| Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l on Thu, 4 Jan 2024 17:00:35 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism |
<snip>Deleuze: But I think that… That creating would be resistance is because… I believe… Let me tell you, there is a writer I recently read who affected me greatly on this topic. I believe that one of the great motifs in art and thought is a certain “shame of being a man” (la honte d’être un homme). I think that Primo Levi is that writer and artist who has expressed this most profoundly. He was able to speak of this “shame of being a man” in an extremely profound book because he wrote it following his return from the Nazi death camps. Levi said, “Yes, when I was freed, the dominant feeling was one of ‘the shame at being a man’”. It’s a statement, I believe, that’s at once quite splendid, very beautiful, and not at all abstract, it’s quite concrete, “the shame of being a man.” But this does not mean certain stupidities that some people might like to have it mean. It does not mean that we are all assassins, that we are all guilty, for example, all guilty of Nazism. Levi says it admirably: it doesn’t mean that the executioners and the victims are all the same… You can’t make us believe that. There are a lot of people who maintain, “Oh yes, we are all guilty”… No, no, no, nothing of the sort… There will not be any confusion between the executioner and the victim.[33]
So “the shame of being a man” does not mean that we are all the same, that we are all compromised, etc. It means, I believe, several things. It’s a very complex feeling, not a unified feeling. “The shame of being a man” means at once how could men do that (hommes) — some men, that is, others than me — how could they do that? And second, how have I myself nonetheless taken sides? I didn’t become an executioner, but I still took sides to have survived, and there is a certain shame in having survived in the place of certain friends who did not survive. So it’s therefore an extremely composite feeling, “the shame of being a man,” and I believe that at the basis of art, there is this idea or this very strong feeling of shame of being a man that results in art consisting of liberating the life that men have imprisoned. Men never cease imprisoning life, they never cease killing life — “the shame of being a man.” The artist is the one who liberates a life, a powerful life, a life [that’s] more than personal, it’s not his/her life.
<snip>And it’s even more… I am talking about “the shame of being a man,” but it’s not even in the grandiose sense of Primo Levi, you understand? Because if one dares to say something of this sort, for each of us in daily life, there are minuscule events that inspire in us this shame of being a man. We witness a scene in which someone has really been too vulgar, we don’t make a big thing of it, but we are upset, upset for the other, we are upset for ourselves because we seem nearly to accept this. Here again, we almost make some sort of compromise. But if we protest, saying “what you’re saying is base, shameful,” a big drama gets made out of it, and we’re caught, and we feel — it doesn’t at all compare with Auschwitz — but even on this minuscule level, there is a small shame of being a man. If one doesn’t feel that shame, there is no reason to create art. It’s … Ok, I can’t say anything else.
<snip>Excerpts from “R as in Resistance”, from L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet. Directed by Pierre-André Boutang (1996). Translation & Notes: Charles J. Stivale
from https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-recording-3-n-z/ Gilles Deleuze: The ABC Primer / Recording 3 - N to Z Reading Date: June 3, 1989 -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org