I. There is a moment in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, shortly after Socrates has developed the famous allegory of the cave, when Socrates is criticized by Plato’s elder brother Adeimantus for having a conception of “higher studies”–he’s referring to philosophy, which Plato defines in the book as a love for higher, eternal forms of being that are intelligible but invisible–that is too generous: “for if someone were to study something by leaning his head back and studying ornaments on a ceiling, it looks as though you’d say he’s studying not with his eyes but with his understanding. Perhaps you’re right and I’m foolish, but I can’t conceive of any subject making the soul look upward except one concerned with that which is, and that which is invisible. If anyone attempts to learn something about sensible things, whether by gaping upward or squinting downward, I’d claim–since there’s no knowledge of such things–that he never learns anything and that, even if he studies lying on his back on the ground or floating on it in the sea, his soul is looking not up but down”. Socrates responds by saying that Adeimantus is right to reproach him, and that he’s been justly punished. In Book X, the critique of the visible realm of becoming as an inadequate basis for knowledge that Plato develops here turns into a critique of painting as a practice of imitation that, precisely because it imitates, cannot but be removed from the higher, eternal forms of being that constitute the true and the good.

One could, in an obvious way, theorize abstract painting as a kind of painting that would escape Plato’s critique, because it does not try to imitate but instead transforms onto the canvas precisely something of the mathematics–geometry and calculation–that Plato associates with the higher and eternal forms of being that exist beyond the imitations that surround us, and that other-than-abstract painting imitates. In this sense, the vampire–a creature that, according to the painter David Reed, recognizes itself in abstract painting because abstract painting, unlike mere imitation, does not reflect the vampire’s being, which is without reflection; the vampire, famously, has no mirror image–would be something like a platonic idea wandering among us, a living human being turned into a platonic idea that, in order to sustain its curious nature, is in desperate need of human blood. Although Reed does not do so, one could reverse his analogy, and say that abstract painting recognizes itself in the vampire: beyond imitation, but in need of human blood. The analogy can be completed, finally, by extending it to Plato and his theory of ideas: it might work for vampires, and yield a brilliant theory of abstract painting, but it is in desperate need for human blood, the life that might be brought to it through a little imitation.

II. I find something of the tension that I have set up here–between the platonic idea, abstract painting, the vampire, and the need for life–in the paintings of Dan Davis, which fall neither under the category of abstraction that might come close to the platonic idea and the vampire, nor under what Plato would reject as imitation; and they don’t entirely (how could they, as paintings, ever entirely?) stand on the side of life either. Take, for example, Davis’ representation of something Adeimantus argues can never lead to philosophical knowledge: an ornament on a ceiling.

Entitled Math, Davis’ painting seems to suggest that something of the higher, eternal forms of being that Socrates is talking about–some of the philosophical knowledge that the Republic praises so highly–can be achieved through imitation, through imitation that is (like) math. Another painting entitled Illuminated by the Light shows something similarly mathematical: a corner of a room, constituted by a floor, two walls, and a ceiling divided into smaller geometrical forms.

However, in Illuminated by the Light the mathematics of the room already appear to be slightly off, as if the mathematical reality of the painting has been bent and the carefully divided geometry of the ceiling is on the verge of collapsing, just like the rest of the room. The feeling one gets looking at this painting is contrary to the illumination that mathematics, at least in Plato’s view, is supposed to bring. Instead one is left, particularly in the case of Math, with a sense of dark oppression, as if Davis, at some point in time, was there to witness this ornament on the ceiling and paint it, but has long since died, together with the rest of us–and all that remains, somewhere, in a very, very small room, is this ornament on the ceiling, some mathematical leftover of a vampiric society that at some point sadly ran out of blood.

References: Plato. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Images: Dan Davis, Math, oil on canvas, 104 cm x 155 cm, 2007; Illuminated by the Light, oil on canvas, 95 cm x 70 cm, 2007.

“The brain is a work, and we do not know it”. Catherine Malabou uses as the Leitmotiv for her book on the brain a line that she adapts from Karl Marx’ The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Humans make their own history, but they do not know that they make it” (as the sentence is quoted and translated in the opening paragraph of Malabou’s book). Although the sentence functions as a powerful motif in the book, it is important to remember that Marx’ line was actually different: “Humans make their own history”, he writes, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past [Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte, aber sie machen sie nicht aus freien Stücken, nicht unter selbstgewählten, sondern unter unmittelbar vorgefundenen, gegebenen und überlieferten Umständen]”. Whereas Marx was interested in both human agency and human beings’ passive exposure to history, Malabou appears to leave out that passive exposure, focusing instead on human beings’ lack of knowledge about their agency when it comes to the brain. In both Marx’ line and in the line from Malabou, one uncovers typical Enlightenment concerns: in Marx, the tension between Enlightenment as a type of agency and as a historical period to which one is passively exposed (one finds this in both Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment as well); in Malabou, the appropriation of Kant’s imperative “Aude sapere!” (“Have the courage to use your own reason!”).

Malabou’s key point, however, namely that the brain is plastic, that it is an organ that is constantly wrapped up in processes of production, is powerful and increases one’s responsibility with respect to what one sees, hears, smells, feels, and so forth. All of these impulses shape the brain, and as a consequence what we think of as “ourselves”, whether we know it or not. They set off a synaptic firework under our skull that is, as Malabou insists, a work: one to which human beings are in part passively exposed, but one in which they also (and here she appears to reverse the emphasis in the line from Marx) actively participate. What we see, hear, smell, feel, and so forth begins to matter after reading Malabou’s book like never before. Thus, the brain migrates from the realm of genetic determination into a realm in which anything is possible, putting all the more emphasis on the question that Malabou chooses as her title: what should we do with our brain? It is here that other recently published books about the brain, such as William Connolly’s Neuropolitics, come into play, as explorations of techniques not just of thinking, but of living—as biotechnics. It is here that Malabou’s notion of the brain’s plasticity—its capacity to receive, give, and explode form; what Malabou also calls the brain’s organic art, its bioart—is most powerful.

References: Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham UP, 2008; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. [Trans.] New York: International Publishers, 1998. Image: Dan Davis, Sons and Daughters, Oil on canvas, 135 x 154cm, 2006-2009.

Added on Sunday, August 8th: Screenshot from Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), which reminded me of Davis’ Sons and Daughters.

I. Democracy is caught up between two leviathans. One is Paul Auster’s novel entitled Leviathan, which is about a man called Benjamin Sachs who travels across the United States in order to blow up replicas of the Statue of Liberty in protest against the war in Vietnam. The other is Thomas Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty, which has the same title.

It is not unlikely that Auster, in a novel dedicated to Don DeLillo, and with an epigraph by Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Every actual State is corrupt”), had Hobbes’ book in mind when he wrote the opening sentences of the novel: “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion”. This image of a body blown to pieces undoes the political move that Hobbes, in his Leviathan, is making and that is captured most forcefully in the frontispiece of the book’s 1651 edition: his aim is to construct one sovereign body that represents all, that is made up by the bodies of all, and that thus acts with everyone’s interests at heart.

Whereas Auster’s novel begins with fragmentation, Hobbes’ project is to unify; his aim is not to fracture, but to bring together. If both texts present their readers with a political body, these bodies are thus opposed to each other: one–that of Hobbes–presents us with absolute, indivisible sovereignty; the other–Auster’s–with the anarchist/terrorist disintegration of that body into barely recognizable pieces.

II. But one should, perhaps, not judge too quickly. For it would be worthwhile to reflect on how the writing of both authors relates to these two bodies and to the opposing political projects that I am suggesting they present.

The project of Auster’s narrator, Peter Aaron, is precisely to reconstruct the life of Benjamin Sachs, to reconstitute the body that was blown into pieces. Literature thus comes to the aid of the various instances–the FBI, the local police, and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms–that do not “have any idea who the dead man was”. Although Hobbes rages against metaphor and literary language throughout his book, he will take recourse to every single trick in the writerly trade in order to make his theory of sovereignty real–in order to convince his readers that the union of the members of the sovereign body that he describes “is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person”. The creaturely body that, in the frontispiece of his book, spectrally rises above the territory that it is supposed to protect is not a projection of the imagination; it is real. Sovereignty is a metaphor of which Hobbes is asking us to forget that it is a metaphor.

But Hobbes’ literary language, the fact that he takes recourse to the very type of language he rejects in order to get his theory of sovereignty across, undermines this appeal, and instead exposes Hobbes’ Leviathan as literary-political tour de force–as a political text infused with a literariness that undermines the unity that Hobbes wants to pass off as real. In Auster’s fiction as well, the biographical project ultimately fails, and the enigma of Sachs remains largely unresolved.

Thus, Hobbes might be closer to Auster, and Auster closer to Hobbes, than an all too easy juxtaposition of their Leviathans at first sight might make it appear. Both their Leviathans, and thus both their political visions, are with the Sphinx rather than with Oedipus.

References: Auster, Paul. Leviathan. London: Faber and Faber, 1992; Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Images: Dan Davis, Power to the People, oil on canvas, 180 cm x 134 cm, 2007; Dan Davis, Arpanet Nightdrive, oil on canvas, 25 cm x 35 cm, 2009.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew proves that realism is the only mode in which the extraordinary can be conveyed. Reality is the only true site of the extraordinary’s existence. This means, paradoxically, that realism is our only access to the miraculous; any other way of achieving this amounts to what Karl Marx has called the “nursery tale” of theology. Take, for example, the opening scenes of Pasolini’s film: they represent the opening scenes of Matthew’s gospel, i.e. the revelation that Mary is pregnant from the Lord. The film begins with an exchange of gazes: Mary is looking at Joseph, and Joseph at Mary; Mary is looking down—clearly something is not the way it should be. The camera moves back, and the viewer sees that Mary is pregnant. When Joseph realizes what Mary’s gaze is telling him, he walks away from her, back into town, where he is visited by an angel who explains the situation (Mary is pregnant from the Lord!). There are no special effects: the angel is just a human being whose long hair is waving in the wind. Joseph returns to Mary’s house, and once again no words are exchanged. There are only gazes: Mary smiles, and so does Joseph. There is a barely perceptible nod on his part indicating that he has accepted the situation, that he accepts the child as the Lord’s. All of these scenes are represented realistically, without any attempt to imitate the miraculous; and yet, it is this extreme realism that conveys a sense of the extraordinary, providing access to the true miracle that is conveyed here.

This mode of representation entirely reverses one’s understanding of the miracle. As has been noted in several recent discussions of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption (see for example Eric Santner’s Psychotheology of Everyday Life), a miracle is usually understood to be what suspends the order of the everyday. Think, for example, of Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the miracle as an exceptional situation or state. It is an event that breaks with the ordinary. Rosenzweig, however, sought to break with that understanding, and instead theorized the miracle as the miracle of the everyday; he was interested in the extraordinariness of the ordinary. As Bonnie Honig puts it in her book Emergency Politics, for Rosenzweig “[t]he miracle is not … about the contravention of everyday patterns of existence or laws of nature. It is a sign of divine providence that is experienced as such and that opens us up, both to providence and to the everyday. It allows or solicits us to experience the everyday as miracle, the ordinary as calling for acknowledgment, or receptivity or gratitude; it calls us to experience the apparently steadfast as contingent and as could have been otherwise. And it calls for us to experience the contingent as steadfast, as fated, willed, foreseen or, at least (in more secular terms) significant. It calls for what we now call mindfulness”. Such a position immanentizes the transcendental tie of religion, and reorients humanity’s investment in the above and beyond towards the everyday reality of the neighborhood.

References: Pasolini, Pier Paolo. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Titanus Distribuzione, 1964); Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Image: Dan Davis, What We Call Civilization, oil on canvas, 80 cm x 90 cm, 2010.