictory anarchism of the French will tell them, that if one of them goes against the rules, all others should be deviant in the very same manner. Of course, on market days, when some policemen are around (if only to show that they really exist), everybody is rule-precise, drivers not in the least holding back to tell other drivers that they do not follow the rules properly.
On the highway, the French behave accordingly. They drive you off that road, almost moving their car into the boot of yours, whatever the speed permitted (no one, so it seems, keeping to that speed); then to pass your car, to immediately slow down again, so that now you have to slow down in turn – at their pleasure. After all, who the hell do you think you are, driving in pole position! Precisely the same behaviour is found in any French situation which involves queuing of one kind or another; waiting in line for the cashier in the supermarket, one is sure to feel the cart of the person behind you bang into your heels. You should not have been there in the first place, as any Frenchman would-be king/queen would have liked to be in front of you, considering this his/her rightful position.
On the scale of French values, conviviality is ranked high; even after reading Nietzsche, no French superman would ever re-valuate that principle. Yet, no jealous grievance-monger of a Frenchman can stop to be unsatisfied, even complaining at social gatherings, never really full of joy in their conviviality. A rather large pastice fuels his burning desire to feel dissatisfied and to make clear that this is not a good world; not his salary, nor his future pension; not the policies of the state; not the behaviour of others (from which, just for the time being of this little convivial gathering, he will except present company) – et cetera. A Frenchman always seems to be a little bit angry, a little bit excited; the language has suffered the consequences and has been malformed, become sharpish, cut-short, high-pitched and always a bit indignant. A Frenchman is overly curious as to his neighbour’s money, habits and mishaps, while he is very much caché as to his own things, as well as his own self, hiding them away, not telling the other a thing; the risk that one little king turns out to be a lesser little king than his neighbour-king is too great. Whereas in the Netherlands, behind large windows curtains are left open, in France shutters over small windows close off the individual’s world. Even in newer buildings, windows are incredibly small; Le Corbusier may be a French hero; his architecture with the large glass windows is not practiced at all.
Dogs, Weeds and Puritanism
The French are hypochondriacs, talking about their afflictions as if they should not have had them, or on the contrary, that about their very special afflictions which make them deserving of your extra attention. Life seems never to be what all of them suppose it to be as an of course: healthy and clean. The French feel their illnesses as an affront, just as the notion of a French nation implies the existence of a pure Frenchness; racism and xenophobia are everyday phenomena. Not, that they are not aware of the stains; on the contrary. However, the bottom line is that foreignness is staining what is, and what will always remain an essentially pure ‘Frenchness’, foreign influences being experienced as the cause of all evil. French puritanism does not seem to be sexual; it is ethnic and racial.
More generally, the French want everything to be propre and neat; observe their clipped topiary, their spotless lawns and idem borders, their finicky manner of dressing by both males and females (even to be casual, one should yet be… propre). Any Frenchman will point out to any foreigner that, what for this foreigner seem to be lovely little flowers or cute little green leaves in his garden, are mauvaises herbes – weeds to be immediately cleared out!
Finally, the clinch: French dogs. Whereas in The Netherlands and in England a dog is first of all a companion, a four-legged friend, in France its function of a chien méchant dominates such friendship. The French dog is a watchdog, an animal which must keep out what is alien as such, that is: other Frenchmen and foreigners more generally. When a Frenchman meets another Frenchman ‘walking his dog’, he expects his and the other man’s dog to immediately start barking in a vicious way; the town is continually sounding like an asylum for mad dogs fighting one another. Walking in the countryside, which few Frenchmen do themselves, but also walking past large gates and hedges guarding the town houses: beware! From unexpected corners of farms, or from behind hedges, wild and vicious animals may jump at you, screaming.
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The French, whether in the countryside or in town, are always defending themselves against other Frenchmen – the real aliens.
And last but not least: the Fifi-dog, which is a wholly and unholy affair of French women; those insect-dogs, which they cuddle and talk to as if it were their lovers. They too are continuously yelping at strangers; barking is not the right word.
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With their insect-dogs these women, perhaps sexually dissatisfied and never ready to tell a thing about themselves, do so in a round-about way. One always suspects these ghastly little animals to be cunt-lickers, as the French painter Boucher already painted them so well in the 18th century.
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What is more, if they do not want to show off these dogs themselves, most of the women abuse their husbands to actually ‘walk’ the little beasts, perhaps too exhausted as they are from having abused the animal in the Boucher way.
Mimicry
By now, my reader will have guessed the plot of this essay: your writer has become so assimilated in his surrounding French world, that mimicry has become his fate. Like the French, he has become a grievance-monger, spitting anger at the Frenchmen around him, even writing a longish essay on The French, in a Friesian’s Perspective… Then again, it is only a case of partial mimicry: I have not become jealous of my French compatriots; they have nothing I would like to have, or that I would like to be.
‘Wrongfooted’ is perhaps the tennis-term which applies best; me, being tricked by Hitchcock’s film Rope. I saw the movie already a long, long time ago, at that first viewing not liking it all that much. Though in colour, it was still a mere thriller and seemed to belong to the schooling period of the grandmaster, with its series of black and white precursors of what would later become his long-drawn scenes of suspense. Much later, when I checked this hunch, I discovered that the 1948-movie had been made after Hitchcock had already shot some of his masterworks: Rebecca, Suspicion,Spellbound, The Paradine Case and Notorious.
This surprise did not alter the judgement of Rope: a rather wooden movie, the cinema version of what had obviously been a play. In fact, seeing the movie felt like watching a play on stage; rather overacted, as in movies stage-acting is suddenly seen from too close-up. Rope is an essay in shooting a plain thriller about a strangling with a piece of rope, an impression which was confirmed by what the author of the original play, Hamilton, wrote in his foreword: ‘I have gone all out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep. It is a thriller. A thriller all the time, and nothing but a thriller.’ Then again, precisely this is not altogether true, something which I only discovered recently, after I had dug up the Rope disc and had viewed it once again.
The famous/infamous philosopher Nietzsche, with his Übermensch/Superman ideas, plays an important role in the story. He inspired the protagonists of the Hamilton-Hitchcock story to commit their horrid crime. At the time of seeing Rope for the second time, I was also editing a little essay in which Nietzsche was figuring; so, after watching it again, I did a little research on the web. To my astonishment, the rather improbable, if not farfetched story, both as a play and as a movie, turned out to be based on the crude reality of fact.
2. Loeb and Leopold: The Case
In 1924, two bright youngsters decided to kill another boy; they were eighteen and nineteen years of age; their victim, only vaguely known to them, a mere fourteen years old boy called Bobby Franks. When still boys, Loeb and Leopold had known one another; they became real friends only in their student time. To have read Nietzsche, and to draw the gruesome consequence from this reading, the two must have been precocious lads. The USA was shocked by the deed of two rich boys, students in history and law, one at Chicago University, the other expecting to be accepted by Harvard. As Nina Barrett was still shocked as later as 2018, when she wrote The Leopold and Loeb Files.
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The Killers Leopold and Loeb
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In Hitchcock’s movie, their philosophy professor, James Stewart alias Rupert, is blamed for infusing the two with Nietzsche’s Übermensch idea. Once the murder has come out, he will tell his students: ‘You’ve made me ashamed at every concept I’ve ever had about superior and inferior beings. But I thank you for that shame.’ Apart from the static movie-making, this sudden transformation of the professor also defied my wilful suspension of disbelief and, as I will argue below, he must also have been a bad teacher; his version of Nietzsche is, as the Americans have it, bullshit. Loeb’s interpretation of Rupert’s teaching, taken as his alibi for the killing: ‘A superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.’
The two started with small fry crime, to be subsequently disappointed to find no coverage of this in the media. It was only after this humble beginning, that they planned their ‘perfect crime’, which could not but come to the attention of the public. They must have craved for this public recognition, eager to have an audience to confirm their identity as Supermen. At the end of this essay on the varieties of violence, I shall come back to this point.
In L&L’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s thoughts about ‘beyond good and evil’, normally accepted ethical and legal rules do not apply to someone who considers himself as an Übermensch/Superman. In their perspective, the killing of the boy must be considered merely from an aesthetic point of view. They had asked themselves the question: ‘Can we, being so clever, commit the perfect crime; killing a non-entity, and get away with it?’ To acquaintances, Leopold had already admitted interest in learning what it would feel like to be a murderer; afterwards, he was disappointed to note that he felt the same as ever.
Surprisingly, given the American appetite for killing other people, both illegally in private, as well legally by way of police guns and the death penalty, Leopold and Loeb managed to get off the hook and were sent to prison for life-plus.
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In Prison
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The police had found a pair of eyeglasses near Franks’ body. Although common in prescription and frame, they were fitted with an unusual hinge, in Chicago purchased by only three customers, one of whom had been Leopold. The famous union-lawyer Clarence Darrow acted in their defense, successfully fending off the death penalty by vigorously accusing a series of American States for still having this kind of cruel punishment, which is not of great help if a good society would like to transform their evildoers. By that time, rehabilitation had become the general creed in many of the other states. The defense mentioned Leopold’s childhood-neglect, as well as the sexual abuse by his governess; also, his dysfunctional endocrine glands came up, which were giving him delusions.
This life prison sentence was not of great help to Loeb. In 1936, he was killed by a fellow prisoner. Again, it was surprising to discover that, as late as 1958, Leopold was released on parole; so much for the sentence of life-plus. That the man remained convinced of his acting in good philosophical faith, may be deduced from the fact that even in the year 1956 he was still vigorously fighting the publication of a novel, titled Compulsion, a book about L&L’s crime. Doing so, Leopold denied the writer Meyer Levin the opportunity of becoming the first author of ‘nonfictional literature’, an honour reserved for Truman Capote. Capote, who wrote his book In Cold Blood in 1966, did indeed get the help of ‘his’ two killers, being allowed to interview them extensively. Everything in Capote’s book was a verbatim coverage of these conversations, while Levin’s Compulsion was necessarily reduced to fiction and surmise.
Leopold objected to the fictionalisation of his life; he even complained publicly, that ‘the impact of Compulsion on my mental state was terrific; it made me physically sick; I mean that literally. More than once, I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside.’ Finally, in 1971, he was saved from more nausea, dying a natural death.
3. The Nietzsche-Problem
Before broaching the subject of the vicissitudes of violence, it would be an injustice to Nietzsche not to criticise in extenso Loeb&Leopold’s narrow interpretation of his philosophy of the Übermensch. However, it would also be foolish to ‘defend’ the philosopher against various extravagant interpretations. I shall try to have him ‘speak’ for himself.
Nietzsche’s oeuvre in general, including Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), contains too many switches and contradictions, not to forget a range of hyperboles phrased in sometimes-obscure language. It is either too easy, or too difficult for the Loebs&Leopolds of this world, to construe an ‘alibi’ for their gruesome act and consider it to be ‘Nietzschean.’ The German philosopher had discontinued the philosophical habit of his precursors, who all had been constructing a conceptual system of philosophical subsystems, a systemic whole of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. Thus, he also broke with the tradition of ‘philosophy’ as such. At the same time, this meant that his aphoristic writings left themselves open to various dubious interpretations.
There is a streak of wilful nuttiness, if not provocation in Nietzsche’s work; a consequence of his wholesale denial of the world’s hypocrisy, cowardice and weakness. ‘Fear is mankind’s basic hereditary feeling; it is fear that explains a lot: original sin and original virtue.’ It is not saying too much, that after Ludwig Feuerbach’s deconstruction of Christianity as a projective farce, Nietzsche wanted to take that final extra step. He considered all religion and all ethics as a farce, though a powerful farce; presenting it, as what Louis Althusser would later phrase as ‘ideology as lived reality.’ After pronouncing God’s death, Nietzsche’s final step implied an answer to the question, as how to challenge this all-pervading force of herdlike, cowardly morality implied in the belief in the godhead. One of the muddles he left us with, was his reliance on the sciences, more specifically the newly developing biological Darwinian science of evolution, and on the other hand his opinion that science-as-such is a dangerous bit of powerplay: ‘Beauty or art; that we may not perish from the truth…’
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The Older Nietzsche
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To understand this muddle, it seems good to go back to both his Zarathustra, with the notion of an Übermensch, and to his unfinished Der Willle zur Macht (The Will to Power), by those in the know considered to be his summa summarum and his masterpiece. The bottom-line: Nietzsche is a radical misanthrope; this, not because he had been slighted by certain people, as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens had been before he turned into a man-hater; Nietzsche detested mankind as such. He wanted man, in the sense of mankind, to raise above himself and his miserable herd-morality, to become a ‘superhuman’ creator of new values. He must have become a misanthropos, because he had become convinced that each of us is the victim of an incurable illusion of subjectivity and freedom, while at the same time – and paradoxically so – without a superhuman mental endeavour, each of us is in need of some kind of religion-like devotion.
With Nietzsche’s hope of the arrival of sovereign individuals who seek their own way, as opposed to the weakness of the herdlike common man who is suffering from weak conformism, there is unmistakably a streak of non-political anarchism characterising his work. One crucial argument which originated in Nietzsche’s thought, later worked out by Heidegger, was the idea that fed his plaidoyer for such future sovereign individuals, later even the Übermensch, as something historically necessary.
Against all previous philosophies, Nietzsche and Heidegger argued that there is no way to ‘ground’ one’s ideas on some indisputable ‘base’; no way, to fasten it to an evergreen of essential being; no way, to return to ‘an indubitable given’, thus no way to return to the past. There is simply no final capstone fixing any philosophical system; each idea has to be argued on its own merits. This holds for all notions of beauty, moral goodness and truth. Nietzsche’s teacher Schopenhauer had yet found a grounding in the structure of our biological organism; it was this ‘grounding’ that he used against Kant’s unfathomable Ding an Sich. In a way, this was more a scientific position than a philosophical one. After Nietzsche, in the interbellum, philosophical ‘positivism’ once more tried to fix truth on ‘empirical fact’, unsuccessfully so. Heidegger proved that such final grounding is out of the question, a conviction that had already fed Nietzsche’s denial of all system. Accordingly, needed is a radical re-evaluation and revaluation of the reigning codes of conduct by ‘the will to power’ of sovereign individuals, later by the Übermensch; the willful invention of a new code, or of codes plural – a revaluation reserved for higher individuals.
Nietzsche’s inevitable conclusion was, that all systems of belief or conviction – aesthetics, religion, ethics, but also science – are arbitrary and despotic. What has counted as ‘good and bad’, has always been merely what counted as ‘good and bad’ for the ruling class in a society. This idea might lead one to think, as had Leopold and Loeb or, for that matter, as the Nazi’s had interpreted it: grab power, impose yourself physically on someone else, and impose your ideas on society at large. Become a master race! This is the fanatic’s would-be Nietzsche, interpreted as the benchmark of what is ‘good and bad’, whether in the form of a racist ideology, a misogynist code, a meritocratic one – or simply as the motive to kill an innocent boy.
In Le Carré’s Silverview – translation of the German name of Nietzsche’s house – one of the novel’s protagonists calls him ‘Hitler’s chosen philosopher’, by the way, not Le Carré’s own opinion. Yet, whether or not Nietzsche was Hitler’s favourite, is irrelevant for what the man has actually written. In both Zarathustra and The Will to Power, he did indeed develop the notion of ‘a superior people’, originating in what had first been dispersed, special individuals; finally, from this ‘people’ the Übermensch would rise. Though, what exactly this ‘superman’ would be, and in what he would differ from the ‘special individuals’ remains unclear. However, this collection of special people is a nation without a state; Nietzsche did not conceive it as a race. (Zarathustra, part 1).
He certainly did not mention a superiorrace. There is in the Loeb-Leopold affair a point which makes such a link even rather foolish. At the time, in 1924, in the year of their Superman-crime, Germany was witnessing the rise of Hitler’s antisemitic NSDAP party. It seems a bit odd to consider (both mistakenly so) Nietzsche as both the source of Hitler’s Arean antisemitism, and as the origin of a gruesome crime ‘performed’ by two Jewish boys as their ‘perfect crime’ who – like Hitler – also thought they were Supermen… It seems more probable that, after their act, the already existing and widespread antisemitism in the USA might even have been fed by their court case.
I would also not put it past the two, to have wanted to up Hitler, telling him graphically that Jews can also be Supermen. This would, in a gruesome manner, have anticipated Tarantino’s masterpiece Inglorious Bastards, a movie in which a Jewess and her black boyfriend have imprisoned the Nazi-elite, inclusive Hitler himself, to subsequently kill them – posthumously as it were – by grilling them in their burning cinema, fired by inflammable celluloid film – the building used as an oven.
To sum up Zarathustra is impossible. What has to be answered, is the question as to which passages might have inspired Loeb & Leopold. I have tried to gather the statements that could have supported their act.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote that ‘evil is man’s best strength… Whatever is good and evil, no one knows as yet, or it must be the one who creates! … Whatever you do, nobody can do against you; there is no retribution.’ Where, ‘in the beginning’, man was ‘dominated by fear of the sudden incident of the unforeseen’, he has later developed ‘a lust in the unforeseen’, ‘waging war against it… with a lust for the happiness of the knife.’ From now on, ‘he will enjoy senseless evil as being the most interesting.’ Taken these quotes out of context, i.e. separated from the rest the book and also from his other texts, it seems that this might have been the source of L&L’s ‘Nietzschean’ crime. The passages, however, should be read in their context.
It would be misunderstanding Zarathustra, if the reader concludes that for Nietzsche Zarathustra himself is already the Übermensch. He is merely his prophet, a man telling those who come to question him to show them ‘the way’, that there is no such thing as the ‘one path’ (Zarathustra, part 3). He is merely gathering people about him, who might constitute a group from which Superman might arise.
What does however become clear in the book is that the path Zarathustra’s is taking, is one of singing the truth of the coming of the Übermensch, a blasphemy referring to the Jewish and Christian notion of the coming of the messiah. His arrival is claimed as a historical necessity, because the world as such has become decadent and weak with soft morals and spineless moralism. There is, then, an obvious contradiction between the peaceful means of Zarathustra himself, who was first of all a proselytist, and the sometimes warrior-like hyperboles he is using to lure the reader into his orbit. Once arrived, Superman will create new notions of what is good and evil; nonetheless, he is a creator, his creative destruction concerns the destruction of the existing ‘tables of morals’ – not the killing of those who still practice the old morals. True enough, the phrasing is wilfully self-contradictory, but the gist of it is certainly not Nietzsche’s love for murderers: ‘Thou must not steal! Thou must not kill! Such words were once considered holy. However, I ask of you: have there ever been better thieves and murderers than in the world in which these holy words existed? Is it not all of life itself – robbing and killing?’ (Zarathustra, part 3) This is a statement of fact, not an invitation to murder.
Let me quote Nietzsche’s poem Der Einsame – in my own translation, and taken from his book Joyous Science:
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The Loner
I hate to follow and I hate to lead.
Submission? No! To rule – no, not indeed!
Fearing oneself, one may put fear in others:
And without terror, others won’t be ruled.
I even hate to lead and rule myself.
I do love, as wild beasts do, and the creatures of the sea,
To wander and, for quite some time, to lose myself,
Be sweetly let astray and muse a bit,
Then, from afar, to lure myself back home,
Seduce myself to what I am – myself.
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Like his ‘loner’, who I presume to be Nietzsche alias Zarathustra, the writer invites his readers to withdraw from it all; not by way of escapism, but by reflecting on what one has observed intently and precisely: the society left behind, the society of hypocrisy and herd morals, the society to which one may return, now and then, to teach the people new ways. Nietzsche considered his latter-day society as being increasingly ruled by the rabble. The core of his writings tells you, that he would have considered the Nazi-masses as the scum they were, following one who had nothing to do with his notion of the Übermensch.
In the preface to Zarathustra, the singer states explicitly that his aim is ‘to lure many from the herd.’ He wants people to listen to him, ‘to follow him, because they follow themselves.’ True – Zarathustra wants them to follow him in his direction. In the final part of the book, he depicts himself as a fisherman with a golden rod, residing high on his mountain; he is angling in ‘the lake of men’, to raise them to his own visionary heights, in order that they may learn ‘to create new values.’ It seems, that Zarathustra’s/Nietzsche’s emphasis on being ‘hard like a diamond’ and being aware that ‘all life is a struggle’, does refer to not giving in to ‘the pharisees of good and evil.’ What is intended is a moral struggle; a struggle with oneself, if not inside oneself.
If I might rephrase this: Zarathustra wants a man to rise above himself, do the almost impossible by peeping around the corner of his own perspective, something which in another text of Nietzsche is described as impossible. It reads a bit like Von Münchhausen’s feat of pulling himself and his horse from the morass by pulling his wig… In short: man should live without illusions, and face the hypocritical world which he has created for himself. Zarathustra’s teaching is not a plea for the killing of others, who are, perhaps as yet, less enlightened than oneself.
Hidden in Zarathustra, I think, is a specific philosophy of self-love. The singer tells us to be proud, as opposed to the common man who prefers ‘those who are vain’ over ‘those who are proud.’ ‘Hurt vanity leads to tragedy; yet, when pride is offended, something more worthwhile than pride will grow.’ Vanity needs an audience; it is at the heart of all hysteria, and – if it takes a turn for the worse – may even result in acts of cruel narcissism. Those who keep themselves ‘within moderation’, are in fact ‘mediocre.’ You may love your neighbour like yourself’, but ‘first of all, love yourself.’ Yet, this must not be the kind of self-love that also implies self-hatred or ‘self-contempt’; those in the herd tend to combine the two.
Thus, if I am right, Nietzsche seems to recommend what Rousseau had coined as amour de soi, in contrast with amour-propre. For argument’s sake, using Karl Marx’s distinction, one might say that self-love as amour de soi is the possession of self, combining the taking care of self and the taking care of others who, as our social context, are also constituting our self. By contrast, with the coming of capitalist-market society, the self became reified, considered as a thing-like entity, a property – a notion which leads to amour popre. Rousseau recognised amour propre as a constant striving to gauge one’s own ‘comparative worth.’ Likewise, narcissism considers others as things to be used and abused. Amour propre breeds vanity, not – as amour de soi does – pride in things achieved, thus pride in oneself.
Nietzsche shared Rousseau’s distaste for amour propre, which, however, is not yet the selflove of the fascist would-be supermen, but the amour propre of the 19th-century rabble, ready to revolt like the slaves, ‘full of a voluptuous greed, gall-like jealousy and an embittered need for revenge’ (Zarathustra, part 4). Though all too much difference between the two there is not. In his Genealogy of Morals, he would sum this up: ‘The revolt of the slaves of morality begins with their rancour becoming creative, bringing forth values; the rancour of those, who are denied the true reaction of the deed, who can only consider themselves to be compensated by their imaginary revenge.’ Whereas a proud, ‘noble ethics consists in a triumphant yes! to oneself, slave morals always imply a no! to what is not their own self’ (First Treatise, §10). This attitude is countered by Zarathustra who, with a wink at Sokrates, preached ‘that one should learn to know oneself.’ This self-knowledge will result in a ‘clean, healthy self-love’, a self-love which also implies the recognition of the ‘heaviness of what is one’s own.’
Though periodically seeking the solitude of forests and mountains, Zarathustra knows that, in order to preach his message, he must live amongst what is still the common herd of men; amongst those, who lack his own superior qualities and, as yet, miss the insight in the need to revalue their own values. ‘Oh, solitude – my fatherland! Too long did I live in wild foreign parts, not to return to you, filled with tears.’ But Zarathustra will go back once again, amongst those whom he will teach the lesson of the Übermensch, the creator of new values. Also sprach Zarathustra is first of all an educational book, perhaps even a Bildungsroman…
For some, it has remained unclear whether Zarathustra who is preaching the future arrival of the Übermensch, is himself already a kind of Übermensch; or for that matter, whether Nietzsche thought of himself as such. As claimed above, I take it, that they considered themselves as prophets. What becomes clear that he was an arrogant man, proud of his acquired insights. Yet, both Nietzsche and Zarathustra did not suffer from hubris, defying the gods by acting like gods; or rather, acting as superior beings in the company of others. If he is in fact superior, a Mensch may certainly be allowed to feel superior; however, he need not show his superiority, and he may without any self-interest also help others who do not have his qualities. To be arrogant is to keep apart from others, or to be amongst others, however only to converse with them on one’s ideas, while never feeling and showing disdain. To be arrogant is radically different from acting hautain or haughty; to be hautain has the intent of showing others their inferiority, as compared with one’s own supposedly superior self – rubbing it in, by gauging one’s own qualities against others. By contrast, while keeping his distance the arrogant man will protect others from himself, shield them from his razorlike tongue and fierce criticism. Noli me tangere is a double-edged sword…
Let me rephrase my interpretation: Zarathustra is arrogant, he is not hautain. The arrogant man considers himself superior to others, a feeling based on real achievements and characteristics; he does not want to have unnecessary contact with those he considers as lesser than himself. The arrogant man would, in fact, despise himself if he would seek contact with lesser men, merely to despise them; acting haughtily and feeling contempt for others would in fact make him feel contempt for himself. This is why, in his solitude, Zarathustra is like Saint Francis: ‘closing circles and holy boundaries around myself’, preferring to commune with eagles and snakes, advising his listeners to do the same. In his preface Zarathustra says: ‘My friend, flee in your solitude…’; ‘I love the forest.’
The haughty manneeds those whom he considers inferior to himself. He does not need them ‘to prove his point’, the fact that, because of his achievements and possibly his higher IQ, he is superior. However, the haughty man is mean, he is gloating and wallowing in making the obvious visible, while consciously hurting those with a lesser endowment of talent. A fine example of such vicious amour propre is found in Ishiguro’s novel Remains of the Day, also made into a splendid movie by James Ivory. We observe two officials of the German Reich who are visiting the mansion of an English Nazi-fellow-travelling Lord; while drinking their cognac, they begin to ask his man-servant what he knows about issues like the gold standard and the European nations’ policies. They interrogate him, not only to prove their point that the ignorant should not have a democratic vote, but also to prove their own superiority. When the man-servant fails to deliver the proper answers and looks utterly humiliated, the superior smile on the Nazi faces tells it all. They have not so much enjoyed scoring a debating point, but they have cherished their humiliation of the man-servant. Being hautain often leads to cool cruelty; the arrogant man, by contrast, would know the difference, without rubbing it in.
4. Killing an Untermensch
Then again, merely humiliating ‘the inferior’ would still leave them their existence; to kill someone considered inferior, as Loeb and Leopold have done, is a different cup of tea.
Before getting deeper into their act, it seems wise to state that it is not a high IQ that makes one superior to others, but the polishing of that intelligence by education and diligent study; then, to use one’s qualities to achieve something special. Education and upbringing make a man civilised; his senses of mere seeing and mere hearing are being polished into a refined observing of things and a listening to music.
First Nietzsche again. In The Will to Power(§997), he wrote: ‘I teach: that there exist higher and lower people.’ Just reading these few words might suggest the notion which the Nazis used for the Jews: Untermenschen. Their first misunderstanding of Nietzsche was to project his notion of ‘lower people’ on the whole of the Jewish people, also transforming this people into a race. Both implications are a falsification of Nietzsche’s thought. Race is absent from his philosophy; and the idea of ‘lower people’ applies to the whole of all still existing ‘herd-like’ men, in times before individuals will arise from their midst, who have the courage to go their own way. Jews, Nazis, negroes, white men: according to Nietzsche, all of them are in no way Supermen. This follows the words already quoted: ‘I teach that under circumstances one single person in a thousand years may justify their existence; that is: one full, richly endowed, great man in regard to countless incomplete fragmented men.’
When Nietzsche teaches that one should be against ‘reconciliation’, arguing against ‘the will to appease’ (§601), claiming that one ‘is entitled to great emotions’ (§612), he is advocating to live a full, sovereign life; not to take the life of others. He writes about ‘a new definition of the concept of life as the Will to Power’, contrasting it with the ordinary life ‘as a matter of cause and effect in the mutual struggle between those who become, often resulting in the eating of the enemy…’ (§617). In the third part of Zarathustra, he considers ‘all those who have just one choice: to become mean animals or mean tamers of animals; in their vicinity I would not build my cabin… What I have taught is to wait – that is to wait for me.’
Now this last phrase might lead us to understand the misunderstandings of the Loeb and Leopold Rope-version of Nietzsche a bit better. In the real-life version in the court case there is also the mention of a teacher, who brought them in contact with Nietzsche’s ideas. ‘To wait for me’ means: to wait for Zarathustra as the prophet of the Übermensch. Did that teacher – in Hitchcock’s movie professor Rupert alias James Stewart – indeed wrongfoot his two pupils by making them believe they were two such Supermen?
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Professor Rupert
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First, Nietzsche in The Will to Power: ‘Hierarchy: that one is the highest man, who determines the values and who turns around the will of thousands of years, by steering the highest of men.’ (§999) This type of man is not afraid of fate and chance; he will battle the existing culture which has been born of fear and the desire for a calculable existence. (§1019) In short: Nietzsche’s Übermensch is waging a cultural and moral struggle; he is certainly not a student who, after having only partially read Nietzsche, will murder a small boy he considers as inferior to himself. But, perhaps, L&L were taught by a professor who was a bad reader himself… Let me quote from the movie transcript the passages in which professor Rupert tells the mouse-like petty-bourgeois father, yet unaware of the manslaughter committed against his son, what he thinks about mankind-according-to-Nietzsche. I take the text to be similar to Hamilton’s original playscript:
Girl: Now, you don’t really approve of murder, Rupert, if I may.
Professor Rupert: You may, and I do. Think of the problems it would solve – unemployment, poverty, standing in line for theatre tickets…. My dear Mrs Atwater, careful application of the trigger finger, and a pair of seats in the first row is yours for the shooting…
Interruption: But we’d all be murdering each other.
Professor Rupert: Oh no. Oh no. After all, murder is, or should be, an art. Not one of the seven lively, perhaps, but an art nevertheless. As such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.
Brandon: And the victims – inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway.
Professor Rupert: Obviously. Now mind you, I don’t hold with the extremists who feel there should be open season for murder all year round. No, personally, I would prefer to have… ‘a Cut a Throat Week’ or ‘Strangulation Day.’
Father: Probably a symptom of approaching senility, but I must confess I really don’t appreciate this morbid humour.
Professor Rupert: The humour was unintentional.
Father: You’re not serious about these theories.
Brandon: Of course he is.
Father: You’re both pulling my leg.
Brandon: No. Why do you think that?
Father: The notion that murder is an art which superior beings should practice…
Professor Rupert: In season!
Father: Now I know you’re not serious.
Professor Rupert: I’m a very serious fellow.
Father: Then may I ask who is to decide if a human being is inferior and is therefore a suitable victim for murder?
Brandon: The privileged few who commit it.
Father: And just who might they be?
Brandon: Oh, myself, Phillip… possibly Rupert…
Father: Gentlemen, I’m serious.
Brandon: And so are we, Mr Kentley. The few are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they’re above the traditional moral concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them.
Father: So, you agree with Nietzsche and his theory of the Superman.
Brandon: Yes, I do.
Father: So did Hitler.
Brandon: Hitler was a paranoid savage. His supermen, all fascist supermen were brainless murderers. I’d hang any who were left. But then, you see, I’d hang them first for being stupid. I’d hang all incompetents and fools. There are far too many in the world.
Father: Then hang me. I must be stupid, because I don’t know if you’re serious or not. In any case, I’d rather not hear any more of your, forgive me, contempt, for humanity, and for the standards of a world that I believe is civilised.
Brandon: Civilised?
Father: Yes.
Brandon: Perhaps what is called ‘Civilisation’ is hypocrisy. Well, I’m sure Rupert, fortunately, has the intelligence and imagination –
It seems obvious, that Professor Rupert has kicked off this philosophical match with banter, making jokes about getting a theatre ticket or a restaurant table by way of killing some ‘obstacles.’ The script becomes confusing, though, when he is challenged as to his statement of the right of ‘superior’ human beings to eliminate ‘inferior’ others.’ He states that his humour has been ‘unintentional’, that he has been serious all along. The viewer, but also those in the film who are questioning him, are caught in a pragmatic paradox: is he, who made jokes while talking about justified killing, not also making a joke when he now states that he is serious and that he has not been making jokes at all? Taking someone’s word for it, has become impossible.
What does become clear, is that professor Rupert’s two pupils, L&L, did indeed take him, and are still taking him dead-seriously. All along, what is important re: the link between Nietzsche’s philosophy and L&L, has been their emphasis on the perfection of the murder, both in the play and the movie, but also in the court room. They claimed that they wanted to commit ‘an immaculate murder, for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing’, and to prove their special status. If the killing of the boy was merely intended to bring out their own superiority of intellect, as compared with the despised boy’s supposed inferiority, perfection of the crime would not have been needed; a gruesome, yet simple elimination would have sufficed. I emphasise this point, as it highlights the radical misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy by many of his readers, whether it be Hitler or these two American boys. The emphasis by Hitchcock and Hamilton on the ‘perfect’ murder might as well have been inspired by Thomas de Quincey’s famous essay On Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts, elevating murder into aesthetics – though fictional and satirical, easily taken as an inspiration by the weaker minds.
Nietzsche did indeed emphasise the creativity of the Übermensch; once having arisen from the great mass of ordinary human beings, he would be der Schaffende – the great inventor of new values in morals, the arts, and perhaps even in the sciences. But this invention concerns the creation of new values and new perspectives, works of art according to a benchmark laid down by a sovereign artist, or a code of living adopted by a sovereign man. For Nietzsche, to create is not, as Loeb and Leopold thought, to murder your living neighbour. As has become clear from my analysis: Zarathustra’s primary object was educational.
Once again, someone mistaking Nietzsche for an adviser re: ‘murder as an art’, might run into the obscurity of many of his statements. In The Will to Power (§852), he wrote about ‘the art of the awesome’, which may inspire the weaker men. This however, would disqualify Loeb and Leopold as weak men; they are obviously wallowing in their own ‘awesome art.’ Then again Nietzsche: ’The ‘feeling of power can consider even those things and situations as beautiful, which the instinct of impotence will only see as hateful.’ This thesis might give the L&Ls of this world the idea that Nietzsche is providing them with an alibi to commit something ‘awesome’ as a form of art. But we have already concluded that for Nietzsche the ‘right to great emotions’ is not the same as feeling high and feeling special after a senseless murder, done ‘nicely.’
Of course, Loeb and Leopold may very well have gone to the limit of philosophical realism, taking some of Nietzsche’s words literally, to enable themselves to consider the killing of a boy as both an expression of Übermensch superiority, and as an artistic creation – as if producing a kind of performance art. Hitchcock and Hamilton seem to have been of this opinion, as both let the two students rearrange their rooms, so as to have a festive dinner displayed on the antique chest with the corpse inside, transforming L&L into two late-Romanticist artists. De Quincy indeed: murder as one of the fine arts…
As to Hitchcock’s professor Rupert, I must confess that his volte face made me lose all wilful suspension of disbelief. In Rope, the fanatic Freudian Alfred Hitchcock has made the professor experience a true katharsis. Rupert suddenly feels ‘ashamed’ about his teachings, which have ended in such a gruesome deed. Then, after ‘having thanked his students for this shame’, he nevertheless shoots a gun from an opened window, to alarm the police and to have his former students arrested. As the transcript of the movie-dialogue has made quite clear, he did indeed a bit of bantering; then, he claimed to have been serious about murder as an art, to be practiced only by those who are Übermenschen, which for a professor of philosophy is a grave misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Of course, his stupid students are confused and agree with his seriousness eagerly, a weightiness which also seems to be acted.
In my view, post hoc there seem to have been only three serious options for professor Rupert: either to confess that his being serious was merely another form of irony; or, to not feel ashamed, and take the blame for the deed of his pupils and approve of it; or, indeed, to feel ashamed of having taught Nietzsche in such a bad way, that his ‘innocent’ students drew these awesome conclusions, and perhaps to live in everlasting fear that other students of his might end up in the same way…
Looking at the two would-be Nietzscheans, I could not help myself to be reminded of that great novella, written by Thomas Mann: Mario und der Zauberer. Mario is the macho in the little Italian village, where the writer and his family are spending their holidays. His children lure him into visiting the show of a travelling ‘magician’, who turns out to be a hypnotiser. After two successful attempts to bring to sleep’ some of the more innocent villagers, in the little hall the name of Mario starts buzzing around. He is challenged by the crowd; the macho cannot refuge – he is ‘out’ in ten seconds flat.
Thomas Mann probably meant his novella to be a metaphor for the swift collapse of ‘the left’ in Hitler Germany, more generally of the whole of the nation giving in to the hypnotic somnambulism of fascism. Seemingly strong spines, breaking like cast-iron… One might contrast this metaphor with Blaise Pascal’s description of all men, whom he considered as ‘thinking reeds’, thanks to their reason smoothly bending in adverse winds. Thomas Mann, of course centuries younger than Pascal, had become the wiser.
In court, Loeb and Leopold cracked like cast-iron, surprised that their heinous deed was not appreciated as a work of art. In a way, they were also spineless losers, or rather losers with a philosophical spine that seemed to be stiff from orthodoxy, but which broke when the support of their teacher failed them. There is also an element in these two killers which reminds one of the remarks made by the fine psychologist John Le Carré in his novel The Looking Glass War. About two desk-spies in an almost defunct department, he relates the following: ‘Thus they created that strong love, which only exists between the weak; each became the stage to which the other related his actions…’ About a field-agent it reads: ‘Running towards the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being.’ Did the killer, who ‘forgot’ his glasses lying with his victim, actually desired to get caught, in order to become ‘famous…’?
5. The Vicissitudes of Violence
In the comments on the Leopold and Loeb case we find various instances of perplexity with regard to ‘a motiveless crime.’ As late as 2018, Nina Barrett wrote in The Leopold and Loeb Files: ‘This case, unlike your run-of-the-mill true crime story, has really attained the status of myth. And it did so very quickly, because of all the very profound questions it raised, almost all of which are difficult if not impossible to answer.’ With this essay, I hope to have answered at least some of those ‘difficult questions…’ Someone, approvingly commenting on Barrett’s book, stated that ‘she refers to the terrible fascination with a murderer whose motives are utterly beyond general human comprehension.’ Barret claimed that the case ‘continues to fascinate artists, because it defies our ideas about motive and about what it means to be civilised… Even though Rope tries to tack on a suitably moral ending, I feel that it also glamorises what they’ve done.’
In the above, I hope to have argued the case that: 1. Hitchcock’s ending is not a ‘suitably moral ending’, and that 2. he was not ‘glamourising’ anything; all this is Barrett-fictional ‘feeling’… What is more: L&L did not commit a ‘motiveless crime.’ Both in court, and in the movie/play, there is ample talk about their motivation, which was the desire to become, perhaps, the first Übermensch and to fulfil Nietzsche’s prophecy made in Zarathustra. Their predicament was, of course, the connection with an audience, involving a pragmatic paradox of the first order. Loeb & Leopold had put themselves into this double bind: on the one hand, they wanted to be prophets and, perhaps the first really existing herd-moral-denying Supermen, in need of an audience; they also wanted to commit ‘the perfect, immaculate murder’ which, in order to be perfect, must be necessarily performed… without ever coming into the public eye. Not having perceived this dilemma, they could not have been of an all too superior intelligence, something we already deduced from their defective, haphazard reading of the source of their inspiration: Nietzsche.
What is raised by these faulty comments on the L&L case, is the question as to whether something like motiveless violence can exist. The L&L case is a good occasion to consider the varieties of violence and to write a little semantics of violence.
‘Violence’ would be the highest metalevel; it covers both natural accidents and violent acts of animals and human beings. Our interest here concerns the acts of man, but this may already be the moment to agree on the fact that animal aggression must be considered as purely ‘caused’, thus un-motivated. An animal killing another animal involves a cause, a ‘mover’, yet no motivation. In a way, this is also true of accidental killings on the road, on the building site, and in cases of manslaughter without intent. In all cases where we have an organism with motives to kill, it needs to have self-consciousness plus the illusion of being a ‘free’ entity. Whether ‘senseless violence’ may exist at all, is an issue that will concern us later.
The violence of killing has an old moral ingredient. In German and Dutch, one speaks of Selbstmord and Zelfmoord; that is, the murder-of-the-self. In the Anglo-Saxon and in the Latin world, one speaks about suicide: the killing of one’s own self. A crucial difference this is, as in the past the Church would not allow those who had committed suicide to be buried in the ‘holy ground’ of the church-cemetery. Using the expression of ‘murdering oneself’ in the North-European countries did not camouflage the reference to the killing of God’s creation, which reminded the Church too much of the ‘murder of Christ’ by the Jews. That this last belief is also false, is a different matter; it seems good to point out that it was the Roman governor Pilate who put the decision to crucify either Barrabas, or Jezus to a crowd in the market place, a festive crowd in a large town that cannot have contained merely Jews. Also, Roman soldiers performed the actual crucifixion…
In the 21st century the issue of suicide or self-murder is still on the table; this is proven by the fierce legal battles on the issue of euthanasia. Most of those opposing it, are still believers in some creating godhead – all those, who did not believe Nietzsche’s wise words on the death of God. Euthanasia has nothing to with murder; it is doctors or nurses, helping those who are dying to achieve an acceptable ending.
Suicide is not murder, but the wilful putting an end to one’s own life; nor was crucifixion murder – it was state punishment, a legal killing of an unwanted human being who ‘had done wrong.’ Crucifixion has also been the punishment for crimes not committed by the one nailed on the cross, but an execution of other, innocent people as a retaliation for political deeds done by those who could not be apprehended. This has been true for execution through the ages; the executioner is not a murderer – he is following orders. He may either like his job or, perhaps in some cases, he may not like to execute this person. In this case, performing his job he will not be motivated so much by his functionary’s zeal, as by the fear of being eliminated himself, if he would not follow that order.
The issue of execution is a morally complex one. At the end of the second World War, in the occupied countries many collaborators were harassed, ranging from girls offering their ‘services’ to German soldiers, to people denouncing Jews to the SD, subsequently to steal their houses after these had been deported to one of the concentration camps. Many of those ‘Kraut-whores’ were badly treated by those who knew them: their hair shaved in the streets, half undressed, beaten. This shameful treatment happened often in spontaneous forms of public ‘execution’, similar to the beating and ‘shaming’ of Jews during the Kristall Nacht in Hitler Germany. Not only was their no discussion about the commensurability of their ‘misdeed’ and the punishment by the crowd; there was simply no instance guaranteeing justice.
Those in the resistance movement knew that, with the coming of peace, the majority of the known collaborators would manage to ‘disappear’ in the crowd, escaping their deserved punishment. As to the really bad collaborators, now and then things went differently. From the ranks of resistance groups three ‘wise men’ were appointed, to sit ‘in court’ and decide the fate of the bastards; to decide, whether they had forfeited their moral right to live on after the war. Subsequently, an executioner was appointed, and many of them were shot. Obviously, this killing was not legal punishment; it was precisely the opposite, it was an essay in illegal, yet civilised execution. The resistance did not trust the future return of ‘legality’; they chose for a ‘frontier justice’, taking ‘the law in their own hands.’ However, this did not equal murder, as the new order would later call it; it must be considered as an execution.
Similar, but quite different, is the summary execution-on-the-battlefield. In this case, there is killing done on the order of one officer who has the right to give that order. Yet, it all depends on his instantaneous personal judgment, and necessarily implies an element of caprice. The number of officers with this right to kill on the battle field has always been rather large… Perhaps, the execution-before/outside-the-law of the resistance fighters has been more ‘just’; yet, summary execution will always smell of a murder-by-whim.
Assassination is another case of killing a human being, in a way similar to the execution by the resistance of collaborators. This term is normally used for the killing of someone in high office, done by a person who is often a member of a political group which considers the target of assassination as detrimental to ‘the good of society.’ One thinks of assassinations committed by the anarchist movement in the 19th century; also, of Operation Valkyrie – the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, led by the General von Stauffenberg. This is not the same as murdering someone; it must be considered as a kind of execution, this time not because of the misdeeds done by the victim himself, but for offences committed by others on his behest. It is a politically motivated deed of wilful manslaughter, like the successful assassination by the resistance of Heydrich in Prague, or the failed assassination of De Gaulle in Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal.
There is also the assault or attempt on someone’s life out of sheer revenge. If this happens in a society with a well-established rule of law, with a dependable force of detection, arrestation, and judgement, it must be considered as premeditated murder, though perhaps considered by the one who commits it as an execution, or as retribution for ills he has suffered personally. This may be taken into account by the judge.
In war we also have snipers; their acts of killing are performed as a military duty, however, with no specific order per killing: a sniper is instructed to kill on sight, that is any one of the enemy he sees fit to be eliminated, in the way that British OO7-spies had an indiscriminate ‘licence to kill.’ Thus, they do not murder people. These snipers will normally use a special, far-reaching gun, equipped with a telescopic sight. In Philip Kerr’s novel Prussia Blue, an assassin has used such a gun, subsequently hiding it in a chimney, to be discovered by detective Bernie Gunther who reflects on the weapon in relation to its use by snipers. ‘Couldn’t pull the trigger on a fellow like that, myself. Even a Tommy-soldier.Too much like murder. I wasn’t the only person who felt that way: snipers and flamethrower operators – in the trenches, they were always singled out for special treatment when they were captured.’ The last line on ‘special treatment’ is summing up the fine line between the varieties of human violence. And the phrase ‘like murder’ indicates how small the difference can be between murder and other kinds of killing.
6. Senseless Violence and Panzer Ego
This leaves us with one last question, as yet unanswered: can ‘senseless’ or ‘motiveless violence’ in any way exist? Though it is not correct to call the killing by Loeb and Leopold of the boy ‘motiveless’, it does not preclude a negative answer to the question. L&L were still living their Modern Times, an epoch in which crime was usually motivated; we are now living Postmodern Times…
My thesis runs as follows. Postmodernity is a new social formation, a social system in the making since the 1960s. Increasingly so, ever since people are tendentially affected by this postmodern complex which is emptying out what had been modern man’s character-with-set-values. The postmodern social complex still concerns a capitalist society, which is determined by the structure of a late-late capitalist economy; however, the dominant inside its social system has changed from politics to ideology, including the postmodern communication media.
Postmodern narcissism is tinged with an everyday-life fanaticism, as if tomorrow never comes; all and everything is done in permanent haste. Thus, one needs to be ‘for ever young.’ Consequently, what is considered relaxation has acquired labour-like qualities; to relax has become a profession: going to the gym, going through a regular routine of exercises, all-together-alone; a weekend, crammed with work-like fun activities, that is: if the actual job does not demand that one also works through the weekend.
Last, but not least – if not the most important and vital factor: the decay of the modern nuclear family; at an ever-earlier age of the children, progressively more of its functions are being taken over by other institutions. In the Western predominantly hysterical modern family, life still had been centred on the warm tradition of values and of norms relating to these values, this in the context of the Freudian oedipal pressure cooker, in which the last remnants of loyalty that had once marked feudal society had yet survived. With the decay of this nuclear family, loyalty and the basic trust that served it are gone. Whatever the psycho-pathological side effects of the modern upbringing may have been, the fact remains that character, conscience and identity were, as a matter-of-course, assembled in the individual; in a tight manner and over a considerable period of years, engineered by the central management of the parents. School, then, was still a separate institution, whereas nowadays schooling has become a fusion of education and upbringing.
The crisis of modern family life has been the result of a set of factors: first the introduction of television; subsequently, the mass introduction of so-called private ‘social media’; the intensification of work of both parents; the systematic break-up of families through early divorce; and the loosening of sexual morality in the wake of the rise of a more general utilitarianism regarding the immediate satisfaction of needs, which in its turn was instigated by the consumerist policy of the combined forces of industrial capital, the mass media, fashion and music culture, finance capital and, not to forget, state policy.
Rereading Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), one is struck by the similarities between prototypical Japanese shame culture, and behaviour in postmodern society. In Western countries, we have come closer to what for a long time had been considered as the ‘Japanese situation’, in which young children, especially boys up to their fifth year, were and often still are raised by females in a warm, liberal manner. Then, and this quite suddenly, the child is thrown into the cold bath of competition, according to strict impersonal norms, resulting in a distance to the ones who gave them warmth before. In Japan, the education of boys is suddenly handed over from the mother and other women, to the father and other men. In our Western societies we observe an early, more generalized separation of children from the family, both girls and boys; they are not merely educated, but also ‘brought up’ by massive school systems, as well as by their co-equals or peers who, at already an early age, have become more important than the parents. Reading the work of Christopher Lash, with his emphasis on the transformation of a hysterical into a narcissistic culture, I agree with his thesis that this conversion of modernity into postmodernity began somewhere in the American sixties and the European seventies.
In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (§62), we read that man is ‘ein noch nicht festgestelltes Tier’, i.e. an organism which is not fitted out with steady, instinctive behavioural patterns of stimuli and responses, thus lacking a naturally given steady identity. In all former versions of human culture, an overall organised system of values, of norms and accompanying steady habits had provided a substitute for this biological lack of an instinctual program.
The explosion of postmodern capitalist consumerism, with its endlessly available chances ‘to have an experience’, and its ever-growing supply of goods has forced people to choose, without knowing all that is on offer – a pragmatic paradox of the first order, at all times present. In the context of an ever-growing speed of social existence and the looseness of so-called friends and work conditions, these pragmatic paradoxes are unnerving. One is always where one is not; one is always not where one is, mentally on the go continually, pondering on what might havebeen, and on what might have beenhad, and where one could alsohave been. This uncertainty applies to things, as well as to other people – lovers, friends et cetera. An organism which is not fixed in its instinctive certainty of behavioural patterns, is affected by this postmodern mental and behavioural flux and flex, resulting in a permanent hyper-reflexivity and in soul-searching. However, there are sheer biological limits to the plasticity of the human organism and to its capacity to adapt to such growing and intense flux.
A porous self will be the product of this new social complex of postmodernity, combining hyper-reflexivity, continuous soul-searching and a structural lack of a steady personality, continuously in need of what, in his book Männer Phantasien (Male Phantasies), Klaus Theweleit has analysed as Panzer Ego. He has investigated how, as a result of their Japanese-like, late-19th-century rough and cold Wilhelminian upbringing, many men were lacking a core identity; recruited by the German Freikorps, they did ugly things during and in the wake of World War One. Theweleit found, that these men were continually in need of a fake-identity, which the author has termed PanzerEgo. Without such Panzers, the vacuous ego would be flooded by the overload of all stimuli present. It would be in a condition of constant fear; or, alternatively, by way of drugs, it would seek ‘to lose itself’, drain itself of the fears and cobwebs in the brain.
I would like to generalise this concept, to consider it as characterising the postmodern social system as such. Whether it be specific clothes, identified by trademark; uniforms; uniformed camaraderie; identities, borrowed from watching serialised soap non-characters; the choice of so-called ‘roots’; the aggressive confrontation with others in sports; obsessive jogging; joining a sectarian ‘club’; wild disco-dancing; excessive drugtaking; indiscriminate sex; tattooing; or the very real violence done to others without-any-motive, so-called senseless violence – an individual who is lacking a core identity, is in need of a sharply outlined exterior source to fill up his vacuous soul, or placate his spurious Ego. These kinds of confrontational excess have the disadvantage of losing their effectiveness all too soon; ever newer, more intense excess is part of this game.
Under conditions of this new social system, megalomania and sociopathy will thrive. The ‘complete’ modern Ego, with its psychopathology, must be contrasted with postmodern sociopathy, residing in the non-existence of fundamental normative consciousness in the vacuous Ego. Modern psychopathology was concerned with deviant, ‘sick’ excess, which could then be cured; postmodern sociopathy is inherent in its pervasive narcissism, it has become the normal condition of postmodern man. The postmodern narcissist is not so much abnormal; it is a-normal, in the sense of existing outside any umbrella of generalised norms and values, which under modernity still regulated social intercourse. The narcissist will never consider the other as a human being, but always as a something, to be manipulated, then discarded – an act, not necessarily accompanied by a conscious motive.
It is here that so-called senseless or motiveless violence originates: aggression against non-relevant others, aggression spent not for any specific ideological reason as it still was in modernity, but as an act of sheer confrontation; the sole ‘purpose’ of an aggressive organism, to afford the vacuous Ego to exist temporarily, and intensely so. It is the sudden outburst at someone non-specific, if only he is not a relevant other belonging to one’s own club or in-crowd. This may be done collectively, as in outbursts of soccer hooliganism, where the cocoon of an F-Side battles a cocoon from the other F-Side, the mirror-hatred having no ulterior motive; it is merely self-referential hatred, an Ego booster. This contrasts sharply with the yet modern ‘motiveless malignancy’ which Coleridge attributed to the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. In the age of Shakespeare as in Coleridge’s own age, mankind still lived in the ethical tope of good versus evil; postmodernity has gone beyond this, even if Nietzsche did not fathom the lengths his dictum would go; beyond good and evil has become the normal postmodern reality of narcissistic indifference…
7. Summa
The crime committed by Loeb and Leopold was a straightforward modern murder; a murder with a motive – a philosophical motive, thus a rather exceptional one, to be easily misunderstood by those who do not regularly pick up a copy of Zarathustra as ‘not motivated at all.’ By implication, they will call it a ‘senseless killing.’ However, the motive of their deed was clearly understood by both the perpetrators L&L, as well as by their lawyer and by the judge.
It would be a misunderstanding to call Lob and Leopold narcissists. The manner in which, in Rope, in the self-organised presence of their philosophy professor and other guests, but also in the court with its audience, they paraded their crime as a work of art, must be considered as an example of modern hysteria. True, in their crime there is surely an element of narcissistic abuse of another man as ‘a thing’; yet, not as an indifferent thing – he was a chosen one, in their perspective an exemplary case of inferiority, selected for this characteristic to prove a philosophical point, as well as their own superiority. The modern hysteric had an irresistible need to ingratiate himself with others, this from a deep desire to be admired and loved. Reread the transcript of Rope, which mirrors their behaviour in court: for the miracle of their ‘perfect murder’ they performed, Loeb and Leopold wanted to be loved and admired by their professor. One of them explicitly spoke of his disgust for the lack of ‘recognition’ after the act. Their ‘performance art’, the staging of the dinner/murder on the chest in which the corpse had been hidden, was a hysterical act, even if their actual criminal abuse of the boy did demand a streak of narcissism. A straight modern murder it was.
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8. Postscript on Ripley
The fascination with utter violence committed against innocent people, we also find in the Ripley-novels written by Patricia Highsmith. Her oeuvre is full of bizarre acts, with a fascination for cruelty and ruthless murder.
True, in Highsmith’s 1974 Ripley’s Game the protagonist justifies the brutal killings committed by himself and by an innocent man he has engaged, with the utter badness of those murdered. The world, thus Ripley, is a better place without those guys – good riddance! Yet, an element of the Übermensch is also there; Ripley explains to his vomiting and fear-stricken co-murderer, that the worse the deeds done, the faster and the more complete they are forgotten. I should not omit the fact that in 1977 Liliana Cavani, the cineaste who filmed this book in a masterly way, also created what might be considered a philosophical biography of Nietzsche, called Beyond Good and Evil.
Yet, no such moralistic justification is present in Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley, a book already written in 1955. We read about a young man who is on a spree of murdering innocent bystanders, either because they do not return his love, or because they merely stand in the way of his survival. In Highsmith’s novels, Ripley becomes increasingly a multi-talented genius, an Übermensch who stands far above the common crowd and whose gross acts seem to be justified by this. A meta-level of moralistic comment/criticism, yet present in Hitchcock’s Rope and in the play on which it was based, is completely missing in her work. Perhaps, this can be explained by the fact that Rope and the play were created in the peak-period of modernity – the interbellum – whereas Highsmith may be considered an avant-garde intellectual of postmodernity.
Many years ago, a few times in a row, I visited Corbusier’s chapel on the hill of Ronchamp. It is elegant, yet bulky – a huge mass of stone. The hill on which it is built is steep all around. Climbing it, it becomes clear that with the equipment of those days there was no way of transporting the materials up the mount in a technical manner; all of it had to be brought up by men with carts and horses. The massive bulk is all the more astonishing. Thus, it did not come as a surprise to read that the enormous hat-like roof is in fact an empty shell with only a thin, reinforced cement skin.
This also explains that, once inside, the visitor may be awed by the fact that the whole of the roof is balancing on small stilts, placed on seemingly fat walls, leaving open a slit through which sunlight peeps in – without the mass collapsing. The sublime in architecture…
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When confronting the outside of the chapel, what struck me already the first time was the optical illusion Corbusier had produced. Standing close to it, yet in the precise position from which the first photo has been taken, the edifice was towering above me. Stepping backwards, thus descending the hill and taking distance, something curious happened: instead of the building getting smaller, which one expects when taking distance, it actually seemed to grow in size, getting bigger and taller. As I stepped away from it, it began to tower all the more so. Being a good Popperian, on my next visit I tried to falsify this weird impression; it remained the same.
This illusion seems to be the effect of the immense, empty, cement-shelled eaves. This idea was reinforced, when I began to analyse the impression made by one of my favourite aquarelles, watching it from a certain distance, in an almost meditative way, lying on my siesta couch – Plokker’s group of buildings in Thiers, France.
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Observing an aquarelle, there is of course no way of taking distance from the building painted; I made a visit to Thiers. As the small town is built ‘against’ a steep mountain, each street dropping before one’s eyes, buildings always ‘up there’ like Corbusier’s chapel, the experiment worked – no falsification, indeed. On a sunlit day, similar to the one the painter used to produce his image, descending backwards down the sloping road, the building was progressively towering over me. Again, I am convinced, that it’s the generously large eaves that performed the trick.
This image was made, with the intent to impose a feeling of mystery on my reader; what the heck could he have made a photo of? That it is ‘for real’, may be deduced from the tips of my shoes and from the bit of tired green which I brought in the picture, to not become a photographer of ‘the abstract.’
The image is a dire symbol of the disaster that struck me, and many others who live in a house on the river Gartempe. More than a week ago, there it was: an almost record-breaking flood, which sent a gurgling avalanche of muddy river-water into my cellars, this to a height of 1.65 centimetres on the inside walls. No warning from city hall, which is legally obliged to sound a loud siren; the thing did not work, they told us later…
I have a huge, complicated and very old house. Before going to bed, I had inspected the right one of my three cellars at 02.15 o’clock, having found but a little trickle of water entering the pipe. I had opened the door to the balcony, to prevent it from getting stuck if the water might come higher. Not expecting much more, this insomniac went to bed, to be disturbed by terrible sounds, about 05.00 o’clock. By that time, I could not go down any longer, to close the door; the water stood already one meter high, flooding the staircase in the hallway…
The open balcony-door was leading the wild river straight into my house, overturning and ruining big pieces of furniture; destroying the contents of the prepared clothes-shop for Easter, set up in the next two cellars; terminating precious 18th-century porcelain and glassware, which were stocked in one of the ruined cupboards; making glue of a collection of stored books; pushing magnificent plant pots from the balcony wall into the river, taking away lavender, hortensia et cetera. What was left, was of the ‘tired green’ mentioned, and of the muddy green seen in the picture.
It was only days later, after long and hard cleaning work, merely making silly pictures for insurance-sake (not a good cause, as they do no insure high for property at such risk…), I took the above shot, as one of a series of three. From the second one, you might divine the reason for making the series:
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However, turning it around, all becomes clear.
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Saved between two miraculously intact glass plates was this image of an idol, once adored by a people on one of the Pacific islands – only to prove, that such idols are useless. This one managed to protect itself, or rather its image, but not the property of the one who reverently brought it into his home. The idol did not even save its little brothers – my collection of beautiful reproductions of Toulouse Lautrec’s circus drawings…
In days long gone, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote a book on what he thought a good state or republic should do for its people. One of his prescriptions for future political masters was to ban certain types of art and music. As he lived in Greece, he proposed to scratch all compositions in the Lydian mode, as according to him that type of music was detrimental to the state – subversive. “The introduction of novel fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolutions in that quarter.”
A reasonable man may be overcome by an attack of irrepressible laughter, and relegate such nonsense to the, as yet, backward Antique culture. However, yesterday a contemporary autocrat proved himself a worthy successor to Plato’s legacy. Kadyrov, the Chechen lord and master of an orthodox Islam republic, forbade all playing of all musical compositions which do not conform to a certain range of beat. To be precise, this according to CNN: “Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute.” This would end the playing of most rock and other evil kinds of music.
All of course with good intentions, Dadayev, like Plato, added that his aesthetic directive would serve “to align music with the Chechen mentality and musical rhythm,” aiming to bring “to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people.” Thank you, Lord!
Apart from the mentioned outburst of Nietzschean laughter, there seem to be only one other way to confront such ridiculous ideas: aggressive and artistic irony. Quite some time ago, the Dutch composer Andriessen found the solution. He composed his large masterpiece The State – the very same title of Plato’s book – and did so in the Lydian mode. In his comments on his own composition, he wrote that – sadly enough – Plato had been all wrong. If, indeed, such Lydian music could provoke the downfall of the state, Andriessen’s composition would have been more effective…
Up there, in one of the niches of the rockisch mountain next to my house, a massif that home one of these days is threatening to smother my, the reader with the right perspective and a keen eye may observe the miracle of two metamorphoses in conjunction. The mere-fifty meters high formation has been transformed into the town’s Mount Everest, as the cat – visible in one of the little holes – has scaled the steep mass of stone, and has become a real mountain lion.
In itself something to behold! But as the mount’s neighbour, I also know that something peculiar has happened: all those other niches, which on a regular day are filled with a host of silly pigeons, are suddenly empty. Normally, it looked like this:
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From time to time, I have found the feathered corpse of a pigeon, half eaten, discarded by the evildoer. I have always thought that it must have been a clever rat, climbing up there and pinching one of the birds. It seems, I was mistaken: the cat-lion did it! Perhaps so well, that the pigeons had already flown when, this time, he finally reached his high-up destination.
Another possibility: every month, the ugly diarrhoea-coloured cabin on stilts, seen on the right of the first picture, is filled with grain that is meant to make the birds sterile. In this town, people think that there are too many pigeons around. That grain may have become so successful, that all birds have disappeared – overnight and forever…
It could also have been my fata morgana; not just the smile of the Cheshire Cat up there, but an after-image of the whole animal – an illusion, something merely imagined by me. The picture proves me wrong here. Hail to the courage of a common cat!
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