New books about violence – Weekend
[ad_1]
Wolfgang Müller-Funk “Cruelty”
Publishing house AST; Ice
Translation David Damte
Published in German in 2022, the book by cultural scientist Wolfgang Müller-Funk is a kind of dotted history of cruelty and violence in European culture. The narrative here is not chronological, but rather Müller-Funk examines circles of cruelty similar to the circles of hell: from teenage bullying to mass genocide. Its main material, however, is not so much the social and political practice itself as the texts—the efforts of Western intellectuals to understand and tame cruelty. Among the heroes are harsh critics of violence, its apologists, and detached observers. Scope: from the historical stories of Herodotus and the moral philosophy of Seneca through Shakespeare, Montaigne, Stendhal, de Sade, of course – Nietzsche and Freud, to René Girard, Jean Amery, Hannah Arendt, Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers who conceptualized violence in the light of the catastrophes of the twentieth century . It is worth saying that Müller-Funk himself has an extremely clear position; he says a firm “no” to both the romanticization of cruelty and its naturalization – recognition as an objective constant of human existence. Violence as we know it, according to Müller-Funk, is the effect of human culture, of history, in which something has gone wrong. The task of humanity is to eradicate it, to recover.
Oleg Ivik “Blood and Symbols”
Publishing house Alpina non-fiction
Oleg Ivik is the pseudonym of archaeologists and writers Olga Kolobova and Valery Ivanov, who have been co-authoring popular science books and fantasy novels for many years. The theme of “Blood and Symbols” is the history of human sacrifice from the Stone Age (there are theories that our distant relatives the Neanderthals were already engaged in cannibal orgies with a ritual element) to the Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Aztecs, Scythians and other cultures that left behind their atrocities plenty of traces. Ritual violence is the subject of a huge body of anthropological literature, but Kolobova and Ivanov prefer not to delve particularly into the theoretical jungle. Their Blood and Symbols is a worthy survey of popular science, drawing on classical sources as well as archaeological evidence. For them, the logical (albeit not chronological) end of the history of human sacrifice becomes a key episode in the development of monotheism – the failed murder of Isaac by Abraham, the invention of a ritual replacement for human sacrifice, which opened up the possibility of a new organization of society and a new form of communication with the divine.
Alexander Brener “Philip Gaston, resurrected among the blind people”
Publishing house Jaromir Hladik press
A poet and artist, one of the leaders of Moscow actionism of the 1990s, Alexander Brener has been writing in recent years something like his own version of art history – an anarchic narrative about renegade artists, rebels, beautiful monsters challenging the artistic establishment, and at the same time the whole world. The book about Philip Guston is part of this large project (although the word “project” in Brener’s system is colored with the most negative connotations). The Canadian Jew Phillip Goldstein, who moved to the States and took a French pseudonym, initially joined the abstract expressionists, but broke with them, seeing in Pollock and company hidden opportunists, and began to develop his own style – something like grotesque metaphysical comics, reminiscent of a fusion of Robert Crumb and Giorgio de Chirico. Although he himself lived a relatively quiet life, Gaston’s canvases are filled with images of violence: dumps of bodies and things, severed limbs, Ku Klux Klansmen, frightening golems. According to Brener, his fleshy, bleeding painting is one of the most radical ways to convey the catastrophe of modern humanity. “Resurrected among the Blind Man’s Bluff” is, of course, not an art criticism essay. Rather, it is a poetic panegyric and, like many of Brener’s texts, something like a self-portrait in the image of a favorite artist.
“How violence occurs and what it can lead to. Heinrich Böll and the RAF”
Publishing house Common place
Translation Irina Ivakina, Evgenia Katseva
This small book includes three texts by Heinrich Böll: the 1972 article “Ulrike wants mercy or personal integrity?”, the 1974 story “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” and a postscript to it written 10 years later. All of them were a response to the cause of the Red Army Faction. Despite his leftist views, Böll in no way sympathized with the RAF, condemned terror, but he was even more disgusted by the reaction of the public and the press to the trial of Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and their comrades. The main target of his article is the Bild newspaper, the most influential newspaper in Germany, which during the RAF trial worked in the worst traditions of the yellow press, fanning mass paranoia and hatred of real and alleged communists. After the publication of the article, Böll himself became the target of harassment. Following this, he wrote “Katharina Blum” – a story about a modest girl accused of aiding a terrorist, destroyed by the all-powerful “NEWSPAPER” and truly turned into a murderer. Böll himself called this story a “pamphlet” – a political statement, straightforward and unequivocal. The idea here is actually simple: violence that is carried out with words, if not more terrible, is often more disgusting than that which is carried out with weapons, and besides, one easily gives rise to the other.
Lutz Bassman “Black Village. Tale”
Publishing house of Ivan Limbach
Translation Victor Lapitsky
Lutz Bassmann is the pseudonym of the French writer Antoine Volodin. Initially, Bassman was a character in Volodin’s novels, a terrorist writer traveling through prisons and camps, and writing stories for consolation. Then Volodin began publishing books, signing his own characters. All of them are part of a large project called “post-exoticism” – a literary movement and at the same time a fantastic universe that Volodin has been collecting for the fourth decade. In total, there are almost fifty books in the post-exotic corpus, ten have been translated into Russian, but you can read them separately and in any order, just imagine the general contours of the myth. Its action takes place in a conditional future, after upheavals of various kinds have befallen the Earth – bloody world revolutions and counter-revolutions, nuclear wars, environmental disasters that led to various mutations, monstrous genocides, mass terror. In general, this is a world of permanent catastrophe. Buddhism plays a paradoxically important role in it: Volodin’s revolutionaries are often shamans at the same time, and their activities take place not only in this world, but also in the kingdom of the dead. “Black Village” is precisely the story of three former party members traveling in the darkness beyond death and, in order not to lose the remnants of consciousness, telling each other “tales.” Their heroes are revolutionaries, gangsters, killers, lone avengers, fighting monks, as well as mutant spiders, Neanderthals, aliens and talking birds. All these are stories of violence, injustice and retribution. They all break off, without really having either an end or a beginning, but together they form an eerie and captivating phantasmagoric mosaic.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
