From: "MEC" <elysse22-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Polarities and Inspection: What If Logic Is a Fantasy?
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:56:42 -0600


Often heralded as a work that predicts the rise of National Socialism--in 
particular, its sadism--,  _Der Junge Törless_ (_Young Törless_) tells the 
story of a school in pre-World War I Austro-Hungary where boys 
torture/brutalize (ultimately gang rape) another, and Törless, having daily 
been witness to this activity, thought about its implications, participated 
in it, and disassociated himself from it, finally flees musing about such 
things as irrational numbers (where Kant no longer makes sense). What 
happens when Törless can no longer escape--that is, dividuate himself from 
others?

By the schism, what if Deleuze and Guattari really have explained National 
Socialism rather than _101 Days of Sodom_? Would it mean that their thesis 
falls pretty close to the one William Golding offers in _The Lord of the 
Flies_? That is, what if human being moves between pack animal and autonomy? 
Hegelian, yet conceptually resounding--simple. Maybe too simple. Yet 
_Triumph des Willens_ (_Triumph of the Will_) and _Der Ewige Jude_ (_The 
Eternal Jew_) are the same movie in this sense just as _The Right Stuff_ and 
_Das Boot_ (_The U-Boat_) are the same movie.  _Triumph of the Will_ 
concerns the glorified supreme leader and the goose-stepping pack just as 
_The Eternal Jew_ concerns the Jew individualized as assimiliated citizen 
and demonized as pack. (Figure out why _The Right Stuff_ and _Das Boot_ 
(_The U-Boat_) are the same movie ... ). The pack, in other words, is what 
is at stake in National Socialism, which is why the reading Deleuze and 
Guattari offer for _Willard_ applies well to the conversion of Germany. 
(Deleuze and Guattari is itself a pact, somewhere between individual and 
pack.)

The conversion of Germany propagated in films such as _Triumph des Willens_ 
is about the logic of _becoming other_, of becoming the pack. Is the logic 
of _becoming other_ a fantasy? Yes and no, a case in which such terms as 
"sacrifice" only have meaning for people who have not yet _become other_ 
(_Olympiad_ /_Triumph des Willens_). In _Der Blechtrommel_ (_The Tin Drum_), 
Oskar Matzerath (an anti-Willard) largely refuses this _becoming other_ by 
becoming monstorously unique.

At least in its propaganda, oneness with the herd is the mystical experience 
the National Socialism hoped to achieve. This mystical experience is, 
however distant, a repetition and a revision, by way of making public what 
is private, of Romanticism and religious mysticism. The mystery of caves, 
the beauty of tall mountains, the inner light of Meister Eckhart--subverted 
to the spirit of a goose-stepping army or an awed crowd. Too, the logic that 
sanctifies is also the logic that condemns--all of which can be done with 
that strange German elixir, music. Perhaps this very sense of the mystical 
helped the Germans to betray themselves--becoming as they did for a time a 
pack. And the strands of this logic embodied--while _Der Ewige Jude_ 
condemns the Jew as the practicioner of schochet, of "ritual slaughter," 
the SS sanctifies mercilessness--something _Der Ewige Jude_ portrays as 
brutal and horrible, practiced as it is on a cow--as the act of refusing to 
be human, as the refusual to share in individuation, as the act of a supreme 
race. Hence, the logic of the pack accomplished and the pack denied.

Yet this logic is not simply that which conditions the relationship between 
National Socialist and Jew, ... and Pole, .. and Czech, ... and Russian, but 
that between SS and SA (Night of the Long Knives), that between Freikorps 
and Communists, . . .  .