Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  As noted, the philosopher was unfamiliar with the scene. Evidently the issue was religious transgression (chastity/secret concubinage), combined with a conflict between nationalities (Gaulish patriots/Romans), linked to a complex of questions relating to romantic betrayal (vows of erotic faithfulness, the impossibility of honoring such things as contracts in the realm of the libido). One finds discussions of the matter in critical theory and in the work of Sigmund Freud, as well as relevant examples in life experience and in the western literary tradition (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, In Search of Lost Time). As the philosopher understands it, the Roman has abandoned his former lover, with whom he has two children, for a younger and more attractive woman.

  The theocratic regime is unfamiliar with the philosopher’s works. Otherwise it never would have let him into the country. Thus the philosopher’s right to hospitality is guaranteed only by the isolated faction that invited him. It turns out that part of his young chauffeur’s soul leans toward orthodoxy, while part leans toward the reformers. But the soul is indivisible; so is the right to hospitality. This hospitality embraces his thoughts as well. She listens to him.9

  3 Killing Religion by Kindness?

  The doctoral student is hardly timid. Not for a moment does the professor feel it would be possible to embroil her in compromises. That impresses him.

  What is faith? An ATTITUDE WITH NO ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION. Difficult terrain for the man of the Enlightenment. It must continue to be possible to dissolve any hermetic position in the world by asking nagging questions. Someday, somewhere, a planet-spanning river of understanding must emerge, making thoughts as useful as commodities. Are thoughts transmitted through friendliness? Must religious people fear this friendliness because it can induce them to make compromises? Goodness is not friendly. There’s a certain severity in the thought that understanding follows a law.

  Outside, as before, rocky desert. The philosopher has trouble imagining all the times civilization here has been destroyed by conquering peoples, raiding tribes, before that the Mongols. What would a Roman envoy from Crassus or one of the barracks emperors recognize as familiar in the highlands of Persia? The philosopher’s interlocutor, taking pains to buffer the bumps in the road, attempts to explain to him — he’s long since grasped the thrust of her argument — the extent to which friendly conversations destroy the SERIOUSNESS OF RELIGION.

  More like Fire Gods

  The fecklessness of the Roman who seduced Norma is only the surface, as it turns out. The praetor spontaneously embraces a fiery death with Norma. Love must burn.

  On this point, it struck the European philosopher, his chauffeur was not actually a Shiite, but a disciple of the Zoroastrian death by fire.

  Love must burn, repeated the driver, or it is not love. The same is true of every state of emotion in history or current reality.

  To the philosopher it sounded as though his Eastern traveling companion was explaining the concept of ALIENATION. “To escape from alienation, one must return along the same path that led into alienation.” He is agnostic, but not about the assumptions on which the concept of the polity is based. As described by Jules Michelet, the idea of the polity arose in France when conquering Franks formed bonds with Roman slave women; the idea arose in ardent hearts and was later capable of mollifying public violence.

  Darkness descended. The headlights lanced out at the gravel road.

  4

  It turns out that both priestesses are in love with the same man. The one who comes to the supreme druidess for counsel has a taboo relationship. Flying in the face of all psychology, says the Persian driver, the two women, one of them betrayed, the other affirmed, form an understanding that can be explained only by the principle of FRIENDSHIP. In this opera’s exuberance of feeling, the Persian explains, the rival, Adalgisa, disavows her love. Out of friendship to Norma, she plans to head at once to the Roman camp to praise the worthiness of Norma’s character to her Roman lover. Thus, COMMUNICATION must supply the means to fetch the straying lover back into the druidess’s secret love nest in the sacred woods of Gaul.

  The philosopher, jostled about in the automobile, asks: Will that work out, judging from life experience? What does the rival praise? Norma’s worthiness of character? What the seducer has lost? The moonlight? The memory of some detail? We don’t know, the Persian doctoral student explains, how Norma’s rival expressed herself in this public speech. She is standing in front of a Roman assembly and a mortified praetor.

  The philosopher tries to imagine the unfamiliar situation. He senses that his Persian traveling companion isn’t asking him about romantic questions, but rather about central aspects of his theory of communication.

  Can a Romantic Relationship Be a Capital Crime?

  Following the failure of her speech to the Roman praetor, Adalgisa embraces the absolute obligation of friendship and surrenders to the priests in the sacred woods, willing to face execution. Word comes that a Roman raiding party, including the praetor, has been captured by Gaulish guards in an attempt to free the foolish Adalgisa.

  If I’ve understood the plot of Bellini’s opera correctly, the philosopher went on, it’s negotiated against the background of a progressively decaying religious principle (in the nineteenth century, Gaulish beliefs no longer hold) and on the basis of a skeptical phase of national pride (France would never subjugate itself to Prussia, but would submit to the more universal Rome without hesitation, as in the Treaties of Rome); at the same time, it’s about the triumph of spontaneity in love. It’s not impossible for passionate skin contact and obsession to turn spontaneously into friendship.

  That wasn’t how the Shiite interpreted the story. Had she misunderstood the philosopher? Friendship is not divided by passion; she rejoined; passion is not divided by guilt.

  The Annihilation of Emotion

  Love strikes down religious precepts. Religion strikes back, compelling martyrdom.10 The Persian doctoral student at the wheel speaks of a decadent tendency in western literature. The philosopher tries to qualify this: In the genre of Italian opera. No, the doctoral student insists, the cynical offsetting of all values, making them annihilate one another, that’s western fundamentalism. Nothing works without barter. Barter is obligatory. But religion doesn’t barter.

  Then how can we imagine the solution of a conflict? asks the philosopher. The epochs of religiosity, and hopefully nationalism as well, were being phased out, and a fundamental principle of differentiation would prevail, allowing new value systems to form.

  The chauffeur replied that she didn’t believe that. On what basis didn’t she believe it? The Persian was silent, dumbfounded. On no basis but what I believe. It was absurd, she went on, to fall back on some third thing to affirm one’s own belief. Enlightenment consisted of using one’s belief without anyone else’s guidance. Otherwise belief would be non-autonomous. “Autonomous belief” struck the philosopher as an interesting inversion. The Persian had told him that Norma’s longtime love had produced two children. Despite her rage, Norma found herself unable to kill them (as Medea had). Here, suggested the philosopher, Bellini departed from traditional religion. One emotion hesitates to annihilate another.

  5 Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

  Sheltered in the bone structure of the skull: the brain, restlessly at work. Surrounding the vulnerable human body, already rattled about for six hours in the automobile: a solid metal shell cutting it off from the heat of the country. The country’s hospitality is invisible, a precarious protection.

  The philosopher is sleepy. How can one uphold, for the seven hours from Tehran to Isfahan, the fundamental assumption that all things in the human interior and the global exterior are open to peace negotiations, i.e., to discussion? At some point, at nightfall, the will to fight, source of the Enlightenment, grows weary. Within a radius of 4,000 miles around Tehran we find one-third of the world’s problems, two-thirds of its crude oil, half of its wealth, two-t
hirds of its poverty. At any time the U.S.A. can cause chaos in this tableau of events across which Persia gazes from the north. That would be devastating for the next generation. The philosopher is troubled. Does secularization only have a chance when nations grow weary? Or do the patient reactions of the Shiite at the wheel show that there is a second kind of secularization, not devised by corruptible German princes, not echoing the expropriation of the priests in France in 1791, but developed from the seriousness of the ideal that prevails across the globe and blows through all events as the WIND OF HISTORY?

  In the moment of weariness, the imagination falls to pieces. It is time to contemplate the individual fragments.

  How could the philosopher, in his jostled state, explain to the doctoral student the concept of seriousness as a common currency, the fragment of Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion,” a mere eight pages long? It contains the seeds of a new secularization. At the same time, it respects the fact that religion can in no way be influenced by rhetoric. But in any case rhetoric is not the philosopher’s tool. What does communication mean? Surely not just speech.

  Figaro’s Loyalty

  We know that Figaro, protagonist of the hit play The Mad Day by Beaumarchais and the Mozart opera named after him, was not of noble blood, nor was the Countess. Evidently the two had been childhood sweethearts before she married the count.

  Every morning thereafter, Figaro caressed this young woman’s hair, made up her face for the day. He was continually drawn to her. He gave her advice, as we know, on how to preserve her marriage. He did not exploit his intimate proximity to her hair and her ear, her side and her back for intrigues. The tenderness of his hands and his straying thoughts stayed restrained (unlike the incest taboo, but resembling a loyalty taboo, something long-familiar yet novel, rarely defined in literature: Thou shalt not betray the interests of the one you love). The relationship which the Count and Countess arranged between Figaro and Susanna, which seems so perfect in the finale of Mozart’s opera, did not survive the turmoil of the 1789 revolution. Susanna began a career as a secretary for the Committee of Public Safety. The Count and Countess were held in a Paris prison. Figaro was now the head of a revolutionary tribunal. The Count and Countess came before him as defendants. Figaro could easily have condemned his rival, the Count, to be executed, thus gaining power over the Countess. He did nothing of the sort. Soon afterward the Count and Countess escaped through the Ardennes and moved into a private house on the far side of the Rhine in Koblenz, where a large colony of emigrés lurked, waiting for some shift in current events.

  A short while later Figaro, now an influential, high-powered man, followed his former masters. In Koblenz he was much sought after as a counselor, hairdresser, and costume designer. Even in German circles. And so, as a “servant” or as a “master,” he supported the Count’s household with his income. Soon the intimate emotion of the morning hours spent on the Countess’s hair and face once again took tender form.

  After the king’s return (the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars was now over), the Count and Countess, no longer young, returned to the French estates that had been restored to them. They left Figaro behind. During the frequent regime changes, as his actions were not dictated by political advantage, he had often ended up on the wrong side, and so aristocratic circles now regarded him as a washout. Nor had he kept up with the fashions.

  He went on working as a provincial hairdresser on the Rhine. He had learned German. He had three sisters, not mentioned in Mozart’s opera. He had no descendants of his own, but his sisters had sixteen children. The family name, originally Spanish, was famous.

  Additional Remarks by Dr. Boltzmann

  From the perspective of evolutionary biology, Dr. Boltzmann informs us, Figaro’s position in this sequence of true events initially seems to be a negative one. With his superior physical strength, even as a young man Figaro could have thrashed and scared off the Count as he wooed Susanna. That’s what an animal would have done. Later, as the head of the revolutionary tribunal, he should have gone for the Count’s jugular. He would have gained the Countess for himself, and thus the chance to have his own bevy of children.

  But in fact, according to Dr. Boltzmann, Figaro’s conduct, the principle of his actions, does have something going for it. He developed a novel terrain on which to exercise the force of tenderness and expand it in manifold ways (this terrain, an achievement of antiquity, had been lost by the eighteenth century). This innovation had the effect of a new heavenly body enhancing a constellation. New contradictions arose, but a greater number of old contradictions was cleared up. And it was not out of the question that such a position, that of a “lucky auxiliary star,” might even result in children.

  “Take the violinist on the sinking liner / The tone is painfully rich and mellow”11

  An unknown composition by Luigi Nono from 1966: seventy of the waiters who went down with the Titanic in 1912 came from neighboring villages in the Abruzzi. Not one of their fiancées, who had hoped that these men would return home and marry them once they’d been paid their wages, ever found anyone else who would. The villages remained childless, and today stand desolate among the mountains. It was to these VOICELESS PEOPLE OF HISTORY that Nono dedicated his Lament for Twelve Strings and Twelve Sopranos in 1966. The grief is not so much for the waiters lost at the bottom of the sea as it is for the miserable fate of the women left behind, who were forbidden by strict local custom from seeking another husband in neighboring towns.

  * * *

  1 A cancellation gives rise to certain difficulties: 95% of the tickets were divided up between different organizations and factory associations and had already been distributed. A hierarchically selected audience had therefore been organized for the premiere. Only a residual number had been sold, in part with a surcharge, and had disappeared onto the black market, as it were. The management of the Kirov Theater was attached to the idea that one must honestly be able to fetch back the tickets if a “full house” were canceled.

  2 The loud whispering was suitably amplified by the megaphones. It turned out that the whispered text prevails over singers and orchestra and is less disruptive than “actorly speech” when heard from amid the audience in the stalls. The whispering gets rid of the traces of theatrical training as well as of the realism of everyday language. Both are of advantage to the peculiarity of the Wagner texts.

  3 Muffling protective casing, which soundproofs the loud sound of the camera motor.

  4 Synch = Picture and sound are synchronized in the editing room. She had edited the 17.5 perforated tapes with their curious sound fragments into a coherent version. Otherwise it would not have been possible to synch the image sections and the much longer sound sections, she said. She had followed the descriptions noted on the tins with the sound tapes. She didn’t speak any German herself, but had an acquaintance at the Paris Goethe Institute, with whom she occasionally slept.

  5 In the epochs of human history, the solar races are preceded by the age of lunar humanity. However, according to Rudolf Steiner, the most advanced elements of the previous epoch may be intellectually superior to the undeveloped elements of the more developed epoch. In this sense, Norma is the heroic, intelligent form of regression, the indispensable REAR GUARD OF PROGRESS (Heiner Müller). The Romans, up to Constantine, are sun warriors.

  6 At that time the stoic man, aware of his terminal illness, gladly took on commissions scheduled for the distant future.

  7 They occupied broad swathes of Gaul. They were viewed as conquerors. They did not have better weapons or better reasons to occupy the country than the inhabitants of Gaul, the old families. It was merely that they met with no resistance. Just one year later, or three years earlier, the coup would have failed.

  8 This, Jules Michelet writes, is how feudalism arose (“I serve you because you serve me”), the foundation for the only basic for
m of love invented in Europe.

  9 Given a position of non-secular religiosity (“serious must remain serious”), the case of Norma will undergo a different analysis than from a stance of discursive competence (“people must not be victimized”).

  10 There is a long chain of confusion; it begins in Norma’s heart, when she feels hurt, and leads to the Gauls’ massacre of the Romans, who will in turn avenge the Gauls’ revolt.

  11 “Take the violinist . . .”: the title is taken from a poem by Ben Lerner.

  IV Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing

  Snow on a Copper Roof

  The building houses a state opera. The art form this building serves has existed since 1607. More than four hundred years of opera. The opera impresario Schulz worked out that there are eighty thousand opera scores. He conjectured that, if they were all gathered together, they would form a single score, something like a CITY of music.

  Commitment to a Colleague with a Sore Throat

  In February 2013 the virulent lung infection that had been going around threw the program of one of Germany’s leading opera houses into utter disorder. The singer playing the title role in Rigoletto at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera lay miserably stricken on his hotel bed, his chest covered in hot packs. There was no way he could sing. By one o’clock that afternoon, the singer playing Falstaff at Milan’s opera house had been ordered to get in a car. He set off over the Alps for the Bavarian capital. Just a quarter of an hour before the orchestra began its general rehearsal, he was being shown his place in the wings by assistants. There remained seven minutes for discussions with the principal conductor. The substitute baritone from Milan sang his part so proficiently and “with such tender strength” (opposite a Gilda who stood twenty yards away from him, who’d had to coordinate her movements with the dramaturge playing his part on stage, and whom he’d never met) that — following his monologue to the servile courtiers in the second act — the orchestra members drummed upon their instruments, an honor rarely shown to someone performing at the opera house for the first time. Just twenty minutes after the moving end of the opera, the singer, who could sing sixteen different parts from Verdi’s operas, was put in his car and driven through the night back to Milan. The next morning at eleven o’clock the same baritone appeared for the dress rehearsal of Falstaff in the northern Italian capital.