...insightfull-truth here is told in unfamiliar content but intense meaning found.
On 7/30/11, Dominic Tweedie <[email protected]> wrote: > > Counterpunch > > > *Anders Breivik, Amy Winehouse, Hamlet and Tahrir Square**//* > /**/ > > *Caroline Rooney, Counterpunch, USA, 29 July 2011* > > The Norway killings by Anders Breivik and the death of Amy Winehouse > would seem to have little, if anything, to connect them, apart from > sharing a fateful historical moment. And yet these events, happening > alongside each other, compel cultural self-reflection on the kind of > worlds in which a young man is compelled to go on a killing spree aimed > primarily at youthful others and a creatively gifted young woman is > compelled to destroy herself, whether by suicide or other forms of > self-harming. Despite the seeming contingency of the two tragic events, > I would like to speculate on a possible contrapuntal connection between > them through the formulation of what could be called a Hamlet complex. > > One of the intriguing things about Shakespeare's plays is how they have > the capacity to assume, time and again, a contemporary relevance. In > terms of the concerns of our times, it is surprisingly not hard to see > Shakespeare's Hamlet as exhibiting the psyche of a Jihadist extremist. > In brief, Hamlet is dismayed by the socio-political corruption he finds > all around him and in relation to this he develops a savior complex: he > believes that it is his almost divinely appointed task to set the world > to rights. He believes that the wrong he has to address is betrayal of a > divinized father ideal: that to which all loyalty must be fanatically > owed. Hamlet is puritanical; he is disgusted by sex and berates his > mother for acting on her sexual desires while he orders Ophelia to veil > herself, more or less, in his 'get thee to a nunnery' speech. Hamlet > also has a paranoid attitude, one of intense distrust of 'infidel' types > such as Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and, of course, > especially Claudius. > > The reason that I put forward this odd---and, possibly to some, > discordant--- proposition of a Jihadist /Hamle/t is to challenge some of > the reductive post 9/11 framings of Islamic extremism by politicians and > the media. One of the particularly reductive features of these framings > has been the widespread simplistic inference that extremism is > culturally other, and specifically Islamic. > > While the figure of Hamlet has been taken by some literary critics to be > emblematic of the emergence of the modern Western subject, what does it > then mean to notice that such a subject would seem to exhibit Jihadist > tendencies? It means not only that the repeated othering of extremism is > untenable but also that extremism accompanies the modern subject as the > effect of its emergence. In other words, if the modern subject is a Dr > Jekyll then Mr Hyde is his extremist double: not another as such but a > phantom other of refused identifications. While the West currently > produces a phantom of Islamic extremism, this paranoid structure comes > to be inhabited by the Jihadist who attempts to invert it, that is, in > producing the West as its demonic other. > > In terms of this logic of opposing mirrors, the Jihadist fighting the > Crusader is just like the Crusader fighting the Jihadist. Or, Hamlet the > Jihadist could also be Hamlet the Crusader. With this turn, it becomes > possible to account for the political psyche of Anders Breivik , not > Anders the Dane but rather Anders the Norwegian. Like his literary > counterpart, Anders the Norwegian considers the rulers of the state to > be corrupt and considers his role to be one of setting the world to > rights. From his website, Anders appears to have been mesmerized by the > specters of idealized military manhood: here, we might recall that the > ghost of Hamlet's father appears precisely as a suit of armor. > > Moreover, the ideology of Anders is explicit in its Jihadist parallels. > Just as the jihadist is engaged in the good fight against corruption, so > is he: it is just that Arabs are the vermin in his world while it is the > infidel West that is the plague in the world of Bin Laden and his young > followers. > > Why is extremism particularly a problem for young men, men who would > like to be savior-knights? What is it exactly they are trying to save? > Is it really religion? Is it truly cultural purity? I think Hamlet > offers us a telling way of understanding the paranoia of would-be young > male savior figures. The key moment for this understanding arrives in > the graveyard scene of the play during the speech in which Laertes > mourns the death of his sister Ophelia: it is indeed a cryptic moment. > Consider the name: Laertes. Strange name for a Dane, for a Scandanavian. > In fact, the name is out of Homer; Laertes is the father of Odysseus. > And, amazingly, the graveside speech of Laertes is the transposition of > a vignette from the Hades section of Homer's /Odyssey/. Here are the two > passages: > > /Now pile your dust upon the quick and the dead / > /Till of this flat a mountain you have made/ > /T'o'ertop old Pelion or the skyish head/ > /Of blue Olympus. (Hamlet, V.i.240-3)/ > // > /It was their [the twins Otus and Ephialtes] ambition to > pile Mount Ossa on Olympus, and wooded Pelion on Ossa, to > make a stairway up to heaven. And this they would have > accomplished had they reached their youthful prime. But > Apollo [...] destroyed them both before their beards began > to grow [...] (Homer)/ > > > From this, we can see that the name Ophelia is an anagram of the name > of the twins: O(tus) EPHIAL (tes). That is, the character of Ophelia is > a front, one that conceals the androgyny of boyhood. In psychological > terms, the extremist could therefore be someone who fails to cope with > the transition from boyhood to manhood. Saying such is to broach a > cultural taboo, signified by Shakespeare's cryptic treatment, and as can > be further explained through an anecdote. > > When I was a student at Oxford conducting research into literary > representations of androgyny, I ordered up in the Bodleian library, a > book entitled /L'Androgyne/ (1891) by the French author Joséphin > Péladan. To my surprise, I was told that it was a banned book that I'd > have to read under surveillance conditions. I expected there to be > material of a sexual nature, but there was nothing of the sort. Instead, > the story is about a boy on the brink of puberty who wishes to resist > the natural process of becoming a man. While the story idealizes the > state of sexual indeterminacy, what is striking about it in the light of > the obsessions of Anders Breivik, is that it also promotes a romantic > mythology of the Knights Templar, Péladan being a Catholic Rosicrucian. > It would seem that what these Christian knights represent is a certain > refusal of the transition from boyhood to manhood, that is, of sexual > difference. > > Hamlet is obsessed with the loyalty of women. Psychologically speaking, > the anxiety is over a fickle femininity that deserts men as they become > men. What the veil and the nunnery signify in this context is a desire > for the interiorization of femininity. That is, femininity becomes that > which is not supposed to show itself on the outside to maintain the > desired fantasy of femininity as an inalienable masculine property. This > entails a paranoid formation because the masculine self is then formed > as a fortress to protect and save an encrypted, secret feminine core > that is perceived to be under attack. Under attack from what though? It > would seem to be from the encroachments of adulthood experienced as a > kind of foreign invasion. > > It is possible that for Anders, in psychological terms, Muslims > represent the foreign masculinity---the intrusion of manhood---that > threatens to appropriate his Christianity as the symbolization of his > boyhood androgyny. The choice of young people as targets by Breivik, > while politically motivated, might be understood on another level to > exhibit his resentment at youth as an unfaithful, fleeting condition. > > This cluster of paranoid anxieties can also be seen to inform T.S. > Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. The poem is about a corrupt modernity, fickle > femininity and the desire for the purity of youth maintained. Apart from > the fact that the poem alludes to /Hamlet/, it structures itself on the > myth of savior knights questing for the holy grail. So, it is a case of > this Crusader/ Jihadist thing. > > Extremism is predominantly addressed in ideological terms, rather than > as a cross-cultural form of paranoia around questions of manhood. So we > remain caught in the crossfire of paranoid accusations: 'I am not the > extremist; the foreign man is.' It is worth noting that the attempt to > project extremism onto demonized others is part of the very structure of > extremism. > > What of the figure of Ophelia as an actual woman rather than as the > cryptic allegorical symbol of youthful male androgyny? What does the > self-destruction of Ophelia have to do with all of this? Ophelia, that > O, is treated as nothing in herself in that her femininity is reserved > for the possessions and disposals of others. In a recent theatre > production, /Imagining O/, by Richard Schechner, Shakespeare's Ophelia > is spliced together with Pauline Réage's /Story of O/. What is > illuminating about this theatrical experiment is the way in which it > shows how femininity is culturally validated as a masochistic position. > The ideal woman gives herself up for the requirements of others. And if > she fails to do this, she is resented. > > The video footage of Amy Winehouse's last concert, the one in Serbia, is > heart-breaking. She is clearly in no state to perform, and yet the > audience---with the greed of self-entitlement because they've paid for > her---exert a pressure on her to perform regardless of her very evident > vulnerability. It is almost as if she is their drug, the audience > determined to get their fix no matter what: Amy as O, nothing in > herself. She forces herself up to the mic, and the expression in her > eyes is a haunting one of caged, appropriated femininity in front of a > predatory crowd. > > Anders and Amy may be said to embody the sadism and masochism of our > cultures or, politically, the ever-present potential for fascism. Amy > Winehouse's relationship with Blake Civil Fielder does seem to have been > a sado-masochistic one, involving the desire of two to merge into one. > Indeed, it is a will-to-singularity that is at stake in this for sadism > aims at the appropriation of the other for the self, while masochism > entails the absolute giving of yourself to another. What is really > missing here is human relationality. > > An important difference between Hamlet and outright Jihadist/ Crusader > extremists is that Hamlet's melancholia acts as the brake on the 'filial > duty' assigned to him by the ghost of the father, namely the duty of > taking the lynching obligation of kangaroo court vengeance into his own > hands. It is in this way that Hamlet marks a turning point. But it is a > turning point whose significance we may not have quite had the courage > to embrace. What modernity really requires of us is the ability to give > up on the desire for divinized selfhood. Hamlet is, in this reading, > torn between the regressive desire for the imaginary fortress of > self-sufficient manhood and the everyday world in which humans are not > complete in themselves, but flawed, vulnerable and inter-dependent. > > If monotheism is an error, it could be as a will-to-singularity, a > singularity of being, of otherness interiorized and denied on the > outside. In the utopian moment of Tahrir Square---radical, revolutionary > but not extremist (although extremism is often confusingly dubbed > 'radicalization')--- we saw a different kind of unity: the solidarity of > relational inter-dependencies, collective good will and mutual support. > And, curiously enough, this revealed itself through a youth movement > drawing attention to what youthful spirit really pertains to: collective > fellow feeling. Or, in the words of Egyptian artist Yasser Rostom: 'At > Tahrir I saw the Egyptian people act in a civil way no one could have > imagined, and they came from all levels of society. I want to thank the > youth of Egypt. You brought my soul back.' > > *Caroline Rooney *is an RCUK Global Uncertainties Fellow based at the > University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She can be reached at > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > *From: http://www.counterpunch.org/rooney07292011.html* > ** > ** > > -- > You are subscribed. This footer can help you. > Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to > this message. > You can visit the group WEB SITE at > http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery > options, pages, files and membership. > To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . > You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to > put anything in the message part. 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