Anarchy--In a Manner of Speaking by Graeber David;Belhaj Kacem Mehdi;Turquier-Zauberman Assia;

Author:Graeber, David;Belhaj Kacem, Mehdi;Turquier-Zauberman, Assia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: diaphanes
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Play fascism

MBK: Reality begins in fascism, to put it very violently. In the psychological sense of the term it’s very difficult for me to accept that, but philosophically I force myself to accept it so as to be less scandalized and act more.

DG: I’m not quite sure which “reality” We’re referring to here, but I think I can add something. This is why I suggested that you look at the book on kings. The evidence seems to be that it’s perhaps the case that the origin of order is in fascism, but what might be called play fascism! So we do get to the idea of play here. There are things that look like royal burials that go back thirty thousand years, with enormous amounts of goods that other people weren’t buried with: scepters, beautiful garments of various kinds … and these were mammoth hunters. But almost every single one of them were physically deformed in some way, so either they were dwarfs or giants or hunchbacks.

There is a kin of giddy theatricality here. Almost as if power begins as burlesque, as a parody of a real power that has hitherto only been imagined.

MBK: Yeah but it’s like in reality—superheroes or blockbusters with big robots. When Hollywood produces such films it’s a metaphor of power. I learned this reading your work. When Hollywood represents monsters as coming from the outside, it’s a self-portrait. They are the monstrous robots, the gigantic machines, etc. I read it as deformity in the anthropological closure. The dimension of anthropology in my work is very anti-Nietzschean; it’s what he calls the degenerated, the losers, the weak, etc. They are the ones I do philosophy for. With diaphanes we want to do a review on madness, asking real mad people the question of social inadequacy and of the political content of their incurable madness.

DG: Perhaps power begins with a celebration of madness. Certainly there’s an ongoing link between prophets, freakishness, sovereignty, and madness which never goes away. If you look at it anthropologically, it makes sense that the very first political figures are also strangely deformed. There is apparently no part of the world (Persia, China, Peru …) where royal courts didn’t host dwarfs. “The state” begins as a kin of the circus, and always to some degree remains so.

One of the articles that I thought was most revealing about this was an article about Nuer prophets by Tom Beidelman. The Nuer are a famously egalitarian people with a segmentary lineage structure whereby everyone is descended from a single ancestor and knows exactly how they are related to everyone else. Different clans and lineages are constantly feuding with one another, but it’s always mediated by this very complex kinship system and legal system, even though there are no political authorities at all. They have these madmen that are normally kind of like the village idiot, but when there’s a crisis, or things that require large organization, they find one of them to become a charismatic leader.

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