The Friday before last I imagined that everyone at work were incarnations of thoughts I’ve had or moods I’ve felt. The next day I went to see the Francisco Toledo show that I’d only walked through quickly, preparing myself for imagery of the nagual, what the part-Zapotec Toledo describes as spiritual metamorphoses with animals, expressed in mask rituals. Toledo encountered the recently published Accursed Share by Bataille in late 60s Paris while being discovered there as a teenager, which excerpted Bernardino de Sahagún’s transcription of the Aztec myth of the creation of the sun representing the share that nourishes but blinds (Nanauatzin, the sun, who jumps into the fire) and the reflection that can be seen (Tecuciztecatl, the fearful moon). Toledo illustrated a book of the Sahagún transcription. A warm winter night a few days back, the cloud cover was so thick that the moon’s brief appearances felt like an interrogation.


Nagual in some tribes has an aspect that casts a spell against assimilation, which reflects on the conflicts of Toledo’s art and life: the money he made painting was spent both bringing institutions of modernity to Oaxaca (contemporary art museums, art cinema) and archiving local indigenous culture. The Princeton/ UTEP show presents some of his illustrations of Kafka’s Report to the Academy, where a monkey sent to Europe escapes his cage by metamorphosing into a human and describes an essence he can’t return to.

One more week of this show, the best on the East Coast now and the first, though way too small, US retrospective of Toledo in years and years. I’ve never seen his drawings and the draftsmanship is strikingly original. His works presented together enable you to inhabit his mythical logic, play of masks, and mirror hall of sacrifices, ‘the gods had to die.. The wind tore out their hearts and used them to animate the newborn stars.’ (Sahagún)

Toledo’s daughter Natalia has poetry, some of which is written in Zapotec, featured in the Copper Canyon Mexican anthology but has yet to be translated book-length; this portrait of her is most likely based on erotic photos of Francisco in his youth in snake and alligator skin.

There’s been some music in town lately. Last weekend the orchestra here tackled Varèse’s Amériques, which you really need to have your local orchestra do rather than an avant ensemble because it requires 120 to 140 instruments depending on the version, including seven french horns, eight cellos, and a lion. I’ve never heard it, thinking until a few months ago that Antheil had the idea to use sirens first (who else would have done it?) I’ve heard so much that imitates it that it sounds like an old favorite warhorse, like the missing warhorse; I will listen to it many more times.

Some virtuoso girls doing Bartók at the Curtis Institute: first Sang Hyun Mary Yong’s over the top rendering of the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra on Monday then Elena Urioste ripping up the Sonata for Violin and Piano this evening. Urioste conveys a broad range of emotions through her mastery of pieces, following up the Sonata with V. Williams’ light, dreamy Lark Ascending, bringing her edge to Beethoven and Janáček, then putting a rose in her hair and (being Mexican-Basque) deconstructing the Carmen Fantasie. An unforgettable graduation recital and I look forward to collecting her recordings.

I bought a bunch of Bartók discs years back and I never really worked them into a listening routine that fit into a particular mood or ritual. I mean, I seem to like every other ‘difficult’ composer. I find his chamber works, or works arranged for chamber, to be more initially engaging because it is easier to appreciate his melodic structure rather than with the combination of melodies in many of his symphonies, which I’m nonetheless inspired to dust off now. Yong's Concerto was exciting, but Urioste enabled me to emotionally connect to Bartók for the first time in a while.

+ on Monday my favorite chamber work, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Written in the throes of a complex love affair, it combines Romantic passion with the forms and dramatic structure of modernity. I have gone through long stretches when I’ve gone to bed to it nightly, and I felt as if my mind halfway between wakefulness and sleep was being presented a public meeting.

At my day job there is an enterprising young Sudanese émigré who plans to return there soon with cash to buy into its economic growth spurt; after talking to him for the first time a week ago I did homework about Sudanese politics, business, history, etc. Today at lunch I found that there’s an elderly African-American who’s also befriended him and done an enormous amount of research, including this gem, at the end of break, which I can’t verify but caused no protest from the native:

that in the Sudan there is so much human blood in the water that the elephants are hooked on the taste, and are beginning to take bites out of the tribespeople. And the Nile he says runs north to Egypt.

Defending the mushy

This evening I watched Lydia Lunch describe her corporate rock imitators occupying the New York scene:

"I think it’s very sad that in referencing something that happened 25 years ago, it’s not as if there’s a revival of the intellectual concepts, or the visions, or the diversity or the extremity of that music, but it’s an homogenization, a gentrification, and it’s a softening..it just feels soft, it feels.. (pause) ... mushy... there’s nothing important that they’re doing."

Someone bust her for using a gendered term! Get the establishment poetics thought police! Ms. Lunch hits home how utterly demeaning it is for male professors to describe ‘soft Surrealism’ as a gendered term.

Roberto Matta’s Being With had for a while been at the Southeastern entrance to the first floor Modern galleries at the Met but this situation has made way for an abundantly curated room with Damien Hirst’s shark and other shark and death-related paintings. I asked the guard where the Matta and Beckmann had gone and he said ‘One of them is through there somewhere.’ I had to anticipate which one. It was the Matta, which has found a new home between Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi sculptures that resemble figures in the painting, facing some complimentary Motherwells. In the old days there was a comfortable couch in front of the Beckmann triptych from which you could look at the Matta from the distance. Sitting on the floor next to the Noguchi you realize that distance was too much. Also, Being With should be looked at after the Ghiberti doors, especially the sequence of the Jacob and Esau relief

and the Adam and Eve relief,


as it relates to the use of perspective (in both) and the whole Gates of Paradise expulsion theme.

You can go to the Mezzanine to see the Abstract Expressionists copy Max Ernst or you could go straight to the new Oceania gallery and walk through Ernst’s soul. That’s a recommendation: if you live in or near NYC, go to the Oceania gallery soon and often. I also found some ancient Egyptian Ernsts with Loplop birds.

I did also get to the Cloisters first and then the Met. It really should be reversed: see the Ghiberti doors on a weekday (til Jan 13) first thing in the morning, and then go to the Cloisters after lunch when the school groups are gone.

Ghost-like events, event-like ghosts: immediate thoughts on Badiou

Badiou drew crowds on his East Coast tour, as many people were turned away from getting into the New York lecture and possibly Philly’s. His Wikipedia page was a paragraph when I was recounting his commentary last weekend, and it’s grown considerably since the tour.

He’s undoubtably enjoying his stardom in the US after over three decades of departmental struggles in Paris. He has fun with English as the directness with which he expresses his ideas in English helps them pack a punch.

His first book translated into English was Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, I presume because the market for good Deleuze books in English preceded the market for Alain’s own inner thoughts. That’s also the first book of his that I looked at, at the Minnesota MLA booth last December when an editor from the Southwest struck up a conversation and started to get me into him. When I got home I scoured the used internet pool for a few books which I read in dribs and drabs until he stated his positions more directly on the tour.

Since part of Badiou’s star comes from a yearning for a Paris 8 standard bearer, it is interesting to see how his ghosts line up (for the boardwalk shooting gallery). First of all, Badiou’s school spirit pervades his evocation of May ‘68 more than Paris 8's old titan Foucault, who used to brag that he was in Algiers at the time where the real shit was going down.

Like Foucault, he cut his teeth with Althusser as a teacher, and both defended Althusser during Louis’ down years when the bureaucratic pricks were taking their shots. As I’m fond of saying, if you defend your mentor only out of loyalty, s/he’s not your mentor. Badiou writes constantly of the ‘return of philosophy’ while Foucault frequently said that he wasn’t a philosopher. This may have related in Foucault’s case to that stage of structuralism and not wanting to be weighed down by the demands of sorting out questions of traditions, a function that Badiou relishes in his own way. Both referenced Althusser rarely, if ever, in their work. Just as Althusser said avoiding ideology is ideological, avoiding Althusser the mentor is Althusserian, and their divergent approaches can speculatively be seen this way. The Sartreanism of avoiding Sartre is another can of worms here.

Oliver Feltham’s intro to Being and Event touches on this, noting (xxvii, Continuum) the ‘encounter’ between Althusser andthe École normale supérieure’s Cercle d'épistémologie in the 60s and the ‘comparable rupture’ of the ‘lineage of Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilheim and Foucault.’ He then says ‘none of these discourses or authors are privileged in the emergence of the thought of the event, instead Badiou turns to Mallarmé.’ Nowhere in this paragraph or anywhere near it or related to this logical construction do we find the name Deleuze, despite the outline of the rupture from the dialectic and the ensuing integration of Mallarmé in that context obviously coming from Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze is only mentioned in that intro twice: the assertion that Badiou has broken from the self-reflexivity of Derrida, Hegel and Deleuze, when, of course, Badiou’s position with regard to Hegel is a resigned reiteration of Deleuze’s, and noting Deleuze’s objection that Badiou’s thought was analogical.

This omission cannot be underestimated. Badiou’s Althusserianism back in the late 60s put him on a departmental collision course with Deleuze who came to the Paris 8 department with a circle of allies fresh from the glory of Anti-Oedipus’ reception. Badiou got to taking shots at Deleuze and by his account, things got tense when Deleuze thought Badiou’s ‘Bolshevism’ was attempting to wrest control of the department from the ‘troika of Deleuze, Châtelet, and Lyotard,’ which ‘retook "power" without resistance.’

What no one seems to say is how Deleuze seems to have taken power over Badiou’s view of the dialectic without resistance, since Deleuze’s attacks on Hegel and the dialectic in Nietzsche and Philosophy on ‘behalf’ of Nietzsche seem to loom as assumptions which pave the way for Badiou’s work. Deleuze came up with the concept of a rupture from the dialectic making use of ontology, since the Nietzschean opposition of being and non-being could not be synthesized, an approach that takes the form of an assumption in Badiou.

Nietzsche and Philosophy is notably not one of the nine books of his that Badiou cites in Deleuze, citing instead Deleuze’s commentary on Mallarmé from their personal correspondence. For those of you that haven’t hung around me much, I think that Nietzsche and Philosophy is Deleuze’s most important work, and despite its title the most Deleuzean. The Guattari collaborations are thought-provoking, getting overly cute in A Thousand Plateaus, ending with the indispensable reflection of What is Philosophy? Pure Immanence is the pared down, most direct and perhaps enduring of his propositions.

Despite building extensively on Deleuze’s ontological approach, Badiou has his ways of staking out a middle ground within the apparently incompatible rupture between Deleuze and Althusser, the ripples of which go back to when Schopenhauer would schedule his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s out of spite. Badiou, on the structures and universal truths of non-ontological situations:

"..my thesis is that in a situation there is always an encyclopedia of knowledge which is the same for everybody. But the access to this knowledge is very different. We can speak in Marxist terms, we cans say that in a situation there is an ideological dispositif [apparatus] which is dominant - in the end it’s the same thing.

Justin Clemens: "Would you say Marxism talks about encyclopedic knowledges but doesn’t talk about the truth?

Badiou: "No, no I think that Marxism, the category of Marxism designates the same thing that I designate by the dispositif of the encyclopedia of knowledge. But in Marxism there is a series of truths, which is different from ideology." (Infinite Thought, 171-2)

It is sort of comical in that context that Simon Critchley, Badiou’s designated opponent on the West Philly fight card, in his exhaustive examination of the options presenting themselves to the Anglophone philosopher, noted an affirmative interest in a Third Way, sheepishly admitting its being a Blairism while we sat safe from the explosive devices in Baghdad. Critchley stood in the ring as one of the ‘anarcho-desirers’ that Badiou had taken on for years so there was no affirmation of the dialectic coming from either side, just the Third Way, as the Third and First ways never do take the time to lift a finger on behalf of the dialectic that forms the basis of their existence. As Blair, Gordon Brown and the others have proved once again, the Third Way is the First Way without the baggage. In the context of Badiou’s refinement of Deleuze’s critique of the dialectic, we can see the Third Way as an embodiment of the reductive, irrelevant, fabricated side of the dialectic, containing nothing of Athusser’s increasingly convincing and resilient case that all thought is ideological.

Badiou touches more on the dialectic in 2006's Logiques des mondes, which I don’t think has been translated, wherein he sets forth a Third Wayish ‘democratic materialism,’ making a third out of what in the other two is not hegemonic. Žižek not surprisingly accuses it of ‘Eating the cake and keeping it’ suggesting the little victories of the new are ‘his all too crude opposition between repetition and the cut of the Event, his dismissal of repetition as an obstacle to the rise of the New..,’ pitting Deleuzean repetition against the Badiouian event. Badiou’s position is not really Third Wayish in that it’s not a compromised one, though, but one of rupture, of what Žižek reductively calls Big Change while critiquing its indifference to incremental reform.