Jan
8
Kluge on Fourier & Afterlife
Filed Under Fiction |
I don’t know if some of you are planning on reading Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year, which received - for the most part - excellent reviews so far. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I must say, some of the discursive patches of writing on politics are pretty derivative and disengaged from Coetzee’s usually lively fictional imagination. The author’s disquisition on State and Power, especially, reads like a limp distillation of the Frankfurt School ideas. I believe that there’s definitely a place for essayistic, political writing in fiction, if done well. One prime example that I know of is Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot. Even when dealing with topics such as the 9/11, Iraq and Guantanamo, Kluge’s mischievous and elliptical fictional frame of mind shapes such issues beyond the simplistic, binarious notions formed by the media images, the headlines. The book is structurally a series of quick feuilletons, and in progressing through the short pieces, one simply moves along with the author’s pace of thought in a state of constant surprise; a perfect read. In one particularly disquieting chapter near the end of the book, Kluge uses Kant’s retort - “A well-intended lie is an act of omnipotence” - as a prism through which to contemplate the various political occurrences of such lies in history (The French Revolution, The Stalinist purge during the 1937 Moscow trials, the CIA interrogation of Al-Qaeda operatives, etc.). Then, immediately following the chapter is the author’s whimsical musing on Fourier’s mathematical calculation of the transmigration of souls -
The human soul, says Fourier, must assume 810 different forms before it concludes its planetary circuit and can return to earth. Of these existences in the cosmos 720 years are happy, 45 favorable, and 45 unfavorable or unhappy. After the end of our world the chosen souls will travel to the sun! Only those with complete courses are chosen. Before souls spend 80,000 years on our planet, they must have inhabited all other planets and worlds. The human race will have enjoyed boreal light for 70,000 years.
Kluge then trains his gaze on Benjamin, who contemplated Fourier’s notion of transmigration of souls in The Arcades Project, its hopeless utopia. All too naturally, the reader’s sense of desperation about the atrocities of human history grafts onto Benjamin’s - especially after having read Kluge’s preceding chapter about “lies” in history. And the twin emotions of despair and glee which attend Benjamin’s description of Fourier’s hopeless utopia seem the same attendant feelings which visit the reader, and Kluge’s fiction becomes, effortlessly and simultaneously in the seamless instant of unnameable sadness, also a palimpsest of historical disillusionment -
Fourier also says that… humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and have a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valves connecting the chambers of the heart and so - without the blood having to pass through the lungs - bring it directly to the heart… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when orange trees blossom in Siberia, and the most dangerous animals will be replaced by their opposites. ANTI-LIONS and ANTI-WHALES… New stars will emerge to take the place of the moon, which, by then, will already have begun to rot.
(Image: by Ji Lee)
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