by Joshua Cohen
Translation: To Žižek, all politics are formed not by deliberate principles of freedom or equality, but by expressions of repressed desires—shame, guilt, sexual insecurity, you name it. According to Žižek, we’re all convinced we’re drawing conclusions from an interpretable world when we’re actually just suffering involuntary psychic fantasies.
Žižek was spending the day in wall-to-wall promotion mode, talking up his new movie The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (described in the press materials as “a lecture on film, in film”), while his new wife, Slovenian journalist Jela Krečič, three decades younger and twenty floors upstairs, chain-smoked on her balcony (junkets make cheap honeymoons). Krečič is Žižek’s third wife, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology the sequel to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema—I wondered how he felt about franchises: What would be different this time around?
“I can’t see the future,” he said. “And I haven’t seen the movie.”
So I told him about it. In the sequel, as in its predecessor, he stands around on the recreated sets of Hollywood classics and, between concussively edited clips, proceeds to desublimate their meanings: the shark in Jaws is not a shark but a semantic void, much like the Mitteleuropean conception of “Jewry”; it’s lucky that the Titanic hit the iceberg, because if it hadn’t, Kate would’ve left her rich fiancé for penniless Leo—death, then, spared her the fate of living poor.
Žižek, listening for the exact amount of time it took to de-recline his chair and cross his legs out of their manspread, exploded—with memories of the earliest foreign media he consumed, Perry Mason novels and Columbo in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian, which led, obviously, to a seminar on Hitchcock’s TV show and movies: “a true work of art, the definition of it is that it survives decontextualization.” About to make another jump, he stopped. A photographer had entered the room, then left. “How do you call this rule that the actor shouldn’t look directly into the camera?”
“The fourth wall,” I said. “Don’t break the fourth wall.”
“Yes. Yes. But what interests me is that there is one genre where it breaks—hardcore pornography.”
He tore away the page he’d been scribbling on—stacked squares—and began scribbling triangles on the next.
“Friends told me that the latest trend, at least in Europe, is public sex. They showed me some clips, and they’re terrifying. A couple enters a streetcar, half-full, simply takes a seat, undresses, and starts to do it. You can see from surprised faces that it’s not staged. It’s pure working-class suburb. But what’s fascinating is that the people all look, and then they politely ignore it.”
Žižek’s style in person is the same as in his Guides: verbose, associative, dissociative, obscene (“Fuck realism!”), anecdotal (“I was just in Istanbul…”), enjargoned (“jouissance”). He went on to analyze Angela Merkel, Joschka Fischer, Robert Redford and The Company You Keep, then transitioned to recaps of the dialectic and the Kantian categoricals: Government surveillance was “private,” Žižek insisted, not “public,” “precisely in the sense that we’re all embarrassed by it when it goes public.”
He flung his pen to the blotter and gripped his beard. “It’s bad if we’re controlled, but if we’re not, it can be even worse.” A theory of religions followed; Malevich and formalism; why Prokofiev was better than Shostakovich; Platonov, Shklovsky, Brecht; the importance of racism to foreign relations. The closest analogue to Žižek’s indefatigable critique is the very subject he’s always critiquing: global capital. It didn’t matter whether any of his “product” or “programming” was consistent or cohered; it didn’t even matter whether any of the thoughts he spewed for this interview—let alone the thoughts of his approximately fifty books to date—would ever be consumed: Instead, all that concerned him was production.
“What do others see in me?” Žižek finally asked, though it was unclear whether he was summarizing Freud, or summarizing Lacan summarizing Freud, or asking me—the last journalist of his junket’s day—my opinion.
“You say you love me, but why?”
But I’d never said that, so it had to be rhetorical.
“It’s absolutely my idea that the state is an agent of what Lacan called ‘the gaze of the Other.’ The gaze is always minimally erotic.”
This was the first moment he looked me in the eye. Then he went on to explain something else.
FROM THE DIARIES
CONVERSATION SUMMARY (NEXT TABLE)
A woman recounts a dream in which she had sex with a celebrity. Her boyfriend, or husband, gets angry. The woman says it was only a dream. Her boyfriend, or husband, gets up from the table. The woman, getting up too and following him, says it means nothing not just because it was only a dream, but also because the celebrity was dead. (As for me, my Polish is so bad I wasn’t quite able to determine whether the celebrity had been alive in her dream or she’d been dreaming of necrophilia.) (Another shameful admission: I still can’t quite accept the existence of such things as Polish celebrities.)
WHY I’VE NEVER HAD SEX IN HUNGARY
Mom calls me in Budapest: “Bring me back that paprika paste…the kind in the squeeze tube…Aren’t all the women beautiful?…Don’t they all look like me?”
NO ONE HATES HIM MORE
ON FRANZEN’S KRAUS
WHAT’S THE GERMAN FOR A writer who resurrects a writer who would have hated him? Until a word is coined, I’m going to go with “Franzen”—after the most famous American novelist of the moment, whose commercial and critical success has brought him, if his public statements are any indication, nothing but misery. His new book, The Kraus Project, returns him to the early 1980s, before he wrote The Corrections and Freedom—two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness, and climate change—and his two earlier, somewhat disavowed systems novels. Thirty years ago he was just a Swarthmore student abroad in what was still West Berlin, exploring his vices and discovering, and tentatively translating, the great Viennese “antijournalist” Karl Kraus.
The Kraus Project is Franzen’s reckoning with his undergraduate self; with his ambitions and frustrations; with his completist tendencies to let no juvenilia go to waste and no headline go unremarked; and with the publishing legacy of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. That was the era when Pynchon, Barth, and Coover were embarking on a counterculturally charged reassessment of the symbolic and structural principles of the novel, and when Kraus’s virtuosic, vitriolic style—halfway between Karl and Groucho—was being introduced to Anglophone readers, in translations by the Viennese refugee and Brandeis professor Harry Zohn*:
Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them.
To have talent, to be a talent: the two are always confused.
Why should one artist grasp another? Does Mount Vesuvius appreciate Mount Etna? At most, a feminine relationship of jealous comparison might develop: Who spits better?
To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.
I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.
From a torch something drops occasionally. A little lump of pitch.
Die Fackel (“The Torch”) was Kraus’s magazine. It was the smoky, scalding, staplebound enemy of mixed metaphors, pan-Germanism, the House of Habsburg, everything French, pro-Semites and anti-Semites, and the popular press, especially Vienna’s paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. In 1899, the twenty-four-year-old Kraus—the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer from Gitschin in Bohemia, now Jičín in the Czech Republic—renounced Judaism and converted to Catholicism (either as a social expedient, or a perverse justification for his already developed self-loathing), and published the first issue of Die Fackel. He reported the news by what’s now called aggregation,
offering commentary and emendation. He inspected Austro-Hungary’s unconscious just as the empire was splitting up. Not that Kraus had any time for psychoanalysis: If his most private thoughts were to be disclosed, it was not because the process would benefit him, but because it would benefit the public; Kraus confessed not just to Vienna’s sins, but for them.
As is common with cult journals, Die Fackel’s subscribers were as illustrious as its contributors: Peter Altenberg, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, and Frank Wedekind (whose play Spring Awakening Franzen translated in 1986 and published in 2007). Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Benjamin, who regarded Die Fackel as the literary fulfillment of Trotsky’s permanent revolution—“an eternally new newspaper.” Gershom (then Gerhard) Scholem turned the noun Fackel into a verb, fackeln, “to torch on”: This wasn’t necessarily flattering but did back Kraus’s assertion that anyone who criticized him became more popular than he was. Die Fackel appeared whenever its editor pleased: quarterly, monthly, weekly, even daily. After 1911, until the end of Kraus’s life in 1936, he was its sole contributor.
He wrote essays, which today, in English and even in German, are read in excerpted sentences and paragraphs: in aphorism. The works of Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Stefan Zweig are intact because their preoccupation with Vienna was merely prologue, material for extrapolation. Kraus was too honest, or too impatient, to try his hand at fiction, and instead got directly at the facts and his opinions: He attacked the liberal “Jewish press”—by which he meant the secular Neue Freie Presse—for spilling too much intellectual “blood” in defense of Leopold Hilsner, a Jewish cobbler from Polná wrongly convicted of the ritual murder of two Christian girls (i.e., the blood libel), and attacked the conservative “Jewish press”—by which he meant the secular Die Zukunft—for outing Prince Philip Friedrich Alexander of Eulenburg-Hertefeld as a homosexual. For Kraus, all Germanophone media were a cabal, in which Jewish editors on the left displayed a pathetic sense of solidarity with their co-religionists, and Jewish editors on the right sought a pathetic normalization through knee-jerk patriotism. Kraus proclaimed himself the final incarnation of the Wandering Jew, and pitched camp in the extreme middle: the only position from which to survey the shifts between the collapsing official censorship bureaus, the internal censorship that editors practiced to influence politics and game the property and stock markets, and the way the resultant liberty to scandalize increased circulation, which increased the appetite for scandal, which was itself scandalous. It all engendered a pervasive sensationalism: the true “news cycle” of every empire in decline.
The Kraus Project is Franzen’s bid to force the equation: Vienna a century ago = America today. To prove it Franzen has translated a handful of essays in their entirety, and subjected them to an approximation of Kraus’s technique, by writing footnotes so extensive that they dominate every page and turn the annotated text into the subsidiary: Kraus’s essays become the headnotes to Franzen’s angst. Interspersed are glosses by the American scholar Paul Reitter, who has the thankless job of historically contextualizing Kraus’s grievances, and the German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, whose interpretations can be divided into the four categories that Freud apportioned for jokes: the obscene, the aggressive, the cynical, and the absurd. Franzen insists on a connection between Kraus—who was misunderstood by Viennese Jews of his era, and who frequently misunderstood himself—and Kehlmann, a twenty-first-century Viennese goy who writes novels and, what’s worse, was born in Munich. Despite the timidity implied by his enlisting of collaborators, Franzen offers Kraus’s original German on the verso of each leaf, as if he wants to be caught in infelicity or error—or in a desperate attempt to bulk out to three hundred pages what might have been a Die Fackel–sized pamphlet.
The essays Franzen has translated are “Heine and the Consequences” (1910), “Afterword to ‘Heine and the Consequences’ ” (1911), and “Nestroy and Posterity” (1912), all three from Kraus’s most energetic period; “Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word” (1917), essentially an after-afterword to the third printing of his Heine essay; and the sub-Brechtian poem “Let No One Ask…” (1934). Kehlmann calls the last “a masterpiece of brevity and despair,” and “one of the most important short poems of the twentieth century,” but really it’s Kraus’s wan excuse for not addressing Hitler’s seizure of the chancellorship: “It passes; and later/it didn’t matter.” But it did matter, only not to Kraus, who was ailing and depressed.
Kraus wrote about Heine for the usual reasons young critics write about older authors: to kill the father, sleep with the mother muse, and be reborn. He linked Heine’s most limpid and lazy style—developed, in Kraus’s telling, during Heine’s precious self-imposed exile in Parisian salons—with the style of the feuilleton, the pastel postcard of gossip and apolitical arts criticism that began appearing in French newspapers in 1800, as if to provide a pleasant distraction from Napoleon’s centralization of power, and then spread throughout Europe, taking on, according to Kraus, each language’s, and country’s, worst attributes. In Germany it became pedantic and moralizing; in Austro-Hungary melodramatically moody and snobbishly refined. Kraus compared the sentimentality of Heine, a Jew from Düsseldorf, with the farce of Nestroy, the Catholic dramatist from Vienna, and it’s no surprise which of the two he found lacking. Kraus was a lifelong frustrated poet and playwright, and though his translations of Shakespeare are entertainingly strange, it comes as a relief that most of his major play, The Last Days of Mankind (1930), is appropriated street-speech, and quotation from press and radio.
* * *
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“THE MASSES” ARE THE BYPRODUCT of the mass production of language: The linotype machine—the internet of the fin de siècle—ensured the fast and cheap dissemination of more periodicals, and so of more fast and cheap rhetoric, than ever before. In the first Heine essay, Kraus fixates on the industrial capacities of the logos, in a German masterly in its truncations: “Glaubt mir, ihr Farbenfrohen, in Kulturen, in denen jeder Trottel Individualität besitzt, vertrotteln die Individualitäten.” A version of this characteristically untranslatable sentence might be: “Believe me, you multicolored multiculturalists, turning every idiot into an individual turns individuality itself idiotic.” Franzen has: “Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.” He skips the neurotic beauty of Farbenfrohen, and the economical swerve of the noun Trottel becoming the verb vertrotteln; and though both omissions are forgivable, a culture where prominent American novelists can use the word “blockhead” will itself become a blockheaded culture. But the most important element lost in this passage, which follows a condemnation of the Frenchification of German, is Kraus’s paradoxical use of Individualität, a noun that had come to German from the French only a half century earlier. In the 1760s Rousseau redefined individuel from meaning “indivisible,” or “numerically distinct,” to meaning “a single person,” but it was only with the second volume of de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique in 1840 that individualisme took on the positive connotation of a heroic severance of personality from the herd, and was opposed by negative, greedy égoïsme; both terms were soon shepherded into German.
Instead of elucidating this paradox, and inquiring whether Kraus was aware of it, Franzen writes the following note:
You’re not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it two billion now?) “individualized” Facebook pages may make you want to say them. Kraus was known, in his day, to his many enemies, as the Great Hater. By most accounts he was a tender and generous man in his private life, with many loyal friends. But once he starts winding the stem of his polemical rhetoric, it carries him into extremely harsh registers.
(“Harsh,” incidentally, is a fun word to say with a slacker inflection. To be h
arsh is to be uncool; and in the world of coolness and uncoolness—the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests—the highest register that cultural criticism can safely reach is snark. Snark, indeed, is cool’s twin sibling.)
Any resemblance to real snark, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Franzen goes on to spank Salman Rushdie (for joining Twitter); n+1, “a politically committed print magazine that I respect” (for praising the internet while not addressing its impoverishment of writers); and the liberal professoriat (for savaging capitalism in contemporary feuilletons written on Apple computers). The footnote is scattershot, but not exceptional. Just as Kraus’s densely argued texts deplore the mechanization of verse, so Franzen’s unstructured exegeses attempt to summon a similar abhorrence of the digitization of the novel. He never considers that if German poetry was able to survive the German-language press (and two wars, and communism), the odds are that American fiction will survive Google.
Kraus proceeds to assault Heine for favoring surface over depth, citing everything from Heine’s excessive punning to his insistence on referring to his poems as “songs,” in effect inviting composers to set them to music: call it incentivization, in a viral campaign involving spinets. Franzen might not have written The Corrections to be optioned by HBO—the chamber music of our time, with David Simon our Mendelssohn—but he agreed to the option, and so the only thing that prevented his book’s debasement was an inept script that died in development. Kraus writes in Franzen’s translation: “To be responsive to literature, you cannot be responsive to music, otherwise the melody and rhythm of music will suffice to create a mood.” A cursory dig into the Grimms’ dictionary will uncover that Stimmungsreiz (Franzen’s “mood”) is a misty German word meaning “charming atmosphere” or “delightful ambience,” which Kraus is deploying sardonically (“mood” is plain Stimmung). Franzen writes: “To this line my friend Daniel Kehlmann, who is an actual Viennese and a deep student of Kraus, offers the comment: ‘Who the hell knows what Kraus is really saying here.’ ”