http://artsfuse.org/36188/short-fuse-book-review-violence-reduced-to-freudian-or-biblical-scripture/
4/28/11
Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to
the Present by Russell Jacoby. Free Press, 256 pages, $24.
The subtitle of Russell Jacoby's new book — "On the
Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present" — announces an
ambition at once vast and oddly
delimited. Did human violence begin when Cain slew Abel, as per a Hebrew text
composed no more than three thousand years ago? Does this imply that there was
no violence among our kind in the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the
redaction of tales that come down to us in Biblical scripture? Or does Jacoby
mean to say that pre-Biblical violence is beyond the scope of his book because
its root system somehow differs from that which underlies the violence he will examine?
Quibbling over a subtitle is a less than ideal way to begin
a book review, subtitles being devised as much by editors as by authors, but
this slim volume — "an essay, not a tome" as per Jacoby — arouses so
many doubts, questions, protestations and refusals along its way — a tome's
worth — that one may as well start at the titular beginning. Still, the problem
with the book goes beyond the reservations aroused en route to the conclusion:
the problem is the conclusion.
Jacoby has earned his place in American letters as an author
of jargon-free, iconoclastic works, including "Social Amnesia: A Critique
of Contemporary Psychology" (1975), and "The Last Intellectuals:
American Culture in the Age of` Academe" (1987). But there's nothing
iconoclastic about "Bloodlust". In the same spare prose for which he
has been praised, Jacoby commits himself, this time, not to paring away but to
resuscitating dogma — that of Freudian orthodoxy.
Jacoby delves into the Freudian corpus, as into Genesis,
does some exegesis — bits of rewiring here and there — and sets a rejiggered
Freud back into place as nothing less than the Master Narrator he has, for most
of us, long since ceased to be, and can never be again. Nor does Jacoby bother
with an apology for or defense of Freud. This lends something of a time warp
quality to "Bloodlust". For Jacoby it seems that Freud has never been
unseated or even seriously challenged, not seriously enough for Jacoby to deal
with the tomes of objections — the death by a thousand critical cuts — Freudianism
has endured. Freud just rules, presides again, as back in the day.
In his preface, Jacoby deploys his well-honed polemical skills
less to promoting what he takes to be the Freudian solution to the problem of
violence than to mocking at and dismissing alternate views of the subject. We
learn right off that "Bloodlust" will shun the "sociobiological
approach" and make no use of anything "Darwin or DNA" might add to the discussion. Jacoby allows that
there have, in fact, been "advances in genetics and evolutionary
biology". (The term Jacoby really wants here is "evolutionary
psychology" which pertains not to frogs, bugs or bacteria— but specifically
to human minds. However he disdains "the biological" too thoroughly to trouble with nomenclature.)
In any case,
Jacoby is "wed" not to "biology and chemistry" but
"to history" — history, if it's history at all, of a certain sort.
It's definitely not the sort of history that invokes a "scenario of
clashing civilizations"
as proposed by the likes of Samuel Huntington — that being precisely the school
of thought to which "Bloodlust" means to deliver a knockout blow. For
Jacoby, the driving force of violence is not others contesting with others over
ideas, religions, territories, culture, status and wealth — but brothers
contending with brothers, neighbors with neighbors, like with like.
(Cain and Abel serve naturally as his paradigmatic fable,
followed by Esau contending with Jacob. But aside from Cain killing Abel,
strife among brothers in the Hebrew Bible, a default condition to be sure, ends
mostly in reconciliation, however strenuously attained. And other literary
traditions highlight intense fraternal affection, as in Gilgamesh’s love for
Enkidu — not his brother but as good as — in the "Epic of Gilgamesh".
As noted, quibbles with "Bloodlust" multiply.)
To maintain, as Jacoby does, that likeness is overall more
lethal than perceived difference calls for a prodigious amount of explaining
away and flattening out of experience. Jacoby goes at the task with true Freudian
vigor. His account of the murderous persecution in 16th century France of
Huguenots by Catholics ignores the religious differences that were obviously
operative between them. Catholics and Huguenots were French, after all, and
French speaking. That they spoke different religious tongues is irrelevant, for
Jacoby. The Catholic persecution
of Huguenots was fratricide.
But religious differences, then as now, tend to involve more
than disputes about doctrine. They extend as much to tradition, family ties,
who one loves and who one fears — matters of blood, core aspects of identity. None
of this registers on Jacoby. Given that "Bloodlust" is an essay, not
a tome, the book devotes undue attention to details of the atrocities visited
on the Huguenots, as if the minutia of gore, not hard to come by in the course
of history, were an argument that might somehow strengthen Jacoby's case. It
doesn't. It's inordinate and sows doubt.
Jacoby's urge to flatten out difference reaches absurd
lengths when he writes that World War II, "presents a paradigmatic case of
fratricide: the extermination of the Jews. . . . German Jews were extraordinary
assimilated and successful. . .German anti-Semitism targeted neighbors not
strangers." But even a casual glance at German history shows that the
assimilation of Jews, a la Weimar (and much of the rest of Europe), was recent,
its status contested and insecure. All it took, in brief, was a German defeat
in the First World War, a ruinous Depression, the charismatic psychotic called Hitler
— throw in a bit Wagner and anti-Bolshevism as necessary — and German Jews were
assimilated no more, marked, marked down, as alien and ancestral malefactors.
In any case, the assimilation of German Jews was always incomplete.
Profound cultural and intellectual differences apply that Jacoby, as is his
wont, disallows. The novelist E. L. Doctorow gets at these (in an interview
with Richard Trenner), when he says:
The Jews [the Nazis] went after — the Jews who most enraged
them — were the assimilated Jews. . . Einstein, for instance, infuriated the
Nazis. Einstein was coming up with a universe in which nothing stayed the same
very long. . . They saw all this relativism as a great threat to their psychic
security and a typically Jewish maneuver to undercut and destroy the Aryan
race. It was not the pious, practicing Jews who kept to themselves who so much
enraged the Nazis at the beginning. It was the Jewish professors and composers
(like Mahler) and scientists. . . The number of poets, novelists, critics,
painters, and musicians whom they destroyed. Migod [how many they murdered.]
To this list Doctorow might have added Freud himself, whose
lifework, no less than Einstein's, infuriated Nazis. But for Jacoby what
matters is that these and other German Jews spoke German, and not, perhaps,
Yiddish. Quite a few were successful, prominent. How then were they not German,
and their extermination not a case of fratricide?
Jacoby's approach to this material shows him, finally, to be
wed not really to history at all but to mythology — the mythos of Freudianism.
Jacoby falls back repeatedly on Freud's notion of the narcissism of minor
differences — "hostility
engendered by small disparities." It's an interesting notion, but
stretched past its breaking point when used as a rubric for violence "from
Cain and Abel to the Present." Nor did the "small disparities" Jacoby alludes to seem quite that small to
those who lived them. When Franz Kafka learned that Walter Rathenau —
for a brief time Weimer's Jewish Foreign Minister — was assassinated in 1922,
his much quoted response was: "It was incomprehensible that they should
have let him live as long as that". The "they" to whom Kafka
refers were not brothers. They may have been neighbors. Kafka, though he
composed literature in their language, senses that culturally they belonged to something
like a different civilization housed just next door.
One of the texts Jacoby draws on for his theorizing is
Freud's splendid essay, "The Uncanny." What's admirable about that
work is that it can be read as if Freud is not going about his usual business
of buttressing, extending or defending the edifice of psychoanalysis. It's Freud, for a change, simply being astute,
almost unFreudian, and enormously suggestive. (Here's a counterfactual: if
Freud did not dedicate himself to the master narrative of psychoanalysis in an age defined,
intellectually, by master narrators we now think of as theoretical dinosaurs —
Marxism, anyone? — perhaps we would have had a more fertile and endlessly fruitful
Freud.)
In his essay, Freud concerns himself with how the sense of
the uncanny is aroused in several ways. One way is when what we presume to be
alive turns out to be inanimate, or, on the other hand, what we presume to be
inanimate (mechanical, robotic) turns out to be alive — in short, when
what we relate to as safe and familiar turns out to be strange and alien. These
kinds of questions have enlivened film and literature for decades. Consider
"Bladerunner", for starters. Consider, even, that subject so
thoroughly derided by Jacoby — sociobiology.
In his writings about ants, E. O. Wilson notes that their
colonies are susceptible to invasion by outsized beetles disguised in ant
colony smell —olfaction being the ants' primary sense — and, as counterfeit,
monster ants, rampage as they please. Ants have tiny brains, limited senses —
humans big brains, a multitude of senses. Yet ants and humans are both social
species, and in both, the question of self and other is fraught — not reducible
to either Biblical or Freudian scripture a la Jacoby.
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