Aarseth Watching Video pt. 2 - The Apathy of Euronymous

From this interview with Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth from June 1992:

"Is the life you are living OK for you? If you could change something what would it be?

Yeah, it’s quite OK. I’d just like to have extremely much money. Then DSP would be a big company, we would all have the POWER in this part of the music business, and I would live in luxury with a harem and watch the children in Africa starve to death on video.

(...)

If you could change something in the world, what would it be then?

I would get all things back to what they were during the cold war, then I would mix it with the barbarianism of the Viking ages and middle ages. I would make people more religious and fanatic. And I would have taken over the Black/Death metal movement from the beginning and seen to it that only evil bands could have existed. And I would have lots of money while others were starving. I would NOT do anything with starving children in Africa, if you’re thinking about that. They can die."

The formation of Mayhem in 1984 coincided with the terrible famine which occurred in Ethiopia in 1984-1985. It seems likely that Aarseth's pitiless remarks were inspired by this humanitarian disaster. In Ethiopia, drought, agricultural mismanagement, corruption and violent tyranny had conspired to cause a drastic fall in the production of food and cash crops. Close to 8 million people became famine victims during the drought of 1984, and over 1 million died.

Ethiopia had been a Marxist-Leninist state since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. During the famine, it was ruled by the military government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. This regime had killed an estimated 500.000 people in the so-called Red Terror. Mengistu was one of the Communist dictators along the lines of Pol Pot, Nicolai Ceaucescu and Enver Hoxha: implacable despots of the kind for whom Aarseth expressed so much admiration (read more in these posts 1, 2, 3 and in this post).

The famine generated intense media activity in the West. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure founded the supergroup Band Aid to produce the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" charity single, and went on to organize the July 1985 concert Live Aid, which raised $100m for humanitarian aid.

*



*

Aarseth's remarks are heartless. Seen from an analytical point of view, they stand in marked contrast to his reception of snuff films, as examined in this post. In the interview which formed the basis for that post, Aarseth described how, consuming 'snuff films', he identified with the victims, vicariously experiencing their suffering: "That is the best way to watch such a movie to try to FEEL the actual pain of the victims. It becomes much more gruesome then, and that's great. One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims." In the interview quoted above, however, we find no trace of identification with the famine victims. On the contrary, Aarseth seems to create the greatest distance possible between himself and the hungry children.

In the interview quoted above, Aarseth proposes to watch videos of starving African children not in solitude but in the company of the sensual young women that inhabit harems, naked odalisques whose sole purpose is pleasing the autocrat to whom they have given themselves (for a moment, I imagined an aging Aarseth as a corpse-painted Black Metal Berlusconi). One can be sure that the consumption of these videos would be accompanied by laughter, talking and so on - which in the other interview was deemed undesirable because it would distance the viewer from the gruesomeness of the snuff film. Likewise, the luxury in which Aarseth desires to live would distance him from the poverty-stricken, powerless Ethiopians.

There is no trace left of the sympathetic identification with the victims which was so prominent in the previous interview. Like a Sadean debauchee, Aarseth strives only to enjoy the privileges of inequality, transforming the heartrending sight of starving children into a purely egotistical pleasure. The lack of compassion and solidarity is complete.

Aarseth's thinking seems to parallel that of the Marquis de Sade, as analyzed by Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot saw Sade as an emotionally apathetic man:

"Apathy is the spirit of negation as applied to a man who has chosen to be sovereign. It is in some way the cause or the principle of energy. Sade appears to argue more or less as follows: the individual today represents a certain amount of force: most of the time he disperses his strength for the benefit of those ghosts called other people, God or the ideal; by this expenditure he wrongly exhausts and wastes his potentialities, but what is worse, he is basing his conduct on weakness, for if he expends himself for others it is because he believes he needs their support. This is a fatal lapse. He weakens himself by vain expenditure of energy and he expends his energy because he believes he is weak. The strong man knows that he is alone and accepts that condition; he repudiates the whole inheritance of seventeen centuries of cowardice that would make him turn to others. Pity, gratitude and love are all feelings he destroys, and in destroying them he recuperates all the force he would have spent on those debilitating impulses and, more important, he derives the beginning of a real energy from his work of destruction."

Does it go too far to call Mayhem an anti-Band Aid?

Deathlike Silence and Sodomy

"Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous..." (Genesis 18:20)

In trying to understand the enigma that is the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the late eighties and early nineties, an important strategy is researching and analyzing the web of significance spun around the music. "The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . . " (Clifford Geertz in "The Interpretation of Cultures").

The German Thrash Metal band Sodom forms an important strand of Black Metal's web of significance, because that band was a very important influence on Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, the mastermind of Black Metal band Mayhem. Sodom is mentioned in almost every interview with Aarseth.

Aarseth's independent record label 'Deathlike Silence Productions' was named after a song by Sodom, the opening song from their 1986 debut album 'Obsessed By Cruelty'. The lyrics - full of spelling errors and unintentionally funny - are reproduced from the band's web site below. There you will also find a YouTube video of the song. In this interview, Aarseth described the album as an underrated "Masterpiece of Black Stinking Metal".

As an aside, 'Deathlike Silence Productions' must be one of the most poetical names in the music industry.Why? Because 'silence' is a word which is not a word, it is (as Bataille said in Inner Experience) the abolition of the sound that the word is. "Among all words, it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is the token of its own death." For this reason, the word 'deathlike' is the perfect adjective for the word 'silence'.

Sodom is relevant to Mayhem for another reason: the name of the German Thrash Metal band refers to the eponymous biblical city which was destroyed by "brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven" (Genesis 19:24-25). In Christian thought, the sin for which God meted out punishment to the inhabitants of Sodom was anal intercourse. Sodomy is a term used predominantly to describe male-on-male, but also male-on-female, anal intercourse.

Aarseth was an ardent proponent of anal intercourse, which he called 'Sodomy', because he regarded it as an "evil" act. It may be useful to compare and contrat Aarseth's view of sodomy with that of the Divine Marquis. From Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbour: "For Sade, the sodomist act is the supreme form of transgression of norms (which suggests their paradoxical maintainance); at the same time it must be the way to transgress the different cases of perversion and thus to constitute the principle of affinity among the perversions. For, like a callipygian test, this act suppresses the specific borders between the sexes and according to Sade constitutes the key sign for all perversions. Having interpreted morally this act as a testimony of atheism and a declaration of war on the norms inherited from monotheism, Sade then projects perversion into the domain of thought. There integral monstrosity forms a sort of space for minds that communicate with another by the mutual understanding of this key sign."

Did anal intercourse in Aarseth's view suppress the specific borders between the sexes? None of the primary biographical sources on Aarseth provide any clarity on this point. Nevertheless, it is striking that even if homosexuality is a taboo generally left untransgressed in Metal culture, Aarseth never specified that he was referring only to male-on-female anal intercourse. In the oeuvre of Swedish Black Metal band Marduk - whose Morgan "Evil" Steinmeyer Håkansson maintained close ties with Aarseth - sodomy had connotations of homo-erotic sadism ('Christraping Black Metal').

"War and Sodomy" was a kind of battle cry for Aarseth. So closely was this rallying cry for sodomites associated with Aarseth's Black Metal aesthetic, that it became the title of the bootleg recording of a Mayhem concert in Zeitz, Germany, on November 24th 1990 (though the album cover mentions that it was recorded in East Germany, the concert in fact took place a month and two weeks after German reunification). That he used "War and Sodomy" as a battle cry in so many interviews, may well point to the fact that for Aarseth too the sodomic act was the supreme form of transgression of norms, as the key sign for all perversions. (Interestingly, war is an important theme for Sodom, but they approach the theme from an anti-war perspective - other than Aarseth).

Sodomy has become an important trope in Black Metal. A quick search on Black Metal audio blog Dunkelheit turns up no less than seventeen bands which use sodomy as a sign of evil: "Black Metal Sodomy", "In The Dark And Sodomy", "Sado Terrorism (Or the Nuklear Sodomy)", "Genocide Sodomy", "Sacred Sodomy", "Angel of Sodomy", "Sodomy of Holy Children", "War, Whiskey, Sodomy", not to mention the tasteful "Cadaveric Leather Sodomy". It does not go too far to conclude that Black Metal aficionados communicate with another by the mutual understanding of the key sign which is sodomy.

However, there is one crucial difference between Sade's view of sodomy and that of Aarseth. Aarseth, being a theistic Satanist, could not have seen sodomy as a testimony of atheism. In fact, Aarseth opposed atheism: "I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion all the other forms of Satanism are bullshit. I hate that some people think up idiotic ways of making eternal peace in the world and dare to call it Satanism, like so many do. Satanism comes from religious Christianity, and there it shall stay. I'm a religious person and I will fight those who misuse His name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individualists. They are supposed to OBEY, to be the SLAVES of religion." (sourced here). Even if Aarseth waged war on Christianity, and even if sodomy was a weapon in that war, paradoxically for Aarseth sodomy also was an affirmation of the norms inherited from Christianity.



Sodom - Deathlike Silence




A twilight was in my mind
Fulfilled of suspended bare foreboding
Great erhaulted forms of life
Touched me by my nightmare
Feel the inflamed impression in my soul
Appeared that I get blessed

Deathlike silence
Deathlike silence

Trustful eyes look up to me
Bring they harm in my exsist
Terrible things revelated the curse
A petual attemp to blasphemic cruelty
Revelated me to that what i am
I hear it, feel it the weird...

Deathlike silence
Deathlike silence

Grasp the sneep tamed snake
Drink fertite poison without ingure
Men spotless and pure heart
True secret as grave
Master of earth and all on it

No reason to vespair
Ready to fo though hell
Always known the fate
Morbid addication to pain

Talk to me in a prophetic sound
I am choosen to saw the true
That have rage as no earthly calamity
Looking for the centre of labyrinth
But its known in my unconscious mind
Escape to myself coined of envy

Deathlike silence
Deathlike silence

No reason to bespair
Ready to go through hell
Always know the fate
Morbid addication to pain

Deathlike silence
Deathlike silence

Fortify at a namn abness of deep
Intinite space of human existence
Broken is my lords foul work
Burst rebellious shouts of deads
All accurse by...

Deathlike silence
Deathlike silence

Brenoritvrezorkre - Four Demos

I

Death is not an instantaneous act; it implies a lasting transition which is terminated only when the dissolution of the body has ended. Between the moment of expiration and the moment all rotting flesh has disappeared, lies the period during which corpses are dangerous, polluting, contagious. The dead do not go to the land of souls until they are without flesh, and until they are without flesh they haunt the living like guests who have outstayed their welcome. But not only the spirit of the deceased is dangerous: until the corpse has decomposed completely, it is particularly vulnerable to the attacks of evil spirits and all the harmful influences by which man is threatened.

The intensity of the dangerous, polluting and contagious qualities of the corpse can be represented by a parabola. When the deceased has died recently, outward forms of decomposition are not yet visible, and the body is still retaining its form. As the corpse starts to rot, and the physical identity of the dead person slowly becomes formless, the taboos with regard to the corpse become stronger. The danger, pollution and contagion are at their apex - or should I say: nadir - when the corpse has become viscuous, unstable but not yet fluid, soft, yielding and compressible, sticky, clinging. After that point, the formlessness slowly treacles away to reveal the whiteness of the bones, the architectural, almost monumental structure of the skeleton. When the skeleton is clean, all danger has subsided.

The funerary rites of many cultures serve to prevent the apex being reached, by mummifying or embalming the corpse so that it does not become formless: think of the ancient Egyptian or contemporary American funereal practices. Other cultures attempt to avoid the apex by short-cutting the transitional period: cremation is one example of such a practice, the necrophagic endocannibalism which was practiced by some Australian Aboriginal and Dayak tribes is another.


II

Les Légions Noires ('The Black Legions') were a group of Black Metal bands which were active in France between 1993 and 1996. Mütiilation, Belketre, Torgeist and Vlad Tepes are the best known of these bands.

Emulating Norwegian Black Metal pioneers such as Mayhem, Burzum, Ulver and Darkththrone, the French LLN Black Metal bands aimed for a production style which was metaphorically called 'necro': very lo-fi, cold- and thin-sounding, blown out, in the red. The sound recording style mimicked the decay of the corpse.

Of all LLN bands, the shadowy and impossibly named band Brenoritvrezorkre ventured closest to the most dangerous, the most polluting, the most contagious point in the process of rotting. The four demos which the band released over the course of 1995 and 1996, contain music that is unstable, viscuous, formless. They are amongst those rare albums which seem to exude a smell, a stench (Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is another one). Listening to the music, one fears the aural dirt might rub off onto one's inner ear, tainting forever the pleasure of listening to music. Like the dead who are not yet without flesh, the decayed sound of Brenoritvrezorkre can haunt its audience - it is certainly haunting me at the moment. But not only Brenoritvrezorkre itself is dangerous: it has opened the gates for other baneful musical spirits such as those of Maurizio Bianchi and Abruptum.

Angelic spirits seem far away: far off is the aestheticizing of decay by William Basinski in his 'The Disintegration Loops I-IV': a series of albums which presented music constructed from withering magnetic material - but pure, consonant, beauteous, majestic, angelic, ethereal music. In a sense, Basinski takes an idealist, utopian, redemptive position with regards to decaying sound recordings. Other than Brenoritvrezorkre, Basinski's music is the product of Hegelian trancendentalism. Thus, Basinski's music is the antinomy of Brenoritvrezorkre's Black Metal. For Brenoritvrezorkre is the darkness of earth where bodies rot, for Basinski the luminosity of the heavens.

I hear Brenoritvrezorkre's music as haunted by the earliest work of Industrial music pioneer Maurizio Bianchi. Bianchi, using the moniker 'Sacher-Pelz', released four compelling C60 cassettes in 1979 and 1980: Cainus, Venus, Cease To Exist, and Velours. From Jim Haynes' review in The Wire 216: "With what appears to be a homebuilt set-up of multiple tape machines, a turntable and a few simple electronic devices, Bianchi abused his vinyl collection of Kraftwerk, Neu!, Morricone soundtracks and unidentified disco tunes to arrive at a mutilated version of monotonous loops and varyspeed warble. What little references to Autobahn that could be heard had been disfigured and corroded as if the sounds themselves had been exhumed from a lengthy burial in a murky swamp." Brenoritvrezorkre sounds like what Sacher-Pelz would have sounded like had Bianchi not abused "...his vinyl collection of Kraftwerk, Neu!, Morricone soundtracks and unidentified disco tunes..." but a vinyl collection of Mayhem, Darkthrone and Abruptum and unidentified early-nineties Norwegian and Finnish Black Metal albums. The music exudes the same sense of misanthropy, inner turmoil, existential frustration and boredom. Boredom? Yes, like Bianchi's repetitive tape loops, Brenoritvrezorkre is boring - but it's not the boredom of endlessly regurgitated clichés and stereotypes, it is boring like the work of the Marquis de Sade. In the works of Sade, Bianchi and Brenoritvrezorkre the musical or literary elements are repeated excessively, like a litany, like a mantra, until the referent is empty. Brenoritvrezorkre presents the pleasure of an agitated ennui.

Rather than from the three main mythological ancestors of Black Metal - Mayhem, Burzum and Darkthrone - Brenoritvrezorkre seems to have descended from the decentered and destructured Black Metal of the Swedish band Abruptum. There is the same sense of the absurd about the music, the same ugliness and clumsiness, the same retarded anti-aestheticism - even if Brenoritvrezorkre plays a lot faster than Abruptum. But where Abruptum's albums present 'neutral, transparent' field recordings of transgressive performance art actions, Brenoritvrezorkre foreground the opacity and materiality of music as a recorded artifact. Unlike Abruptum, the spectre of Brenoritvrezorkre is textural, explicitly introducing "...the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content." (K-Punk). The decay of recording technology: that is the very essence of Brenoritvrezorkre.

Brenoritvrezorkre seeks out the point at which all the rot, and all the harmful influences of rot, are at their most intense. Their music is revolting.



Post scriptum

You can find Brenoritvrezorkre's four demos here, at the consistently interesting Cosmic Hearse blog.

When will the LLN corpus be exhumed for a proper rerelease? Southern Lord, do for the LLN bands what you did for the early Abruptum tapes!

The four Sacher-Pelz tapes were rereleased on cd in this beautiful box in 2001 in a limited edition of 480: one of these is the pride and joy of my record collection. The box will be rereleased by Menstrual Recordings.

De Sade and Music

From Maurice Blanchot's 1947 essay 'A la recontre de Sade' (translated here as 'Sade's Reason'):

"La nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, suivi de l'Histoire de Juliette sa soeur appeared in Holland 150 years ago. It was a monumental work of nearly 4000 pages. The author had rewritten it several times, greatly increasing its size. Overwhelming and almost endless, it immediately threw the world into a panic. If there is a department of forbidden books in every library, it is for such a book. We may as well admit that no literature of any epoch has ever produced so outrageous a work and that no other volume has ever wounded people's thoughts and feelings more deeply. In our age, which shudders at Henry Miller, who would dare to compete in license with Sade? Yes, we can safely say that here we have the most scandalous book that has ever been written, and surely this is a reason for taking interest in it. (...)

It is an outrageous book because it is hard to get at and cannot be made public. But it is also a book that proves that there is no outrage where there is no respect, and that were the outrage is immense the respect is proportionate. Who is more respected than Sade? Even today many people still believe that they would only need to have this accursed work in their hands for a few minutes to make Rousseau's boast - that any virgin who reads a single page of it will be undone - come true. Certainly such respect is a trophy for a literature and a civilization. And we can hardly resist a longing to whisper to all his present and future critics and editors: when dealing with Sade, at least be respectful to the outrage."

Reading Blanchot's essay, I was struck by the question why there is no composer or musician comparable to De Sade's? Why is there no composer or musician whose Evil is of the same stature?

Sure enough, there have have been many highly controversial composers and musicians. Stravinsky, whose Le Sacre du Printemps was scandalous at the time, springs to mind as one example; more recent examples include The Beatles, Throbbing Gristle and Burzum. And there have been many musicians who identified with Evil - this blog is full of them.

But no piece of music has ever wounded people's thoughts and feelings as deeply as the writings of De Sade. No piece of music has been regarded as an outrage for as long as De Sade's work.

Le Sacre du Printemps is now regarded as Classical music. The Beatles have been knighted. Throbbing Gristle, once deemed "wreckers of civilization", now play at Tate Modern. Even Burzum is in the process of becoming legitimate - the fact that his music is reviewed in The Wire is surely a sign of that. The outrage over these musics has lasted only a comparatively short time.

Why? Why can't music claim such a trophy of Evil?

It is tempting to hypothesize that the reason for this is that music and literature are essentially different, that music - exactly because it is music and not literature - can impossibly cause a moral panic on the scale of De Sade's literary work. In such an hypothesis, music would be an innocent art form, compared to literature. Nonetheless, I feel I should first try and find a socio-historical reason for the absence of a musical Marquis.

Blanchot notes, "...no literature of any epoch has ever produced so outrageous a work...", thus implicitly suggesting that only the epoch in which De Sade lived could have produced such a work. Indeed, the numerous theories De Sade produces are indelibly connected to the moral, legal and political ideals of Enlightenment. Even if De Sade's theoretical though is elusive, chameleontic, inconstant and contradictory, it is more than merely a sardonic perversion of these ideals. In a strange way, his work is still loyal to Enlightenment. Surely this is the reason why the work of De Sade has stayed so unnerving for such a long time: the moral, legal and political ideals of Enlightenment form the foundation for our current liberal democracy. De Sade corrupts these foundations from the inside out. Thus, he is more effective than his heirs, the Romanticists and the Decadents: they had already become disloyal to Enlightenment and could therefore not anymore infect Enlightenment at the root. Such Evil as De Sade created, could only be created when our present society was still in its formative stage.

During this formative stage, music was not in a position to produce such Evil as De Sade created.

The literature produced by De Sade was not only informed by Enlightenment. More ambiguous than that, it was just as much informed by Absolutism, and especially by the despotic tendencies in that form of government. The protagonists of De Sade's writings are Absolutist despots, even if they speak the language of Enlightenment. In this, they are phantasmatic proxies for the aristocratic author himself - even if De Sade was very different from his protagonists and (unlike his heroes) capable of displaying human feelings. While writing literature was an acceptable passtime for the aristocrats of the Absolutist era, making music was not. Music was made by servants, not by masters. Classical music of the era could speak the language of servants exalting the masters; it could not yet speak the language of the masters themselves. De Sade's heroes were no and could be no musicians. And where the writings of De Sade could speak from the perspective of the despot, music could not.

Furthermore, De Sade's writings are the product of a profound loneliness. As Blanchot notes, the censors and judges who claimed to have immured De Sade are really in his service, and are in fact fulfilling the liveliest wish of his libertinism. "For Sade always longed for the solitude of the Earth's entrails, for the mysteries of a hidden and solitary life. Time after time he formulated the idea that man's greatest excesses demand secrecy, the darkness of the pit and the inviolable solitude of the cell." Secrecy, darkness and solitude may well be circumstances under which a Sadean literature can flower; but these circumstances did not at the time favor the production of music. Though is it not entirely inconceivable that one would compose music in secrecy, darkness and solitude, certainly orchestration and the actual playing of music demand interaction with musicians. Today, of course, technological developments permit music to be made in secret, in the pit, in the cell: the legions of one-man Black Metal bands testify to that.

In this post, I've concentrated on the circumstances in which De Sade's oeuvre was produced, and in which a comparable musical work was not produced; while perhaps I should have focused on the circumstances in which De Sade's oeuvre was received and in which music did not get the same same reception. What is needed to answer the question posed in this post is historical-comparative research into the reception of transgressive music and literature, based on reception theory. Of course, such research presents immense theoretical problems, not to speak of the practical difficulties one would face.

In the mean time, only our imaginations can create a music which a composer comparable to De Sade might have created. I imagine it to be created by a vast orchestra, consisting of hundreds or even thousands of musician slaves; I imagine it to be at once repetitive to the point of boredom, and as frenziedly festive as the storming of the Bastille. De Sade: “How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination!... [where] the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate.”

Possession (pt. 6)

In the post about artists as men possessed, which inspired this series of posts, Mark K-Punk wrote about Joy Division:

"The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy."

The Law of Curtis

K-Punk: "He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead."

The lyrics of Shadowplay open with the image of a crossroads, which in many cultures is an Interzone, a location "between the worlds", a place where spirits can be contacted, a dangerously sacred place, "No place to stop, no place to go".

Hecate, 'Queen of the Night', who sometimes traveled with a following of ghosts and other social outcasts, was the goddess of crossroads in ancient Greece. Oedipus met his father at the crossroads and killed him there. In Voodoo, crossroads are regarded as a favorite haunt of evil spirits and propitious to magic devices. At crossroads, the most powerful Voodoo divinity, Papa Legba, receives the homages of sorcerers and presides over their incantations and spells. Many magic formulae of Voodoo begin with the words: 'By the power, Master of the Crossroads.' The bluesman Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.

Crossroads are a locality where two directions touch and annihilate each other, a directionless place ("...so plain to see..."), a nowhere, a no-man's land. In anthropological terms, crossroads are a liminal place, a "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, a place characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.

This non-place, which is a non-time as well, is where Curtis receives his stone tablets with his bitter Law.

However, Curtis does not bring back Ten Commandments from the wilderness, from his personal Mount Sinai. The Law he brings back from the Wilderness (Curtis' shamanic Otherworld), it is primarily a descriptive law, not a presciptive law. Curtis' vision quest in the Wilderness aim to describe, understand and predict the cruelties of social life: travelling "...far and wide to many different times...", Curtis brings back visions which underline his proposition that social life invariably, unchangingly is cruel. In Wilderness, the laws of Curtis are statical (not dynamical) laws of social existence.

In Wilderness, prescriptive law plays only an indirect role, showing through in his feelings of indignation, guilt, and shame at seeing moral laws transgressed. Nevertheless, the fact that these feelings show through so strongly indicate that the relation between the two types of law is highly relevant in understanding Curtis' situation. For Curtis descriptive law (the cruel laws governing social life) and prescriptive law are fundamentally incongruous, conflicting: the laws of social life ordain that the laws of morality will always be trampled underfoot.

In fact, I am reminded somewhat of the Marquis De Sade's 1787 novel 'Justine (or The Misfortunes of Virtue)'. In this novel too the descriptive and prescriptive laws are at odds. Justine's morals, the virtuous protagonist's prescriptive laws are confronted with the descriptive (metaphysical) law which makes those who live a life of evil and vice prosper, whilst the morally pure suffer. A Sadean reading of Joy Division - perverse pleasure at Curtis' dejection - is entirely possible, though in all probability quite rare.

Curtis takes an intermediate position between Marquis De Sade and Justine. Justine, though confronted with wickedness, perversions and crimes at every turn, blindly clings to her moral laws, remaining unaware of the evil character of Nature. Marquis De Sade on the other hand is conscious of the monstrosity of Nature, and this consciousness leads him to embrace all evil. Curtis, unlike Justine and like De Sade, is painfully aware of the corrupt nature of social life; but like Justine and unlike De Sade, he does not reject prescriptive law.

What strikes me about the lyrics of Wilderness is that they employ imagery of a Christian nature - surprising for a band which has a nihilist reputation. The lyrics mention saints, the Cross, sin, the blood of Christ, and martyrs. In this context, the 'one-sided trials' seem to refer to Pontius Pilate's trial of Jesus and subsequent trials of Christian martyrs.

In fact, there is something Christian about Joy Division's lyrics, which insistently extol suffering, which present us with a "mortification of the mind". Furthermore, Pilate's executioners may have nailed Christ to the Cross, but the crucifixion was a sacrifice of God. In the sacrifice of Christ the position of the victim is sanctified, while the position of the sacrificer is disavowed. If I examine Curtis' lyrics with the scheme of sacrifice in my mind, Curtis presents himself primarily as the victim, not as the sacrificer. The sacrificers are generally external agents: the leaders of men, the architects of law, the conquistadors who took their share, the figures from the past, the people who pay to see inside asylums with doors open wide, the 'you' in whom 'I put my trust', the 'you' who 'treats me like this'. Like Christian thought, Curtis disavows the sacrifiers.

However, unlike Christian suffering, Curtis' suffering brings him no interior peace, no spiritual joy, no salvation. Curtis is like Benjamin's Angel of History, who also looks backwards and not towards a future redemption: 'His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.' 'No future' means 'No Redemption', means 'No Kingdom Come'; teleology and salvation have slipped from our grasp.

Furthermore, in some lyrics the conflict of prescriptive and descriptive law rages even within Curtis himself. In these lyrics, Curtis no longer disavows the sacrificer, but experiences himself as guilty. Humanity's guilt of killing Jesus Christ assumes an unlimited nature. The leaders of men, the conquistadors who took their share, and all the others are no longer the only actors in the drama of sacrifice, since the fault devolves on all humans. In the end, even Curtis, even Christ himself, is tainted. In these lyrics, Curtis' torment takes on a tragic dimension.

Mother, I tried, please believe me
I'm doing the best that I can
I'm ashamed of the things
I've been put through
I'm ashamed of the person I am

Isolation (3)

But if you could just see the beauty
These things I could never describe
Pleasures and wayward distraction
Is this my wonderful prize?

Isolation (5)

The beheading of Louis XVI

I

The members of Georges Bataille's secret society 'Acéphale' performed one of their yearly rituals on the 21st of January. On that day they commemorated the beheading of Louis XVI on the Place De La Concorde on January 21st 1793.

Can we reconstruct some of the meaning of this obscure ritual?

"The Place De La Concorde is the place were the death of God has to be announced and proclaimed because its obelisk is the calmest negation of it", Bataille pronounced in a 1938 essay in Acéphale's eponymous journal.

This quote leads us to examine both the obelisk and the death of God in relation to the beheading of 'citizen Louis Capet'.


II

From wikipedia:

"The center of the Place de la Concorde is occupied by a giant Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics. It is one of three Cleopatra's Needles, the other two residing in New York and London.

Although the needles are genuine Ancient Egyptian obelisks, they are somewhat misnamed as none has any connection with queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt. They were originally erected in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis on the orders of Thutmose III, around 1450 BC. The material of which they were cut is granite, brought from the quarries of Aswan, near the first cataract of the Nile. The inscriptions were added about 200 years later by Ramesses II to commemorate his military victories.

The obelisks were moved to Alexandria and set up in the Caesarium — a temple built by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony — by the Romans in 12 BC, during the reign of Augustus, but were toppled some time later. This had the fortuitous effect of burying their faces and so preserving most of the hieroglyphs from the effects of weathering.

The viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, offered the 3,300-year-old Luxor Obelisk to France in 1831. The obelisk arrived in Paris on December 21, 1833. Three years later, on October 25, 1836, King Louis-Philippe had it placed in the centre of Place de la Concorde, where a guillotine used to stand during the Revolution".

Thus, the obelisk was erected on the spot where Louis XVI was guillotined.

For Bataille, the obelisk was a phallic expression of absolute power. It symbolized the end of time, the denial of chance and change. It occulted regicide under an idealized, authoritarian, pro-monarchical meaning. Bataille's view of the obelisk is connected to his hatred of architecture, as expressed in Documents' critical dictionary:

"Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society's ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses itself in actual architectural constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak to and impose silence upon the crowds. Indeed, monuments obviously inspire good social behaviour and often even genuine fear. The fall of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things. This mass movement is difficult to explain otherwise than by popular hostility towards monuments which are their veritable masters."

The Acéphale ritual thus has both an aesthetic (anti-architectural) and a political (anti-authoritarian) meaning.


III

The booklet "Sade Mon Prochain" ('Sade My Neighbor') by Pierre Klossowski sheds light on the relation between the death of God and the execution of Louis XVI. Klossowski was a member of Acéphale and painter Balthus's brother.

"When the blade severs the head of Louis XVI, it is in Sade's eyes not the citizen Capet, or even the traitor, who dies. It is, in his eyes as in those of Joseph de Maistre and all of the Ultramontanists, the representative of God who dies. And it is the blood of the temporal representative of God, and in a deeper sense, the blood of God, that falls back upon the heads of the people in insurrection. Catholic counterrevolutionary philosophers such as Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, and Maine de Biran speak of the putting to death of Louis XVI as a redemptive martyrdom: for them Louis expiates the sins of the nation. For Sade, the putting to death of the king plunges the nation into the inexpiable; the regicides are parricides. Sade doubtless saw in the inexpiable a coercive force; he then wished to substitute for the fraternity of the natural man the solidarity of the parricide, the solidarity of a community that could not be fraternal, because it is of Cain."

Klossowski's reading of the beheading of Louis XVI points towards Nietzsche's most famous aphorism, "The Madman", the 125th from "The Gay Science":

"'Wither is God?' he cried: 'I will tell you. We murdered him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. (...) How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to cleanse ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?'"

To the aesthetic and political meaning of Acéphale's January 21st ritual, is added a historical, criminological, theological, philosophical meaning - and perhaps even an erotic, Sadean one.

IV


In Klossowski's text, and most clearly in the last line of the paragraph quoted above, one can hear echoes of Acéphale's project to establish a community through the murderous sacrifice of one of that society's members. The sacrificial victim is the Divine King.

The Divine King as sacrifical victim points us towards another layer of meaning - mythological in nature - in Acéphale's ritual.

In his classic 1890 book on the history of religions "The Golden Bough", Sir James Frazer examined the ethnological genealogy of an obscure ritual of the Romans of classical antiquity, which took place at the little woodland lake of Nemi. Here, the office of King of the woods was held by an escaped criminal; the King of the woods was at once a priest and a murderer. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the current priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier killer.

In explaining this murderous ritual cycle, Sir James Frazer examined myths and rites from around the world, both from classical antiquity and from non-western societies. Especially, he investigated those religious phenomena in which Kings were regarded as incarnations of a divinity and ritually put to death, either when they lost their strength or at the end of a fixed period:

"The mystic kings of Fire and Water in Cambodia are not allowed to die a natural death. Hence when one of them is seriously ill and the elders think that he cannot recover, they stab him to death.

The people of Congo believed, as we have seen, that if their pontiff the Chitomé were to die a natural death, the world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would immediately be annihilated. Accordingly when he fell ill and seemed likely to die, the man who was destined to be his successor entered the pontiff’s house with a rope or a club and strangled or clubbed him to death.

The Ethiopian kings of Meroë were worshiped as gods; but whenever the priests chose, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die, and alleging an oracle of the gods as their authority for the command. This command the kings always obeyed down to the reign of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II, King of Egypt. Having received a Greek education which emancipated him from the superstitions of his countrymen, Ergamenes ventured to disregard the command of the priests, and, entering the Golden Temple with a body of soldiers, put the priests to the sword."

Sir James Frazer proposed that the periodic sacrifice of a sacred king, who incarnated a solar deity, was central to religions the world over. The periodic sacrifice had an agricultural meaning: the death and resurrection of the sacrificed God was in tune with the seasons.

Mauss, though a close friend of Sir James Frazer, was highly critical of the latter's interpretation of the sacrifice of the Divine King. Mauss proposed that for the god to take on the role of a sacrificial victim, there must be an affinity between his nature and that of the victims. So that he may come to submit himself to sacrifice, the god's own origin must be in the sacrifice itself. The god is a localization, concentration and accumulation of sanctity which is organized in the rite of sacrifice. Thus, it is in the sacrificial murder of the Divine King in which the idea of sacrifice attains it's highest expression.

V

Acéphale's members had spun a thick web of significance around the beheading of Louis XVI on January 21st 1793. Their ritual commemoration of that blood-spattered episode of French history comprised aesthetic, political, historical, criminological, theological, philosophical, erotic and mythological meanings.

Perhaps the ritual commemoration was Bataille's attempt to invent a Maussian contemporary 'total social fact' (fait social total), a phenomenon in which all kinds of meaning are given expression at one and the same time - religious, juridical and moral, political as well as private, and economical.

If so, the invented tradition of commemorating the beheading of Louis XVI bound together into one ceremonial practice the many motivations and factors which made up his Weltanschauung.



Post scriptum

Here is a link to a French-language essay which among others treats Bataille's essay on the Place de la Concorde obelisk.

Here is a link to a post on the brilliant Ombres Blanches blog about Bataille's cinematic aspirations.

Faces of Paris

Visiting Paris, it was one of my goals to buy three cd's:

'Presque Rien' by Luc Ferrari;

'Barbara Chante Brassens et Brel' by the eponymous chanteuse; and

'No Longer Human Senses - Et Fugit Interea Fugit Irreparabile Tempus'* by Spektr;

and write a post about it called 'Faces of Paris', the post's title being a riff on the notorious 'Faces Of Death' video nasties of the 1980's.

The nexus of the post would have been Pierre Klossowski's 'Sade - My Neighbour', more specifically the chapter of that book on the Divine Marquis' relation to the French revolution, where Klossowski describes regicide as the killing of God by proxy. The post would have linked the three cd's thematically through:

• the violent, sadomarxist, even selfdestructive aspect of existentialism, that philosophical movement of which Barbara was one of the figureheads (didn't Sartre write in his preface to Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth' that ".... by their mad fury, (...) by their ever-present desire to kill us, (...) have [the oppressed] become men"?);
• the violent, regicidal aspect of the may 1968 Paris uprising, where 'Soyons cruels!' was one of the slogans and where De Gaulle was to play the role of sacrificial king; the uprising of which Luc Ferrari's 'Music Promenade' is a music concrete collage of field-recorded sounds; and
• the sadean aspect of Black Metal, which needs no commentary here. "Les Hordes Noires", cruel deicides par excellence, would have been presented as the heirs of the Sadean regicidal revolutionaries.
  

However, as I came down with the flue during the visit to Paris, I only bought Ferrari's cd, so this post will never be written. It is up to you, dear reader, to imagine it's shape from these contours.





*The title of Spektr's cd is a paraphrase of Virgilius "Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour".