Hysterical Reading and Détournement
Or, Two Kants
[T]he hysteric is precisely someone who appropriates another's desire by identifying with them. —No Subject – Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
I. An Hysterical–Kantian Strain
There has been a strong Kantian strain in this last month of reading—a strain that in past years I might have resisted, having read and been sympathetic to much that was critical, at every step, of the Kantian philosophy to the point, I now think, of impetuousness—a strain culminating in Michael Kohlhaas, by Heinrich von Kleist, which details an almost farcical but in the end very earnest moral tenacity, which you might call hysterical: or, Kantian.
That strain of hysterical–Kantian reading reaches a symptomatic fever-pitch in The Dying Grass (William T. Vollmann) with a wonderful sentence that strikes me as eminently Kantian, in the most generous sense:
But the fact that this earth and everything on it rushes along at a significant tilt in relation to the celestial ecliptic of reason and righteousness; and the additional datum that it intersects this invisible line no more than a couple of times a year, at equinoxes of sweetness, merely renders the rest of our existence all the more bewildering, or, if you like, offensive.1
And this reminds me how the other day, after reading an account of one of Mirabeau’s famous speeches of the French Revolution (embedded within another Kleist text2), I felt as if the sky itself was not distant enough to field the inspired gaze of which I momentarily felt capable (thanks to Mirabeau)—so I looked where?—into a tall, concrete building parallel to the cafe where I sat, my eyes glassed over, reflecting the people walking by on the street and the table in front of me over which my book lay spread out (—reading about certain moments in the Revolution affects me the way the right Biblical verse might affect an insane zealot—painful hope rises in that figurative-real zone of my chest that is part mythical, part historical, part fictional, part emotional, but which is as flaring and brief as any teary-eyed moment is able to be at midday, surrounded by well-behaved and well-meaning people who do not exactly fire the revolutionary spirit but only normal feelings of aimless acknowledgment and civil regard).
What is more in tune with the “celestial ecliptic of reason and righteousness” than this flash in the dark sky of history (“an equinox of [bitter-]sweetness”), the French Revolution, the greatness of which can be measured and felt always in inverse proportion to how much we “rush along at a significant tilt” in relation to its celestial ecliptic of (hysterical–Kantian) moral strength in our day-to-day existence?
II. Two Kants
Thinking of the French Revolution, I think also of Thomas Carlyle’s conservative revulsion (it seems to compel him more than admiration would in his Miltonian prose-poeticizing) at Robespierre and the terror, which has the same effect on me as Walter Kaufmann’s attacks on Kant, which is to say: Certain criticisms, especially once time has softened their polemical edge, can be accepted to the letter rather than refuted, rendering them basically inoperative, sometimes even positivizing their previously negative charge. The repeated insults of Carlyle against the later stages of the Revolution and the indignation of Kaufmann against Kant become, all of a sudden, without any of the wording being changed, badges of distinction and quality for the respective objects of criticism. Carlyle on “The Seagreen”:
There likewise sits seagreen Robespierre; throwing in his light weight, with decision, not yet with effect. A thin lean Puritan and Precisian; he would make away with formulas; yet lives, moves, and has his being, wholly in formulas, of another sort. “Peuple,” such according to Robespierre ought to be the Royal method of promulgating laws, “Peuple, this is the Law I have framed for thee; dost thou accept it?”—answered from Right Side, from Centre and Left, by inextinguishable laughter. Yet men of insight discern that the Seagreen may by chance go far: “this man,” observes Mirabeau, “will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.”3
And as far as Kaufmann’s (analogous) criticisms of Kant, here is a characteristic word, chosen almost at random:
To return to the [first] Critique, if he wrote it in four months, working five days a week, he averaged ten printed pages a day; if it took him five months and he worked six days a week, he would have averaged a little more than six and a half printed pages a day. It seems reasonable to assume that he averaged about eight. And he had to provide clean copy for the printer without the help of a typewriter or a secretary. In other words, the Critique of Pure Reason was written so fast that there was no time to weigh words or to reconsider long and involved sentences or arguments.4
Can’t something like this be read as praise, as though reversed in a mirror?
But now, to quote at some length, here is what Lucien Goldmann has to say about the same man, who Kaufmann describes as a constipated, self-deceiving, and milquetoast old specimen of the anal character par excellence:
Thus [Kant’s] position with regard to [the French Revolution] was unambiguous. In backward Germany where the news of the Revolution and of its development struck like lightning and, with the Jacobin terror, most of its original supporters, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel and so many others, took fright and joined the opposition, there were very few who, while critical of the excesses of the Jacobins, did not allow this to upset their judgement on the Revolution as a whole and its importance for humanity. Among these few were Germany’s two greatest poets—Goethe and Hölderlin.
No one, however, spoke out so clearly and unequivocally as the seventy-four-year-old Kant in his last published work. His words resound like the last salute of the imprisoned giant to his brothers who have broken the bars of their prison and begin now to live in freedom. It is a salute which is formulated with considerable prudence [ . . . ], for when one has oneself no chance of breaking down the prison walls, it would be foolish to irritate the guards too much. It is, however, in spite of everything, a salute which is sufficiently clear to reveal as an obvious falsification any claim that in his old age Kant allowed himself to be yoked to the wagon of German nationalism and of Prussian reaction. It is a salute which confirms again what the whole critical philosophy has demonstrated repeatedly, that those “philosophers” who, at the decisive moment, from fear, from calculation, or through subjectively sincere but radically perverted thought have betrayed the cause of freedom and the right of man in support of the most reactionary dictatorship which had suppressed every freedom, that such “philosophers” have thereby lost the right to link their thought and their action in any way with the name and work of Immanuel Kant.5
If the truth of Kant’s character lies between these two views of him (which are different enough to make one cross-eyed), then I am inclined to think the latter weighs more significantly on the scale of importance—that it is heavy enough to render many of the criticisms of a Kaufmann (plenty of which are nevertheless perfectly justified) rather light.
(I find it interesting that almost all of Walter Kaufmann’s criticisms of Kant are extremely similar to those of Goldmann’s against the neo-Kantians, to whom the latter starkly opposes the writings of Kant himself—that they are pedantic, sniveling, over-focused on categorical “architectonic,” intellectually dishonest with themselves, and so on.)
There is possibly something too optimistic about all of this, as though a congenial perspective of the facts (and of the interpretations of facts) were enough to overturn something critical that, with time, has come to seem petty and beside the point. There is almost certainly some self-flattery involved in bringing a critique like Kaufmann’s into view as though it could be deactivated by the laudatory remarks of someone like Goldmann. So, not deactivated, but overruled.
III. Détournement
None of this is to say that refutation and counter-criticism are to be dispensed with. Obviously, to take a reactionary attack on any one thing and accept it to the letter without altering its environs is not a strategy—the Situationist International outlines the kind of hijacking that I am thinking of in its definition of détournement:
Short for “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.6
Such hijacking requires a critical ability of refutation just as much as a sense of irony and a good eye for when criticism has lost its bearings.
And still, doesn’t propaganda almost always age poorly, making the intended enemy look—sometimes—very cool? Time works its own détournement on reaction; and yet, there is a world of difference between rerouting a text and willfully reading with eyes of mauvaise foi, which Kaufmann expertly translates not as “bad faith” but as “self-deception”.
Détournement is also a game of identification. The position from which a text is hijacked forces the hijacker to confess a mode of his desire.
William T. Vollmann, The Dying Grass. Penguin, 2015. 206.
Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech,” translation by Christoph Harbsmeier. (“[F]rom 1805, first published posthumously in 1878[.]”)
Quoted also in “Dérives on Letters: Part 2”.
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1301/pg1301-images.html
Walter Kaufmann, Goethe, Kant, and Hegel: Discovering the Mind, Volume I. Transaction Publishers, 1980. 181–182.
Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant. NLB, 1971. 220–221.
https://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.definitions.htm