Date: Sun, 03 May 1998 06:19:13 +1000
From: Ken Mogg <muffin-AT-labyrinth.net.au>
Subject: Re: Lacan's castrating theory ..., etc., and now Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hitchcock


Gary Norris's interim post (2 May) read:

'Of course Nietzsche "corrupted" Schopenhauer's notion of the Will, but
your snub at a title, the almost pre-phenomenological "will-to-power,"
is what I will want to discuss ... BTW, I like your assessment of
LIFEBOAT and Hitch'.

Gary, you've encouraged me (I hear groans from 'the inevitable lurking
crowd' you mentioned) to clarify what I said about LIFEBOAT.  I had
thought to do so anyway, as clarification is always important, isn't it?

Hitchcock, born 1899, received 'exposure' to Nietzsche from his reading
of John Buchan (notably, 'The Power-House', 1913), from meeting and
reading George Bernard Shaw, from notions 'in the air' of a life-force
and the (Bergsonian) élan vital, from other notions in the same air more
directly about Nietzsche (cf. John Carey's 'The Intellectuals and the
Masses', 1992).

His basic critique of Nazism and the Ubermensch in LIFEBOAT (1944) is
very much 'after Buchan': admiration mixed with condemnation.  Buchan
had written: 'You flatter your vanity by despising mankind and making
them your tools.  You scorn the smatter of inaccuracies that passes for
human knowledge, and I will not venture to say you are wrong. 
Therefore, you use your brains to frustrate it.  Unhappily the life of
millions is built on that smattering, so you are a foe to society.'
('The Power-House', Chapter 8)

As you can see, good British decency and sense!

My point about LIFEBOAT would be that, in the telling of it, Hitchcock
was concerned to expose the 'perversions' in Nazism, and thus arrived
back at Schopenhauerian bedrock.   Schopenhauer's basic concept of the
world's 'Will' is effectively symbolised, I'd argue, in the image of the
'mighty big ocean' on which 'we're all adrift'.

'Will' is more basic than Nietzsche's 'Will-to-power'.  After watching
many of David Attenborough's marvellous nature documentaries, I'm happy
to acknowledge the presence of a 'Will' but am not convinced that a
'Will-to-power' is universal.

Hitchcock's famous remark, 'Everything's perverted in a different way',
seems to me pure Schopenhauer!

In the final analysis, I'd say that Hitchcock's vaunted 'morality'
approaches  Schopenhauer's emphasis on a cognitive, even 'Eastern', form
of ethics (with an aesthetic equivalent, that sees the artist as often
privileged).

(Just to clarify further, I've got none of this from my reading of
Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian approach to Hitchcock!)

If you can help me with any of this, Gary, I'll be very happy. 
Meanwhile, I think I see what you are getting at in your references to
Nietzsche's understanding of will ('how it functions is up to us'), and
shall think about them further over the next few days.

Thanks - Ken M.


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