On the Lousy Conversationalists at Cannes

Lars von Trier’s combined irony and intellectual honesty at Cannes was too much for those less acquainted with European humanism – including the present organisers – when he tried to ridicule his own family background while circumventing standard demonisation of Adolf Hitler. See for yourselves in the video clip available on the BBC site. International media headlines have screamed that the director had praised Hitler (of course), though he simply insisted on some common notion of humanity that had to be shared with even the cruellest murderer in history. Surely anyone familiar with von Trier’s cinematography from Dogville to Breaking the Waves to Antichrist is painfully familiar with the recurrence of his critical eye for the human condition?

This is at the very least his second film in row that apparently won’t get the critical opportunity that it deserves as a piece of art to be, given media and random celebrities with unnecessarily loud and uncontemplative voices. At least all the critiques of Antichrist in the mainstream media that I read were too occupied with violent fetishes – and the recurrent panic – of the reviewers themselves to see the questions posed by the director. A pity.

Though I'm sure von Trier has often enough depicted how apparently good it feels have a fellow human being on his/her/its knees.

That’s what you get when you let entertainers organise what was intended assumedly to be an art festival, and invite politicians and super models as guests. Bonfires of anything that attempts to address our worst fears and sins too honestly will burn all too often, as they always have. Perhaps this is a moment of hope: Art is still dangerous and Europe still retains some of its faculties. It is a fine and optimistic gesture from von Trier to place the judging power on other film directors. Could an artist or a thinker of any merit silence another and live with oneself?

In any event, is it necessary (/possible) for a fine cultural philosophical thinker to be a reliably nice human being?

(image: so that von Trier will know better!)

Bios Politikos from a Dead Angle

…prostituere (to set forth in public, to expose to dishonor, to prostitute, to put to unworthy use). The Latin verb is a composition of pro (forward) and statuere (to cause to stand, to station, place erect). (Wikipedia, Prostitution)

The name of this yet undefined little building – a French euphemism – is intended as a reference to the mutual reluctance with which people’s attempts to create and furnish some personal space for themselves are treated in pretty much all human social organisation.

Olivier Razac states it in his history of barbed wire (Histoire politique du barbelé, Le Fabrique Éditions, 2000): barbed wire marks something akin to the game of citizenship that bestows symbolic tokens to all those, who are ready to embrace the figurative, not that actual at all, equality within. In a landscape of direct and indirect borders, biofilters, those without the game tend to be unpronounced, undeveloped property that yet waits to be conceptually and physically earmarked.

I have a nagging feeling that it’s not all this simple, though, and I’m perhaps not primarily interested in workings, rights and wrongs of any particular political agenda. I don’t mean to sound like an anti-globalist either. I’m still figuring out the globular part. Bitter-smelling territory markings, gradually washed away by recurring showers of rain or covered in particles, are unavoidable in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention that in a way or another, when correctly positioned in the right conversations, the scent compels us all.

All the small ways in which human life-spheres and bodies necessarily keep being prostituted as a sign of submission to the game – aesthetic, economic, political, ethical, you name it to make it seem true – mark the site of maison de tolérance, the barely tolerant tension that marks the most palatably queer of our storytelling traditions; or the embarrassed feelings that fill those, who suddenly become aware of their own curiosity toward their newly incarcerated playthings in the game of barbed wire relations. Without the right stories to go with, leaving to die is not all that different from keeping alive.

No promises, other than where there stands a treelike tree in all its hierarchical, arborescent form, it stands on a plateau that gazes at it from many a more unknown places.

And how can we talk of order overall

when the very placement of the stars

leaves us doubting just which one shines for whom?

(from Szymborska, Psalm)

(image: Harboured Hopes, Scribe of Salmacis 2010)