Full download Uncertain times不确定的时代 1st edition jacques ranciere pdf docx
Uncertain Times■■■■■■ 1st Edition
Jacques Ranciere
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/uncertain-times%e4%b8%8d%e7%a1%ae%e5%ae% 9a%e7%9a%84%e6%97%b6%e4%bb%a3-1st-edition-jacques-ranciere/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Regulating New Technologies in Uncertain Times Leonie Reins https://textbookfull.com/product/regulating-new-technologies-inuncertain-times-leonie-reins/
Unexplained: Real-Life Supernatural Stories for Uncertain Times Richard Maclean Smith
Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5867-4 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5868-1 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939813
Typeset in 11 on 13pt Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
This book brings together papers which were either published or delivered at conferences between 2010 and 2021. But the collection makes sense in a broader overview of the transformations that have affected our world since the end of the 1980s, with the break represented by the collapse of the Soviet system. Everyone can remember the speculations to which the end of the Cold War gave rise at the time. In 1991, Francis Fukuyama’s best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man announced the coming of a world standardized and pacified by the joint reign of liberal economics and political democracy.1 These predictions reflected the more widespread feeling that the era of ideologies and the deadly conflicts they engendered had passed: we had entered an age of realism when the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. This is what was called, in France, the ‘consensus’.
We must now take stock of these promises and delve deeper into the nature and effects of the consensus. It is not only new ethnic wars and reawakened religious fanaticisms that have thwarted the peace which this
Preface
consensus promised. It is the consensus itself that has turned into its opposite, or rather revealed its truth, in the incredible scenario of the last American election when the president of the ‘greatest democracy in the world’ declared that the results of the elections were not what they were, and launched hordes of fanatics to storm the Capitol. At the same time, old Europe saw far-right parties take centre stage almost everywhere; their ideas spread very widely through the spheres of government, the media and the intellectual class.
The texts brought together in the first part of this book mark out the several stages of this reversal – which was also a consummation – of consensual realism. By following this line of argument, I have had to distance myself from what is currently a favourite way of marking out the present time: one that regularly sees exceptional events as opening up radically new eras. This was already the case with the collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, interpreted at the time as a symbolic break that pushed us into a new era. More recently, the coronavirus pandemic has been analysed as the moment when the very balance between human beings and nature was disrupted, entailing a radical change in the civilizational paradigm. In both cases, however, we have seen how closely the ‘world after’ resembled the world before. The violence of Islamist terrorism and the violence of the virus were managed as external aggressions to which the governments of the communities affected reacted by using the means of protection already implemented in the ordinary state of consensus – that is, by reinforcing the feeling of identity, state security and the absolute authority of the experts. The handling of the exception was in accordance with the rule. This does not mean that we live in a ‘state of exception’ but, on the contrary, that the regular functioning of the dominant
Preface
machine has contrived to treat all disturbances, large or small, in the same way – a terrorist attack is treated like a fall in the stock market index, a pandemic like a street demonstration.
It is this ‘regular’ functioning of the consensual machine that the papers collected here analyse, marking out its manifestations and effects. In them, I show that the consensus is by no means the peace that it promised. Rather, it is the map of the territory on which new forms of warfare are being waged. Even before the publication of the book in which Francis Fukuyama hailed the global triumph of liberalism, the firestorm unleashed by the American armies in Iraq had shown what this triumph consisted of: the absolute equation of might and right, of the limitless expansion of power with a justice that George W. Bush, at the time of the second invasion of Iraq, would call infinite. Those who remember how this justice was demonstrated with lies borrowed from the propagandist arsenal of the so-called totalitarian powers (the corpses of infants snatched from the hospital and abandoned on the frozen ground, weapons of mass destruction targeting Western capitals…) will better understand how this sequence of a ‘liberalism’ out to conquer the world came to a climax with the deluge of lies in the name of which Donald Trump launched his militant troops against the headquarters of American representative power. Such is the logic of consensus. It proclaims its own version of peace, which has at its heart the equation between the power of wealth and the absolutism of right. It declares that the old divisions of political conflict and class struggle are obsolete. At the same time, it acknowledges only one form of alterity: the alterity of the outsider, the absolutely other – an empire of evil against which all violence is legitimate, or an absolute victim whose rights are appropriated without restraint.
Preface
It was in a slower, more sophisticated way that consensus developed its effects in old Europe. Not as the affirmation of a global civilizing mission but as the simple adherence to the necessary course of things. For that is what ‘consensus’ means: not the agreement that it is better to discuss things than to wage war, but the recognition that there is nothing to discuss because objective reality authorizes only one choice. The objective reality that imposed itself at the end of the 1990s was the reality of an absolutized and globalized capitalism to which each country had to submit. This ‘no alternative’ had initially been the winning formula of the counter-revolution led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But almost everywhere in Europe, we saw formerly socialist parties endorsing it and recognizing it as the ineluctable order of things to which everyone had to adapt. And to this end it was necessary to liquidate any vestiges of the past which posed obstacles to it: workers’ rights, labour laws, welfare systems, public services shielded from competition, etc. This attack on the achievements of decades of social struggle conveniently robbed the obsolescent Marxist tradition of its hard core: the faith in historical necessity. This had once meant that the very development of capitalism led to its self-destruction and to the advent of socialism. That is why Marxist thinkers stigmatized backward artisans attached to forms of the past which held back the forward movement of capitalism and the working class. Now it was the workers of this same working class struggling for the maintenance of their rights who were stigmatized as backward, defending archaic privileges to the detriment of future generations. On this basis, part of the left-wing intelligentsia came to support the efforts of right-wing governments and identified this ‘archaism’ with another ‘backwardness’, that of the nostalgia of a far right that was racist and
x
Preface
obsessed with questions of identity. These trends now merged into the same negative figure, ‘populism’, the supposed mode of expression of a lower class overtaken by modernity. That is how the alliance between the representatives of financial power and the representatives of science and enlightened opinion was sealed.
But the struggle of the new enlightenment against ‘populist’ backwardness needed to follow some rather tortuous paths. The parties of the reasonable consensus present themselves as a bulwark against the resurgence of the identity-based and racist far right. But this so-called opposition is actually complicity. Our consensual governments are removing all barriers to the free flow of capital. But when it comes to its reverse side, the other circulation of populations wishing to enjoy some share in the wealth accumulated in privileged countries, they establish an economic division of tasks: on the one hand, they take the administrative and policing measures necessary for containing the influx of undesirable populations (the Dublin Regulation, border police, the tightening of conditions for naturalization, etc.); on the other hand, they leave the imaginary management of this undesirability to the far right, whose natural specialty it is. But, at the same time, they claim to have stripped the far right of its weapons by showing that they themselves are better at fighting the enemy that nourishes the passions of the far right, namely immigration – a generic term subsuming all the problems posed by the populations from the former colonies and by new migrants driven out of their countries by poverty or violence. Thus a number of measures were taken which, on the pretext of depriving the far right of its hobbyhorse, continuously reinforced the figure of the unassimilable Other that the same far right brandished as a threat. Thus was constituted, in the guise of the struggle against dirty racism, the
Preface
‘clean’ figure of what I have proposed we call ‘racism from above’: a double-trigger racism where the open contempt of well-born people for the backward plebs is coupled with a fascination, at first discreet but nowadays exhibited in broad daylight, for the unapologetic racism attributed to those same plebs. The supposedly neutral figure of the security state, protecting the population against ever-present threats – an economic crisis, a recession, an epidemic, illegal immigration, Islamist terrorism – has never ceased, by its very operation, to reinforce this naked hatred of the Other that the state had claimed to disarm. The ‘reasonable’ consensus about adhering to the mere necessity of things has reached its consummation as a passionate economy of fear, exclusion and hatred.
But this consummation itself could be achieved only because it was endorsed by the very people who claimed to denounce the consensual order. One of the most striking aspects of the last decades, indeed, is the decisive contribution to right-wing powers and far-right ideologies made by large sectors of a left intelligentsia which has transformed its disappointed hopes into a formidable resentment against everything that had once fed those hopes. I have already mentioned how the Marxist faith in historical necessity and the denunciation of classes that clung to a bygone past were transformed into intellectual weapons against the workers engaged in a struggle for the defence of social gains. Subsequently, the providential notion of ‘neoliberalism’ made it possible to attribute the responsibility for the absolutization of capitalist power to the ‘unfettered’ freedom demanded by the featherbrained young rebels of May 1968, and more generally to the democratic aspirations to freedom and equality that were seen as expressing the mere desire to consume ever more commodities. In France, we saw many cases of
xii
Preface
disappointed revolutionary ardour being converted into a ‘republican’ militancy of civic education against the fateful excesses of democratic individualism. But these excesses of democratic individualism would quickly take on an unexpected appearance: that of the young Muslim high school girl wearing a headscarf. Against this was brandished a master signifier of the French republic, namely secularism. This had long signified the neutrality of state schools in matters of religion. It was now given a new meaning: that of a virtue that individuals were obliged to manifest in their clothing so as not to risk designating themselves as outsiders to the republican community. Thus the distinguished racism of those in power and the vulgar racism of the far-right contrived to unite in the same exaltation of the republican ideal. The hatred of equality that dwelled in the former and the naked hatred of the Other that stirred up the latter were fused: in this way, the anticapitalist or anti-racist militant and the fundamentalist killer ultimately became one and the same figure – the Islamo-leftist, a new spectre haunting the nights of the French political class.
The past thirty years have seen the fulfilment of the intellectual counter-revolution which either rejected all traditional progressive values or turned them into their opposite. The consensus, however, has failed to accomplish what was its very principle: to impose itself as the only reality, to be the sole way of defining the time and space of common life. The ‘infinite justice’ of the American armies and the hateful expansion of the consensual order have triggered a counter-response –movements such as democratic uprisings that started from peripheral places where the authority of dictatorial powers seemed unshakable (Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Mubarak’s Egypt) and whose dynamic flowed back into Western capitals with the
xiii
Preface
occupations in Puerta del Sol in Madrid and Zuccotti Park in New York before spreading to Greece and France, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago and many other places. Each time, the occupation of a space created a specific time, interrupting the reproduction of the time of domination. We know the fate of these movements: some were directly repressed by state violence, others were slowly diverted to serve other forces, and yet others were simply unable to survive in the long term. Some critics have taken this as an argument for reviving the old refrains condemning an ‘infantile revolt’ (as opposed to the adult order of reasonable politics) or a spontaneity without a program (as opposed to the long-term calculations of revolutionary strategy). These were two convenient ways of settling the question of political temporality. And the hackneyed contrast drawn between spontaneity and strategy conceals what the movements for the occupation of various city squares brought to light: political conflict is not only an opposition between forces endowed with divergent wills; it is an opposition between worlds – a world of equality and a world of inequality – involving different ways of constructing a common time and space. The movements to occupy city squares2 lasted for only a few weeks or a few months. But they reminded us that the time of ‘adult politics’ – that of the representative order – is merely the reproduction of a system of domination closed in on itself. And it is also in this closed time, the time of the enemy, that so-called long-term strategies can find a place. These strategies, it is true, have long been based on a strong belief: the belief that the time of the dominators was itself included in a more fundamental time, namely the time of a historical evolution that would destroy the very dominations it had aroused, the time of a development of the productive forces that would end up burying the bourgeois class which had
xiv
Preface
unleashed them. However, if any powerful meaning emerged from the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the destruction of the industrial metropolises of the West, it was the bankruptcy of this belief. Time no longer endeavours – and, to tell the truth, has never endeavoured – to transform inequality into equality. Inequality and equality are two worlds locked in confrontation, at every present moment: the former is always already in place, with its well-oiled mechanisms, while the latter needs perpetually to be reconstructed. It is this naked conflict between worlds that reasonable or vindictive adults have sought to forget in two ways: some by transforming the revolutionary necessity into the mere necessity of the existing order, others by exercising their resentment against all the values which historical faith had supported.
The ephemeral movements of the occupied city squares were substantial enough in themselves to show that history worked neither for nor against anyone, and to strive to build, without history’s help, a space and a time of equals. This involved a risk – the risk of having to confront in practical terms the contradictions that others repressed in a wide-eyed consent to the ‘no alternative’ or in the bitterness of infinite resentment. The protesters thus experienced the contradiction of a practice of struggle – namely occupation – borrowed from the time of the factory and from the arsenal of workers’ struggles, but now orphaned of all that had given it strength: the power of the workers’ collective brought together by the very system of domination, the power of this collective over the tools of this domination, and the anticipation of a new world of emancipated labour. They had to transfer this effective anticipation of a world of equality into the space of the street and into the fragile form of fraternal assembly, at the risk of reducing egalitarian struggle to the simple
Preface
desire for an equal community, expressed by the word ‘consensus’ that the militants of the occupied squares had rather oddly taken from the lexicon of the enemy so as to make it their own watchword. The second part of this book attempts to analyse the internal contradictions of these movements which, despite their limits, alone were able to open breaches in the consensual order.
A few last words on the composition of this volume. To reflect on the processes that have constructed our divided present, I have seen fit to mix two kinds of interventions: short texts that seek to mark out the singularity of an event, and longer texts that try to capture its sequence and even more to reflect on the very way in which we name and interpret such events. At this point I can do no better than recall what I said twelve years ago when presenting my interventions from previous years:
There is no clear divide between theory and its practical application, any more than between transforming the world and interpreting it. … Texts, practices, interpretations, and bodies of knowledge intertwine and together define the polemical field within which the political constructs its possible worlds.3
PART ONE THE VIOLENCE OF CONSENSUS
1
The New Racism: A Passion from Above
In the summer of 2010, following the death of a young Roma man killed by a policeman and reprisals carried out by his community, the French authorities proceeded to large-scale expulsions from Roma camps. This was the context in which a study day was organized on 11 September 2010 at La Parole errante, on the initiative of Cécile Canut. She edited the proceedings, published in the review Lignes, no. 34 (February 2011).
I would like to put forward a few reflections on the notion of ‘state racism’ that our meeting has put on the agenda. These reflections run counter to one widespread interpretation of the measures recently taken by our government, from the law on the Islamic veil to the expulsions of Roma. This interpretation sees in these measures an opportunistic attitude aimed at exploiting racist and xenophobic themes for electoral purposes. This apparent critique again draws on the presupposition that racism is a working-class passion, the frightened and irrational reaction of backward layers of the population who are unable to adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world. The state is accused
of being complacent towards these populations and therefore failing to live up to its principles. But this merely bolsters the state in its position as the representative of rationality in the face of working-class irrationality.
However, this layout of the game, adopted by ‘leftwing’ criticism, is exactly the same layout that has authorized the right to implement, for twenty years, a certain number of racist laws. All these measures were taken in the name of the same argument: there are problems of delinquency and various disorders caused by immigrants both legal and illegal who may well provoke racism if order is not imposed. It is therefore necessary to submit these delinquencies and disorders to the universality of the law so that they will not create racist unrest.
It is a game that has been played, on the left and on the right, since the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws of 1993.1 It consists in setting working-class passions against the universalist logic of the rational state – in other words, in giving racist state policies a patent of antiracism. It is time to turn the argument upside down and to mark the solidarity between the state ‘rationality’ which dictates these measures and the convenient ‘other’ – that complicit adversary – which it gives itself as a foil, namely working-class passion. In fact, it is not the government which is acting under the pressure of working-class racism and in reaction to the so-called populist passions of the far right. It is reason of state which maintains this ‘other’ to whom it entrusts the imaginary management of its real legislation. Fifteen years ago I proposed the term ‘cold racism’ to designate this process. The racism we are dealing with today is cold racism, an intellectual construction. It is first and foremost a state creation. At this meeting, we have discussed the relationship between the rule of law and
the police state. But it is the very nature of the state to be a police state, an institution that fixes and controls identities, places and movements, an institution engaged in a permanent struggle against anything surplus to the tally of identities that it carries out, and thus also against anything in excess of the logics of identity that arise from the action of political subjects. This process is made more insistent by the global economic order. Our states are less and less able to thwart the destructive effect of the free movement of capital on the communities for which they are responsible. They are all the less capable of thwarting this effect because they have no desire to do so. So they fall back on what lies in their power, the movement of people. They focus specifically on the control of this other circulation, and their aim is the security of the nationals threatened by these migrants – more precisely, the production and management of the sense of insecurity. It is this process that is increasingly becoming their raison d’être and the means of their legitimization.
Hence a use of the law which fulfils two essential functions: an ideological function which involves constantly giving a concrete figure to the subject who threatens security; and a practical function which involves continually redeveloping the border between inside and outside, constantly creating floating identities, capable of bringing down those who were inside. Legislating on immigration initially meant creating a category of sub-French people, demoting to the floating category of immigrants people who were born on French soil to French-born parents. Legislating on illegal immigration meant placing legal ‘immigrants’ in the category of illegal immigrants. It is the same logic that has governed the recent use of the notion of ‘French of foreign origin’. And it is this same logic that is targeting the Roma today by creating, against the very principle of free movement
in European territory, a category of Europeans who are not really Europeans, just as there are French people who are not really French. To create these suspended identities, the state is indifferent to contradictions, as we have seen in its measures concerning ‘immigrants’. On the one hand, it creates discriminatory laws and forms of stigmatization based on the idea of a universality of citizenship and equality before the law. Those whose practices are opposed to the equality and universality of citizenship are then penalized and/or stigmatized. But on the other hand, it creates within this citizenship – meant to be the same for all – discriminations such as that which distinguishes the French ‘of foreign origin’ from the rest. So on the one hand all French people are the same (and woe betide those who are not), and on the other hand they are not all the same (and woe betide those who forget it).
Racism today, then, is first and foremost a state logic and not a working-class passion. And this state logic is supported primarily not by goodness knows which backward social groups but by a large part of the intellectual elite. The latest racist campaigns are not at all the work of the so-called ‘populist’ far right. They have been led by an intelligentsia that claims to be a left-wing, republican and secular intelligentsia. Discrimination is no longer based on arguments about superior and inferior races. It justifies itself in the name of the fight against ‘communitarianism’, in the name of the universality of the law and the equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law and gender equality. Here again contradictions are largely a matter of indifference; these arguments are put forward by people who otherwise pay little heed to equality and feminism. In fact, the main effect of their argument is to create the amalgam required to identify undesirables: for example, the amalgam that blends migrant, immigrant, backward, Islamist, macho and
terrorist. The recourse to universality in fact operates to the benefit of its opposite: the establishment of a discretionary state power able to decide who belongs or does not belong to the class of those who have the right to be here – the power, in short, to confer and remove identities. This power has its correlate: the power to compel individuals to be identifiable at all times, to stand in a space of full visibility in the eyes of the state. From this point of view, it is worth returning to the solution found by the government to the legal problem posed by the ban on the burqa. It was, as we have seen, difficult to enact a law specifically targeting a few hundred people of one given religion. The government found the solution: a law that as a general principle forbade people to cover their faces in public space – a law that simultaneously targeted the woman wearing a full veil and the demonstrator wearing a mask or a headscarf. The headscarf thus became the common emblem both of the backward Muslim and the terrorist agitator. This solution, adopted, like a lot of measures on immigration, with the benevolent abstention of the ‘left’, was formulated by ‘republican’ thinking. Remember the furious diatribes of November 2005 against these masked and hooded young people going around by night. Remember, too, the starting point of the affair involving Robert Redeker, the philosophy professor threatened by an Islamic ‘fatwa’. The starting point of Robert Redeker’s furious anti-Muslim diatribe was … the banning of thongs on Paris-Plage. In this ban issued by the Paris city council, Redeker detected a measure of pandering to Islamism, to a religion whose potential for hatred and violence was already manifest in the ban on being naked in public. The fine words on secularism and republican universality ultimately come down to the principle that it is necessary to be fully visible in the public space, whether it is on the street or the beach.
Let me conclude by saying that a great deal of energy has been spent criticizing a certain figure of racism (the kind embodied by the National Front) and a certain idea of this racism as an expression of the ‘white trash’ representing the backward strata of society. Much of this energy has been harnessed to bolster the legitimacy of a new form of racism: state racism and ‘left’ intellectual racism. It might be time to redirect our thoughts and our struggles against a theory and a practice of stigmatization, vulnerability and exclusion which today constitute racism from above: a state logic and a passion of the intelligentsia.
2 A Modest Proposal to Help the Victims
This text was written at the time of the discussions which led eventually to the law on the veil, finally passed on 11 October 2010 by the French parliament. It stipulates: ‘No one may, in public places, wear clothing intended to conceal his or her face.’ During these discussions, a deputy had proposed a fine of 1,500 euros for women wearing the veil. This text appeared in Libération on 11 January 2010.
One of the outstanding films of 2009 was Vincere, in which director Marco Bellochio focuses on the tragic fate of Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s lover who was rejected by him and locked up in an asylum on his orders. There is some reason to be surprised by the compassion aroused for a woman whose crime was not to have denounced fascism but to have claimed the glory of being the dictator’s true wife and the mother of his son. No doubt its scope stems simply from the classic Marie-Antoinette effect: quite apart from any political judgement, a fallen woman of high rank will always attract more compassion than one who has always lived in wretched circumstances. Tragedy, said Aristotle long ago, is the
story of famous people who, through some stroke of misfortune, fall from happiness to misery.
The fact remains that the spectators of plays by Aeschylus or Sophocles were free to sympathize with the misfortunes of Agamemnon or Oedipus. Between these legendary princes and the citizens of democratic Athens, there were no scores to settle. The same is not true for Marie-Antoinette. We know that for thirty years a fierce ideological campaign has endeavoured to see the French Revolution as the origin of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (and thus of Mussolini’s fascism) and to criminalize, in its wake, all the movements of emancipation and all the social struggles of the past. The first to be blamed were malevolent theories and would-be dictators who had exploited the struggle of the oppressed for their own benefit. But soon, it was the oppressed themselves who were directly attacked. They, it was discovered, were the real oppressors. The time came when any workers’ strike was likened to the taking of hostages aimed at defending the advantages of privileged categories of people. At the same time, many ideologues denounced the ‘tyranny’ of victims, a tyranny exercised by peoples deprived of their land or their rights. Remember the threefold argument put forward in response to the image of a dead Palestinian child in his father’s arms: first, he was unworthy of appealing to compassion in such complex issues; second, the child was safe and sound; third, he had been killed by bullets from his own side.
Since the once oppressed had become the privileged and the tyrants, it was logical that the powerful should assume the role of the victims. This confiscation was permitted by the attacks of 11 September 2001. The famous statement ‘We are all Americans’ made by the editor of a French newspaper could be seen as expressing compassion for those who had died in a role reversal
A
that the so-called cretin George Bush knew perfectly well how to exploit: the American superpower now became the victim par excellence, exercising its global policing as a universal defence of victims. And all the rich countries joined in this enterprise. Ever since, the powerful of this world have never stopped playing the role of the tortured victims. Every politician whose mediocre trafficking is revealed complains bitterly that he’s being subjected to a media lynching; and, if he has any reputation, an artist accused of raping a minor is deemed to be the victim of a judicial lynching. Recently a German philosopher called on the rich to revolt against the fiscal ‘kleptocracy’ organized by the state to serve the vile resentment of the poor. He called on the same rich, in the name of a culture of nobility, to make voluntary donations. This second part of the program is likely to arouse less enthusiasm than the first. It is true, however, that our leaders still sometimes show some old-fashioned concern for victims, as evidenced by the recent bill on the wearing of the burqa. This is a humiliation imposed on women; it is unacceptable in our republic and must be penalized – so said our president. As a result of which, those who suffer this humiliation will pay a fine for which one elected official suggested the figure of 1,500 euros. It’s surprising that he did not push this innovative principle further. Rape is also a humiliation, and there are many more women raped in France than women wearing the burqa. So it would be logical to impose a heavy fine on all rape victims. We could also extend the principle, by imposing a fine on any victim of violence or injustice. At 1,500 euros per injustice, such a measure would have the additional advantage of relieving the deficit in the public budget without harming the competitiveness of any company. It goes without saying that the victims of media or judicial ‘lynchings’ and similar tyrannies would be exempt.
3 An Elusive Populism
This text, discussing a notion that has become a current obsession, was published in Libération on 3 January 2011. It was included in the collective volume Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? (What is a people?).1
Not a day goes by that we don’t hear the dangers of populism being denounced. However, it is not easy to grasp what the word refers to. What is a populist? Through all the word’s shifting meanings, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it by three essential traits: a style of interlocution that addresses the people directly, independently of their representatives and notables; the affirmation that governments and ruling elites care about their own interests more than public affairs; and an identity-based rhetoric that expresses a fear and rejection of foreigners. It is clear, however, that no necessity links these three traits. That there is an entity called the people, which is the source of power and the main interlocutor of political discourse, was the conviction that inspired the republican and socialist orators of yesteryear. There is no form of racist or xenophobic sentiment attached to
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
H
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Goden- en Heldensagen
Author: Ernst Hoffmann
Translator: J. S. Theissen
Release date: March 30, 2024 [eBook #73289]
Language: Dutch
Original publication: Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1917
Credits: Jeroen Hellingman, Branko Collin and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg
[Inhoud]
[Inhoud]
GODEN- EN HELDENSAGEN
NAAR HET DUITSCH
VAN
ERNST HOFFMANN
Omgewerkt door Dr. J. S. THEISSEN
Leeraar aan het Sted. Gymnasium te
Groningen
[V]
[Inhoud]
7e DRUK.
Met 25 illustraties buiten den tekst
P. NOORDHOFF—1917—GRONINGEN.
V 6 .
Bij dezen nieuwen druk zijn enkele verhalen geheel opnieuw bewerkt, andere herzien. Er is niet gestreefd naar meerdere volledigheid; eerder is het aantal namen nog iets beperkt. Een werkje als dit behoeft m.i. geen opheldering te geven van iederen naam uit mythologie of sagen, dien men kan tegenkomen; daartoe kan een woordenboek van eigennamen geraadpleegd worden. Bij te veel namen kan bovendien de eisch van werkelijk kennen van den inhoud niet gesteld worden; bij beperking daarentegen is dat wel mogelijk.
Getracht is, vooral met het oog op Gymnasiasten, naar nauwere aansluiting aan de lezing van het verhaal, die tot grondslag voor de bewerking diende. Waar één bepaalde overlevering van nabij werd gevolgd, is de bron nu opgegeven. Ook zijn de boeken van Ilias, Odyssee en Aeneïs in margine aangegeven; dat kan de keuze voor eigen lectuur vergemakkelijken.
Ook H.B. Scholieren en leerlingen aan andere inrichtingen van onderwijs, waar literatuurstudie op het programma staat, zullen tot goed begrip van heel wat lectuur eenige vertrouwdheid moeten bezitten met de bekendste goden- en heldensagen, met den inhoud van de groote epische producten van Oudheid en Middeleeuwen en van de meest gelezen treurspelen der Grieksche tragici. De hoop, dat het boekje ook buiten het gymnasium lezers en gebruikers zal blijven vinden, heeft het ook nu weer onmogelijk gemaakt consequentie in de spelling der eigennamen te betrachten. Waar een Grieksche lezing aan [VIII]het verhaal ten grondslag ligt, is in het algemeen aan de Grieksche schrijfwijze de voorkeur gegeven; waar een Latijnsche schrijver is gevolgd, is de Latijnsche spelling geprefereerd. Dreigde echter zoo een veel voorkomende naam minder goed herkenbaar te worden, dan is, om duidelijkheidsredenen, van dezen regel
afgeweken. Verder is de klemtoon nu in den tekst door accenten aangewezen. De namen zijn, als vroeger, waar ze voor de eerste maal voorkomen, gecursiveerd.
Eindelijk is het werkje van illustratie’s voorzien, waarnaar in den tekst hier en daar is verwezen. Daarbij is niet gezocht naar het minder bekende; ik meen, dat allereerst de meest voorkomende navolgingen van producten van klassieke beeldhouwkunst gekend moeten worden.
Een alphabetisch register van eigennamen, met verwijzing naar de bladzijden, is aan het boekje toegevoegd, en zal, naar ik hoop, de bruikbaarheid verhoogen.
Groningen, Mei 1914. J. S. THEISSEN.
[Inhoud]
Voorwoord voor den 7en druk.
Na de algeheele omwerking van den vorigen druk, scheen het mij niet noodig nu reeds weer wijzigingen van beteekenis aan te brengen, te minder, omdat geen opmerkingen werden gemaakt, die mij daartoe aanleiding zouden kunnen geven. Enkele storende drukfouten zijn verbeterd, een paar illustratie’s verplaatst, zóó, dat ze beter bij den tekst aansluiten; overigens bleef het werkje gelijk.
Groningen, December 1916. [1]
[Inhoud]
[Inhoud]
ONTSTAAN DER WERELD EN DER GODEN.
DE REGEERING VAN OERANOS (URANUS)
(HESÌODUS: THEOGONIE).
Allereerst is, naar de voorstelling van de Grieken, de Chaos ontstaan, de wijdgapende oneindigheid, de raadselachtige oorsprong van heel de bezielde en onbezielde wereld. Daaruit ontstonden Gaia (Gaea), de aarde, en de Tàrtaros, de afgrond diep onder de aarde; ook Eros, de liefde, de macht die alles verbindt. Uit den Chaos kwamen eveneens voort de Duisternis en de Nacht; zij werden op hun beurt de oorsprong van het Licht en van den Dag. Verder werden uit Gaia nog geboren Oèranos, de hemel, de gebergten der aarde en Pontos, de zee.
Aarde en hemel huwden elkaar en kregen achttien kinderen. Daarvan waren er drie met honderd armen en vijftig koppen; boven de hoogste bergen staken zij uit, en zij waren afgrijselijk om te zien. Drie andere hadden ieder maar één oog, rond van vorm en midden in het voorhoofd geplant. De honderdarmigen heetten
Hekatoncheiren, de éénoogigen: Cyclopen. De twaalf vroeger geborenen, zes jongens en zes meisjes, waren goed gevormd; zij heetten Titanen
Oèranos echter koesterde maar weinig vaderlijke gevoelens ten opzichte van zijn kinderen; zoo gauw er een geboren was, stopte hij het weg in diepe duisternis in het binnenste der aarde. Toen verzon Gaia een list om zich van de geweldenarijen van haar man te bevrijden; [2]zij maakte een groote sikkel en sprak tot haar kinderen: „Als ge nu wilt, zullen wij ons gemakkelijk op Uw vader kunnen wreken.” Allen zwegen, vol ontzetting; alleen Kronos, de jongste der Titanen, bood zich aan om de vreeselijke daad te volbrengen. Gaia verborg hem nu in een hinderlaag, gaf hem de scherpgetande sikkel in handen en toen in donkeren nacht de hemel zich uitbreidde over de aarde, greep Kronos hem aan, verminkte hem op afschuwelijke wijze en verdreef hem uit zijn heerschappij. Uit het bloed, dat neerdruppelde, kwamen de Erìnyen (Furiën) voort, de godinnen van de wraak, de geweldige Giganten en de melische nymphen; „melia” is de esch, uit welks hout de bloedige lans werd gemaakt. En terzelfder tijd baarde ook de nacht allerlei vreeselijke wezens: het noodlot, den dood, den slaap en zijn benauwende droomen, den haat en de tweedracht, die de moeder werd van laster, van strijd en van moord.
[Inhoud]
DE REGEERING VAN KRONOS (SATURNUS)
(HESÌODUS: THEOGONIE).
Kronos regeerde nu; zijn zuster Rhea nam hij zich tot vrouw. Toen hij echter van Gaia vernam, dat ook hij door zijn eigen zoon verdreven zou worden, verslond hij zijn kinderen, zoodra zij hem geboren werden. Een vijftal ondergingen dit vreeselijk lot: Hera, Demèter en Hestia, Hades en Poseidon. Maar toen het zesde kind geboren zou worden, wendde zich Rhea om raad tot haar ouders. Op hun aanwijzing ging zij naar Creta; daar werd Zeus geboren en in een grot neergelegd, waar de geit Amalthèa hem voedde met haar melk, terwijl gewapende mannen met de lansen sloegen op hun schilden, opdat Kronos het schreien van het kind niet zou vernemen. Aan den vader werd een steen gereikt, [3]zorgvuldig, als een zuigeling, in doeken gewonden; hij slokte hem op, in de meening dat hij zijn pasgeboren zoon verslond. Deze, intusschen, groeide voorspoedig op en werd de mooiste en de sterkste van alle goden. Toen hij volwassen was, dwong hij, geholpen door de listen van Gaia, Kronos zijn opgeslokte kinderen weer te voorschijn te brengen; eerst kwam de steen eruit; toen volgden goden en godinnen, in de volgorde, waarin hij ze verslonden had. Een hevige strijd ontspon zich nu tusschen de oude en de jonge goden; de eersten verschansten zich op den berg Othrys, de laatsten op den Olympus. Tien jaar reeds was er gevochten, toen Zeus, op raad van Gaia, de Hekatoncheiren uit hun donker verblijf aan het licht bracht; vroeger al had hij de Cyclopen bevrijd, die, bedreven in alle smidswerk, uit dankbaarheid bliksem en donder voor hem smeedden. En ook op de honderdarmigen werd nu niet te vergeefs een beroep gedaan. Geweldig was de botsing van de vijandelijke scharen; de zee bruischte hoog op, de aarde dreunde, de wijde hemel raakte geheel in beroering en de machtige Olympus sidderde tot op zijn grondvesten; tot in de diepte van den Tàrtaros toe waren de zware voetstappen van de aanstormende goden, was de doffe slag van de neerkomende rotsblokken, waarmee de honderdarmigen den vijand bestookten, duidelijk verneembaar. En onophoudelijk slingerde Zeus zijn bliksems, knetterend kraakten de donderslagen, bosschen raakten in brand, rivieren begonnen te koken, in een dichten damp werden de Titanen gehuld.
Eindelijk behaalden de jonge goden de overwinning; de oude werden in den Tàrtaros geworpen, zóóver onder de aarde, als de hemel er boven is, opgesloten binnen een metalen omheining, omgeven door driedubbelen nacht, streng bewaakt door de honderdarmigen en de éénoogigen. [4]
[Inhoud]
ZEUS EN DE GIGANTEN.
Toen Zeus nu de regeering in handen had gekregen, koos hij zich zijn zuster Hera tot vrouw. Aan ieder van zijn broeders gaf hij een deel der heerschappij; Poseidon werd de beheerscher van de zee, Hades de vorst van de onderwereld. Ook de geit Amalthèa werd niet vergeten; Zeus maakte een van haar horens tot een wonderhoren: wie deze bezat, kon wenschen, wat hij goed vond en zeker zijn van de vervulling; sedert spreekt men van den „Hoorn van overvloed.”
Maar Gaia, ontstemd over de opsluiting der Titanen, zette nu de Giganten op tot strijd tegen de goden. Met forsche kracht wierpen zij groote rotsblokken tegen den hemel: de goden echter spotten met hun geweld, de steenen rolden, zonder uitwerking, terug, en geen berg was hoog genoeg om van daar uit een bestorming te kunnen ondernemen. Toen scheurden de reuzen den Pelion uit den grond en wentelden dien boven op den Ossa. Te vergeefs echter; Zeus slingerde een geduchten bliksem tegen den berg, zoodat hij kantelde en naar beneden rolde. Daarop stormden de goden, onder een vervaarlijk krijgsgeschreeuw, van den Olympus af en begonnen een gevecht. De Giganten waren zeer sterk en de slag duurde een geheelen dag; eindelijk werden zij overwonnen en gevangen genomen.
Om ze nu goed in bedwang te houden, werd op iederen Gigant een zwaar rotsblok gewenteld, zóó, dat ze niet meer aan opstaan konden denken. Een der reuzen trachtte over de Middellandsche Zee te ontvluchten. Maar de dochter van Zeus, de krijgshaftige Athene, die ook een groot aandeel aan den strijd had genomen, bemerkte die poging, scheurde een ontzaglijk, driehoekig stuk land los en wierp dat den vluchteling achterna. De worp was raak, en de Gigant werd midden in zee onder de aarde bedolven. De aarde zelve bleef daar liggen, [5]droeg langzamerhand bosschen en steden, en heet tegenwoordig Sicilië. Soms roeren de Giganten zich nog onder hun last en trachten dien van zich af te schudden; dan wordt door de menschen een aardbeving gevoeld. En als zij in hun ongeduld erg driftig worden, blaast hun vurige adem door de rotsblokken heen en werpen zij gesmolten erts en steenen uit.
Een voorstelling van de gigantomachie kwam voor op het altaar van Pergamum en op een deel der metopen van het Pàrthenon.
Brunn, Denkmäler griech und röm Skulptur F. Bruckmann, München. P. Noordhoff, Groningen.
[Inhoud]
TYPHOEUS
(HESÌODUS: THEOGONIE).
Na de overwinning op de Giganten gaf Gaia het nog niet op, maar schiep een ontzettend monster, den Typhon. Krachtig waren zijn armen; zijn voeten onvermoeibaar en uit zijn schouders staken honderd vuurspuwende drakenkoppen op. Ieder van die koppen had zijn eigen geluid; nu eens klonk het als de taal der goden, dan weer als het loeien van een stier of het brullen van een leeuw, soms ook als het geblaf van honden of het gesis van een slang. Haastig greep Zeus zijn bliksemschichten en ging het ondier te lijf; van de zware donderslagen dreunden de aarde, de hemel en de zee, ja zelfs de donkere diepten van den Tàrtaros. Hoog bruiste het water op en weer sidderde de Olympus; van een lichtenden vuurgloed werd alles vervuld; Hades huiverde in zijn duister rijk en de Titanen werden bevreesd door het ontzaglijk tumult van dien woedenden strijd. Eindelijk gelukte het
1. Athene-groep van het groote fries van het altaar van Pergamum.
Uit:
Zeus het monster neer te slaan; zijn koppen zengde hij hem af met bliksem op bliksem, en toen hij ten slotte, verlamd, op den bodem lag uitgestrekt, stegen rossige vlammen op uit het doorboorde lichaam. De aarde dampte over een groote uitgestrektheid en begon [6]te smelten als tin in den smeltkroes; toen greep Zeus hem beet en slingerde hem toornig in de diepte van den Tàrtaros.
[Inhoud]
DE GODENWERELD.
De heerschappij der jongere goden was nu voor goed gevestigd.
Zeus (Jùpiter) was de oppergod, de god van den hemel, de verzamelaar der wolken, die de bliksemschichten slingerde en donderslagen deed rollen. Hij was bekleed met het opperste gezag; aan hem ontleenden de vorsten hun macht; door hem werden beschermd, wie bijzondere bescherming noodig hadden. In zijn prachtig paleis op den Olympus zat hij voor bij de vergaderingen der goden en bevestigde het genomen besluit door zijn stevigen hoofdknik. Feestmalen werden hier gehouden; dan bediende Hebe en soms ook Hephaistos; nectar en ambrozijn werden gebruikt en een groote vroolijkheid uitte zich vaak in een gullen lach.
Ook op den berg Ida, in de nabijheid van Troje, mocht Zeus graag vertoeven.
In het bijzonder werd Zeus geëerd op Creta, waar hij immers opgevoed zou zijn. Een oud heiligdom van Zeus bevond zich in Dodòna; daar gaf hij orakels; uit het ruischen der bladeren van een aan hem gewijden eik wist men zijn wil af te leiden. Maar vooral Olympia was aan Zeus gewijd. Hier stond binnen de altis, het heilige terrein, de groote Zeustempel met het kolossale Zeusbeeld in goud en ivoor, door Phidias vervaardigd. Hier werden ter eere van Zeus om de vier jaar de beroemde Olympische spelen gegeven. Hier eindelijk, evenals in Dodòna, konden orakels worden verkregen.
Elische munten hebben de voorstelling bewaard van het groote Zeusbeeld te Olympia. Het bekendste beeld is nu de Zeus van Otricoli. [7]
Onder de dieren was de adelaar aan Zeus gewijd.
Boven Zeus nog stond de macht van het noodlot, de Moira, het Fatum, waarvan Zeus de voltrekker was.
Hera (Juno) was de vrouw van Zeus, de koningin van den hemel, de beschermgodin van het huwelijk. Vooral in Argos werd zij geëerd, waar in een aan haar gewijden tempel een groot beeld van Polykleitos voorkwam. Ook in Olympia was het Heraion een bekende tempel. De meest verspreide voorstelling in beeld is de Hera Ludovisi.
Pallas Athene (Minerva), een dochter van Zeus, uit zijn hoofd geboren, was oorspronkelijk ook een hemelgodin. Later was zij de godin van den tactischen krijg, gewapend met helm en schild en speer: zóó stond zij op het plateau van de Acròpolis te Athene. Zij was verder de godin van de wijsheid en de beschermster van alle kunstvaardigheid, vooral van de vrouwelijke handwerken. Om de vereering van de stad Athene had zij met Poseidon moeten kampen; wie het nuttigste geschenk zou geven zou de gevierde zijn. Toen deed Poseidon een bron ontstaan; Pallas Athene schonk den olijfboom en kreeg den prijs. Op de Acròpolis stond het Pàrthenon, een groote tempel, aan haar gewijd; op de gevelvelden waren haar geboorte en haar wedstrijd met Poseidon afgebeeld. In het Erechtheion werd een oud, houten beeld van Athene bewaard, dat uit den hemel heette gevallen te zijn; ieder jaar, bij gelegenheid van het feest der Panathenaeën, werd in plechtigen optocht aan dit beeld een nieuw kleed gebracht. Een voorstelling van dien optocht was afgebeeld op het fries van het Pàrthenon en bevindt zich nu in het Britsch Museum te Londen.
Een kleine copie van de Athene Parthenos bevindt zich in Athene; ook andere verre copieën van Phidias’ werk zijn bewaard; zoo b.v. de Athene Farnese te Napels.
