Our dear collaborator Karl Kraus has entrusted us with the fruit of his summer labors: two short texts inspired by events whose banality seemed to him to be fraught with meaning. From a Viennese park to a Parisian kosher supermarket, a short sentence is sometimes enough to bear witness to the stupidity of the times, or, on the contrary, to aptly express their grueling nature.
The voice of the intellect speaks quietly
Recently, in the middle of August, while every self-respecting Viennese was on holiday somewhere in the Alps, some smart aleck defaced one of the city’s monuments to Sigmund (Schlomo) Freud with unsightly black writing. It was the one in the Sigmund Freud Park – a simple stele. At the top is marked the Greek “psi” next to an equally Greek “A”, but which the Latin alphabet has integrated – so that before recalling his Greek alphabet, one has the impression of being faced with an incongruous coupling of letters from two ancient languages. Whether or not it was Freud’s intention to produce this slight disturbance, it was by this graphic pairing that he used to abbreviate the word “psychoanalysis”. Below it is the beginning of a sentence by Freud: “The voice of the intellect speaks low”. Then, a black line demarcates the last fifth of the surface, where Freud’s name and dates of birth and death are inscribed.
Our ham has covered the beginning of the phrase “The voice of the intellect speaks quietly” in black, to make this voice of the intellect, which clearly annoys him, disappear. Instead, he painted over “Das Schweigen” – “the silence”. So much so that it now reads “the silence is quiet”. And under Freud’s name, he wrote, in English this time, “pervert”. Barbaric our artist, sure – but polyglot.
What attracts attention in this desecration of a monument in honor of someone who, all his life, never stopped desecrating, is the doubt expressed in the writing. For “Das Schweigen” does not cover the stele evenly. The part that is written in large letters is simply “Das Schwei”, the letters “g” and “e” follow in smaller letters, and the final “n” is not visible at all. Now, any German speaker cannot fail (Freud could have explained why) to automatically complete “Das Schwei“, which is not a German word, with an “n” to make it a German word, which would then be “Das Schwein” – the pig.
Whether this was the author’s intention or not, reading his inscription, one inevitably hesitates: did he mean to write “Das Schwein ist still” or “Das Schweigen ist still”? It’s important to remember that “ist still” does not have the same meaning in both sentences. The first means “The pig is quiet” (finally); the second, as we said, “The silence is quiet”. The incredible genius of the scribbler – a true formation of the unconscious in this case – consisted in producing, through his hesitation in writing, the two meanings: the perverse pig (i.e., the Jew) Freud is finally silent, finally definitively dead, psychoanalysis, that whole horrible business of turning the subject inside out, that whole demand for the courage to confront oneself, not to be content with one’s “identity”, one’s “nature”, one’s “opinions”, that whole Jewish subversion of our most intimate certainties, is no longer part of our society. In any case, this is the wish expressed by the person who defaced the monument. And at the same time, the statement immediately produces the world we’ll be living in as soon as the “pig” shuts up: the beautiful world of tautology, of identity with oneself, of flawless subjectivity, of healthy and moral desire, where intelligence will be reduced to stammering obviousness disguised as haiku like “The silence is quiet”.
One people
Crouched beside my shopping basket – I had hurt my back, so that explains it – I hear a voice coming from above: the lady sitting at the checkout. She speaks loudly enough for me to understand that she’s talking to me. Panicking, I raise my head, look at her and ask, in a slightly hysterical tone, “Excuse me?” Placidly, she informs me that she had said good evening to me. This information apparently doesn’t appease me at all, because I start to explain to her that I’d heard her say “ watch out ‘, and that I’d asked myself – from the depths of a despair that effectively clashed with the calm of that late August Tuesday evening at the Porte de Vincennes Hypercacher (kosher supermarket)- ’ but my God, why ‘watch out’?
Perhaps it was precisely the surrounding calm that had triggered my sigh, as if, even if everything seemed tranquil, there was no reason not to pay attention nonetheless. The lady, in any case, seems to have heard something of the sort, for, in her attempt to reassure me of my misunderstanding, she explains: “It’s fatigue”.
I don’t claim to be the most handsome man in Paris, and in any case I am too old to make any such claims, but I had just returned from a vacation in the South of France, feeling fresh, rested and, above all, tanned. A kind of masculine revolt came over me, so I retorted, to emphasize my good looks, that it was very hot outside. Outside. It was a strange little word, but one that seemed highly important to me, as if I absolutely had to put some distance between her, the cashier, who rightly said she was tired after her long day’s work in a place that wasn’t so well air-conditioned after all, and me, who had spent the whole day quietly reading, enjoying a beautiful, still-empty city over lunch on a terrace, only to decide in the warm evening that the schlepp to the other end of Paris was, all in all, a nice way to finish the day, crowned by the purchase of a stock of excellent herring in oil that you can only find at Hypercacher. She may have been tired, but I was at my best, only a little stunned by the heat of a splendid summer’s day.
However, this was not to take into account the wisdom of the cashier, who repeated to me, without paying any attention to the difference between her and me that I had tried to establish: “It’s fatigue”. I didn’t need to give her a deep look of understanding to let her know that, this time, I’d heard her. She expected nothing of the sort anyway, because she knew she was telling the truth. Whether I conceded it or not. There was no doubt in her mind that I was in fact tired, simply because the people was tired: Tired of the umpteenth synagogue burning, of a war with no end in sight, of hostages not coming back, tired of its own internal strife, of French right-wing Zionists throwing themselves into the arms of the extreme right and calling Zionists who still believe in the nobility of the “Israel” project traitors to the cause; tired of fear, tired of silence; tired of hearing “watch out” when someone wishes you “good evening”.
After a summer when nothing moved, when the dividing lines only deepened, when we saw Jews attacking a military base because the IDF insists on the purity of weapons, and other Jews committing a pogrom in the West Bank, as if it were more important to stoop to the level of the worst European political traditions than to try to negotiate a peace that might save the hostages who still might be saved. A summer that also saw Israeli athletes at the Olympics protected as if each were a miniature American president, French politicians stirring up the hatred that compels such over-protection, and where only the summer languor of the Grande-Motte faithful, accustomed to starting services a little late, saved us from another nameless disaster. Yes, after all that, the people are tired. Is this all that remains of its unity today? Is this sense of tiredness all that remains? After this summer, there’s every reason to believe so. And yet, I came away from this meeting buoyant, because if the cashier only wants to see unity, maybe there’s still hope.
Karl Kraus
