From 4.40 to 7.45 in the late afternoon of Monday 26 April 1937, the small Basque town of Guernica was destroyed by sustained bombing attacks by Hitler’s Condor Legion and Mussolini’s Aviazzione Legionaria. It was carried out at the behest of Francisco Franco’s rebel Nationalist faction under the code name Operation Rügen. The operation was supervised by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, the Condor Legion’s chief of staff, a brilliant and ruthless Prussian aristocrat with a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. A cousin of the First World War fighter ace ‘the Red Baron’ Manfred von Richthofen, Wolfram had planned the entire operation as an experiment in terror – as he would later mastermind the Blitzkrieg in Poland and France. His choice of projectiles aimed to cause the greatest possible number of civilian victims. A combination of explosive bombs and incendiaries rained on the residential sector of the town, which was largely made of wood. And to prevent the fires being put out, the municipal water tanks and the fire-station were the first targets. Terrified civilians fleeing to the surrounding fields were herded back into Guernica by the machine-gun strafing of Heinkel He 51 fighters that circled the town in what Richthofen called “the ring of fire”. Monday was market day in Guernica. Between the townspeople, refugees, peasants bringing goods to the market, and train loads of people from Bilbao coming to buy food, there were at least 10,000 people crammed into the town that day. They were attacked by 28 German and three Italian bombers together with 10 Heinkel He 51 and 12 Fiat CR32 biplane fighters and possibly six of the first ever Messerschmitt Bf109s. It was an operation on a scale that could hardly have been organised by the Germans behind the backs of the Spanish staff, with whom there was, in any case, constant liaison. The town had no anti-aircraft defences.
“Large figure in a shelter” — Henry Moore
Largely thanks to Pablo Picasso’s searing painting, Guernica is now remembered as the place where a new and horrific modern warfare came of age. Picasso had previously avoided creating explicitly political art but the Spanish Republic was keen to get the world’s most famous artist to identify himself with its cause. In January 1937, he responded positively to an invitation to contribute to the Spanish pavilion at the World Fair in Paris scheduled for later in the year. That contribution would be Guernica. In fact the painting, begun on 1 May, four days after the bombing, is not just about what happened in the Basque town. There were three prior influences: the savage bombing of Madrid in October and November 1936 and again throughout April 1937; the suffering of refugees who were bombed and strafed as they fled in February 1937 from Picasso’s native Málaga to Almería; and the bombing of Durango on 31 March.
This new reading of Gilles Deleuze by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee forges a link between his early and later works by decoding his hidden agenda for communism. Encoded in the idea of ‘the Third World’, Deleuze used his concept of communism as a bulwark against fascist politics and the liberal political economy. Inspired by May 68 and its aftermath, these concealed interpretations of Marx are now tacitly forgotten but can unlock a deeper understanding of Deleuze’s political project.
“As we know, love needs re-inventing.” Arthur Rimbaud
An excerpt:
PHILOSOPHERS AND LOVE
You borrow from Rimbaud the phrase “Love needs re-inventing” and draw on numerous poets and writers as you develop your own conception of love. But first we should perhaps ask questions of other philosophers. You have been impressed by the fact that so few have shown a serious interest in love, and when they have, you usually disagree with them. Why?
The relationship between philosophers and love is certainly far from straightforward. Aude Lancelin and Marie Lemonnier’s Philosophers and Love from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir shows that very clearly. The book has added interest in that it combines an examination of the philosophers’ thinking and their lives without dumbing down. In that sense, it is almost unprecedented. The book shows how philosophy oscillates between two extremes when it comes to love, even though there are also intermediate points of view. On the one hand, there is “antilove” philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer being the prime representative of that tendency. He is well known for writing that he will never forgive women for experiencing a passion for love, thus making it possible to perpetuate a human species that was in fact worthless! He is one extreme. At the other, you find philosophers who transform love into one of the highest levels of subjective experience. That is the case with Sören Kierkegaard, for example. For Kierkegaard there are three levels of existence. At the aesthetic level, the experience of love is one of vain seduction and repetition. The selfishness of pleasure and the very selfishness of that selfishness drive individuals on, the archetype being Mozart’s Don Juan. At the ethical level, love is genuine and demonstrates its own seriousness. It is an eternal commitment, turned towards the absolute, something Kierkegaard himself experienced in his long courtship of the young Régine. The ethical level can lead the way to the highest level, the religious level, if the absolute value of the commitment is endorsed by marriage. Marriage is thus conceived not as a strengthening of the social bond against the perils of wayward love, but as the institution that channels genuine love towards its fundamental destination. The final transfiguration of love becomes possible when “the Ego plunges through its own transparency to meet the power that has created it”: that is, when, thanks to the experience of love, the Ego roots itself in its divine source. Love then moves beyond seduction and, through the serious mediation of marriage, becomes a way to accede to the super-human. As you can see, philosophy struggles with huge tension. On the one hand, love seen as a natural extravagance of sex arouses a kind of rational suspicion. Conversely, we see an apology for love that borders on religious epiphany. Christianity hovers in the background, a religion of love after all. And the tension is almost unbearable. Thus, when Kierkegaard was finally unable to contemplate the idea of marrying Régine, he broke with her. In the end, he represented the aesthete seducer of the first level, lived then ethical promise of the second and failed to make the transition, via the real-life seriousness of marriage, to the third level. Nonetheless, he visited the whole gamut of forms of philosophical reflection on love.
Does your own interest in this question go back to the initial move made by Plato who turns love into one of the ways of approaching the Idea?
Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea. Thus, even when I am merely admiring a beautiful body, whether I like it or not, I am in movement towards the idea of Beauty. I think – in quite different terms, naturally – along the same lines, namely that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.
One of the great theorisers of love, according to you, Jacques Lacan, also engaged in dialogue with Plato and concluded, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” What did he mean?
His is a very interesting thesis, derived from a moralist, sceptical perspective, but one that leads to the contrary conclusion. Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the ediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex. In fact, Lacan also engages in philosophical ambiguities in relation to love. The idea that “love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship” can indeed be interpreted in two ways. The first and most obvious is that love is what the imagination employs to fill the emptiness created by sex. It is quite true, after all, that sex, however splendid it is and certainly can be, ends in a kind of emptiness. That is really why it is subject to the law of repetition: one must start time and time again. Every day, when one is young! Then love comes to be the idea that something exists in this void, that lovers are linked by something else apart from this relationship that doesn’t exist. When I was a very young man, I was very struck, almost disgusted, by a passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where she describes, how, after having sex, the man feels the woman’s body is flat and flabby and the woman feels in parallel that the m an’s body, apart from his erect member, is generally unattractive, if not slightly ridiculous. Theatrical farce or vaudeville makes us laugh with a constant usage of similar thoughts. Man’s desire is the desire of the comic, big-bellied, impotent Phallus, and the toothless hag with sagging breasts is the future that awaits all beauty. Loving tenderness, when you fall asleep in the other’s arms, is like Noah’s cloak cast over these unpleasant considerations. But Lacan also thinks quite the opposite, that love reaches out towards the ontological. While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock… love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned.
What you are really saying is that there are very contradictory philosophical interpretations when it comes to love?
Principally three. First, there is the romantic interpretation that focuses on the ecstasy of the encounter. Secondly, what we referred briefly to when discussing the Meetic dating agency, the interpretation based on a commercial or legalistic perspective, which argues that love must in the end be a contract. A contract between two free individuals who would presumably declare that they love each other, though they never forget the necessary equality of the relationship, the system of mutual benefits, etc. Finally, there is the sceptical interpretation that turns love into an illusion. My own philosophical view is attempting to say that love cannot be reduced to any of these approximations and is a quest for truth. What kind of truth? you will ask. I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. It is the project, naturally including sexual desire in all its facets, including the birth of a child, but also a thousand other things, in fact, anything from the moment our lives are challenged by the perspective of difference.
Given that love, according to you, is a manner of experiencing the world on the basis of difference, why don’t you share the view o f the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, namely that the person in love experiences in the person he or she loves not “a quality that is different from any other, but the very quality of difference”? Why don’t you accept that love is an experience of the other?
I think that it is essential to grasp that the construction of the world on the basis of difference is quite distinct from the experience of difference. Levinas’s vision starts from the irreducible experience of the face of the other, an epiphany that is grounded in God as “the Almighty Other”. The experience of otherness is central, because it is the foundation stone of ethics. In a great religious tradition, love also becomes an ethical sentiment par excellence. In my view, there is nothing particularly “ethical” about love as such. I really don’t like all these theological ruminations inspired by love, even though I know they have made a great impact on history. I can only see the ultimate revenge of One over Two. I believe there really is an encounter with the other, but an encounter is not an experience, it is an event that remains quite opaque and only finds reality in its multiple resonances within the real world. Nor can I see love as an experience of “communion”, namely, an experience in which I forget myself on behalf of the other, that is a model in this world of what will finally lead me to the Almighty Other. At the end of Faust, Goethe was already asserting that “the eternal feminine takes us Above”. I’m sorry, but I find such statements rather obscene. Love doesn’t take me “above” or indeed “below”. It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity. Here, I am opposing “construction” to “experience”. When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know – not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is – that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world. The birth of a child, if born from within love, is yet another example of this possibility.
Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong Translated by Peter Bush
In this paper, I examine Badiou’s idea of the “infinite value of truth” as an important imperative of our post-truth era. The main concepts essential for understanding the creation of truth include the mathematical system of set theory, events, and the relationships between truth and the subject, truth and politics, and truth and art. The condition of truth appears to be essential for Badiou’s notion of real life. By gaining a better understanding of what truth can be, we can explore different visions and understandings of the future to come.
Neste artigo, examino a ideia de Badiou acerca do “valor infinito da verdade” como um importante imperativo da nossa era de pós-verdade. Os principais conceitos que são constitutivos para a compreensão da criação da verdade são o sistema matemático de teoria dos conjuntos, acontecimento, relações entre verdade e sujeito, verdade e política e verdade e arte. A condição da verdade parece essencial para a noção de Vida Real em Badiou. É por meio de uma melhor compreensão do que a verdade pode ser que uma visão e compreensão diferentes do futuro que está por vir podem ser exploradas.
Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari, the child of Italian immigrants, grew up on a coffee plantation in the state of São Paulo where his father worked. At the age of fifteen he started his studies at the academy of arts in Rio de Janiero. In his work he wanted to depict the turmoil of the time – prevailing political upheavals and social injustice. Portinari addressed the social problems of Brazil in his paintings, such as the plight of the country’s rural inhabitants, most of whom were previously enslaved people. He became a member of the Brazilian Communist party so the class struggle of the workers and native population become the main topic of his art. On September 6, 1957, his famous pair of paintings War and Peace was donated to the United Nations Assembly in New York. Due to Portinari’s involvement with the Communist Party, he was not invited to this ceremony. In December 2010, the panels returned to Brazil and were celebrated with an exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro.
In this interview, Alain Badiou focuses on the concept of the migrant, or the sans-papiers. Badiou discusses the importance of this concept in his previous work and for contemporary politics.
Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere “stick” in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war. Like other inventors, I believed at one time that war could he stopped by making it more destructive. But I found that I was mistaken. I underestimated man’s combative instinct, which it will take more than a century to breed out. We cannot abolish war by outlawing it. We cannot end it by disarming the strong. War can be stopped, not by making the strong weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself.
Hitherto all devices that could be used for defense could also be utilized to serve for aggression. This nullified the value of the improvement for purposes of peace. But I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea and to perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense. If it is adopted, it will revolutionize the relations between nations. It will make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other means for attack. My invention requires a large plant, but once it is established it will he possible to destroy anything, men or machines, approaching within a radius of 200 miles. It will, so to speak, provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression.
If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in war. My discovery ends the menace of airplanes or submarines, but it insures the supremacy of the battleship, because battleships may be provided with some of the required equipment. There might still be war at sea, but no warship could successfully attack the shore line, as the coast equipment will be superior to the armament of any battleship.
I want to state explicitly that this invention of mine does not contemplate the use of any so-called “death rays.” Rays are not applicable because they cannot be produced in requisite quantities and diminish rapidly in intensity with distance. All the energy of New York City (approximately two million horsepower) transformed into rays and projected twenty miles, could not kill a human being, because, according to a well known law of physics, it would disperse to such an extent as to be ineffectual.
My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. This wonderful feature will make it possible, among other things, to achieve undreamed-of results in television, for there will be almost no limit to the intensity of illumination, the size of the picture, or distance of projection.
I do not say that there may not be several destructive wars before the world accepts my gift. I may not live to see its acceptance. But I am convinced that a century from now every nation will render itself immune from attack by my device or by a device based upon a similar principle.
At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.
Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a “thinking machine.” I anticipated this development.
And unless mankind’s attention is too violently diverted by external wars and internal revolutions, there is no reason why the electric millennium should not begin in a few decades.
Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a filmmaker, author, and film theorist. He was deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. Farocki’s films investigate the processes through which images and the messages they carry are constructed, transmitted, and perceived; as well as the ability of recorded images to convey the realities of war.
The Anti-fascist school booklet was devised as a learning notebook for reading, writing and calculation, but also as an artistic publication by the Popular Front Government at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The Cervantes Institute (Instituto Cervantes) organised an exhibition on this historical document, which also served as a tribute to its creators: the Polish-born graphic designer Mauricio Amster and the Berlin photographer Walter Reuter.
Freud, Burke, Lacan, and philosophy’s other scenes by Daniel Adleman and Chris Vanderwees
Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a collaborative work emerging from several years of conversations between Adleman – a rhetorician – and Vanderwees – a psychoanalyst. Their dialogue represents a thoughtful fusion of psychoanalytic practice and theory with new rhetoric, rather effectively combining the work of Freud, Burke, and Lacan as main theoreticians, with many others also included. Rhetoric and psychoanalysis are disciplines that have been, or still are, on the margins of established scientific and institutional domains.
