♀ 14 April 2023 🌘 205 Germinal CCXXXI
Quotes from Brech’ts Threepenny Novel, Walter Benjamin
[Macheath’s decisive discovery of the human instinct of independence]

Murder is suspected; a criminal affair arises. But the criminal affair merges into the satirical theme. The society seeking the murderer of the woman who has committed suicide will never be able to recognize him in Macheath, who has only recognized (??) his contractual rights. The murder of the small bussiness woman Mary Sawyer not only is central to the plot but also contains its moral. The impovereished shopkeepers, the soldiers crammed into leaky ships, the burglars whose employer has the police president on his pay—this gray mass, which in the novel takes the place of the chorus in the opera, provides the rulers with their victims. On it they commit their crimes. To it belongs Mary Sawyer, who is forced to drown herself, and from its midsts comes Fewkoombey, who to hi astonishment is hanged for her murder. (my emphasis) (206-207)

[Full text of “A New Face” in which Fewkoombey dreams of judgement.]

[The Party of Macheath]

In the handbooks on criminality, lawbreakers are described as asocial elements. (208)

The recuperated/constitutive social role of organized crime, justification, the ballet logic of fascism (the ballet dancer must not only dance, she is expected also to be beautiful. likewise the fascist savior must not only save, he must be a paragon of morality. at the same time, in taking over responsibility, or rather power, for a crisis, the dictator is free from responding to those who put him in power, free to act with sovereign, unaccountable authority.

The dialectic of fascist irresponsibility, the sovereign transcendence of party by businessmen, who sell to the poor and rich alike

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

-Anatole France

Good Rich and Good Poor, the idealistic abusive model of justification. it is not that they expect you to perform the impossible, they expect you to die. except for Cicero, who does expect the impossible, who does expect reality to get its act together and adhere to the platonic ideals of the republic and human nature.

The same themes which circle Refuge for A Bleeding God—the self who is also its enemy, the lines of conflict running through the self or selves rather then between classes or parties, the stupefying processes of fascism, mystic liberation.

I’ve been reading a reconstruction of a biography of Cicero, the Imperium series by Robert Harris. Macheath reminds me of Crassus with his monopoly on firefighters allowing him to buy up burning properties for pennies on the dollar, Cicero’s dedication to the state and shock to find that there is madness in the state (is the state not a form of madness?). Cicero as a paradigm of liberalism, a certain cultivated obstinance or ignorance vis a vis the implications of politics going beyond the proper modalities. “Violence had become a normal part of politics”—as if it were not constitutive of it. an Idealistic, mystifying attitude to material reality: the need for bread interpreted as “Gratitude turns to Dependency turns to Entitlement”, a refusal to understand how those who have no stake in the wellbeing of the status quo would respect the rules of the status quo when organizing to utterly disrupt it.

Also a recurring interest of mine with the american liberal bonnet clutching obsession with hypocrisy, see the response to the suffragete argument—but don’t you see, you admit the current system is unjust, yes of course they don’t care, what they care about is if the spoils are going to them or to others, it’s not even hypocrisy because they never credibly claim to care about fairness, they only care about maintaining their privileged position in prevailing hierarchies.

A sort of refusal to recognize the reality of the text, the text of reality, an idealistic ignorance which permits a moral high ground and therefore an abdication of political responsability.

Cicero as Lincoln putting John Brown to death for attacking the state. the state as a way things are supposed to be when can be wielded by those in power to justify their abuse by pointing out that even if abuse is not permitted under the state, still less is redress by the victim or the child permitted, only petitioning those in power, or others in power, in the state, only the self regulation of the state by itself, not by those who oppose it to begin with, is permitted. the state is an end in and of itself for such liberals, which thereby obscures the state’s own end, i.e. the protection of property rights, slavery, etc.

Borges’ The Bribe, where an up and coming European academic maneuvers to be put in charge of a conference by attacking baselessly the methods of his senior american academic in texas. the senior, a northerner, defended the south out of a sense of fairness and self restraint, a narcissistic attachment to an idea of himself as fair which overrides the actual material facts of slavery and secession. the european, in attacking the american, offers him the opportunity to rebuke him by not appointing him to chair the upcoming conference, but the alternative is a bribe: to absorb the attack, demonstrate his abundance of face, of fairness, and appoint his young adversary and thereby put him doubly in his debt, both for the appointment and for not seeking revenge. it is this self negation, this swallowing of a social slight, shame, which is the bribe, since it permits a more inward narcissisms, escaping guilt and instead building up an icon to his fair mindedness and selflessness.

It is Al Gore refusing to contest the presidency since that would undermine the illusion of fairness and peaceful transitions, it is Cicero refusing to offer bread to the poor since he would rather be loved—or despised—for his principles. it is the loyal retainers of the ruling class who would not undermine the system even in pursuit of their own self interest, preferring to defer to their opponents, the fascists and nationalists and so forth, recognizing that though they are opponents, they share a common enemy—namely the liberals’ own ostensible clients, the poor whom the state oppresses. It is Cicero, who as a new man defies the aristocrats and insists on fair applications of the law, only to side with the conservatives and the aristocrats against Caeser and Catalina to defend the state against those who would remove the senate to mobilize the people, enabling the people to win bread and they to win power. Cicero never opposed the aristocrats in fundamentals, but merely struggled to join them.

Likewise my father resented his working class standing and put every ounce of money he saved up into the capitalist’s coffers, winning inheritances and stealing my own wages to build up treasure in the cloud, distaining to offer me aid, distaining even unions which he had previously benefited from and selfishly supported, since they now oppose his god elon musk whom he believes will save the planet and increase his his dividens, which in truth to him are not able to be seperated, so thouroughly has he absorbed the logic of capitalist realism.