Mark Neocleous: The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism.

Mark Neocleous

The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism

University of Wales Press, 2005, 152 pp.

ISBN 0-708-31904-1 (hbk) 45 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 0-708-31903-3 (pbk) 18 [pounds sterling]

Mark Neocleous is one of the most interesting and original thinkers around, and I took this slim (and, unfortunately, rather expensive) book to review because of his transgressive track record, and because of my current interest in Hitler's charismatic career. In addition, a book with such an apposite photomontage by John Heartfield (whom I visited in the sixties) on the cover is not an easy one for me to pass up. Hitler is depicted by Heartfield in August 1933, posturing in front of a mirror and asking, 'Little Mirror, Little Mirror on the Wall, who is the strongest in the whole country?' In the mirror, the hand of a skeleton grips the reflection's throat. However, none of this made The Monstrous and the Dead simple to review. Neocleous's book is 'an attempt to generate new thoughts, ideas and perceptions about the monstrous and the dead, and about political thinking in general. This book has been written as a means of opening up, as well as contributing to, a debate about our relation to the monstrous and the dead' (p. 8). The argument is that the way in which political philosophies conjure up, think about and deal with the dead, the monstrous and the undead will throw fresh light on those philosophies. One of the 'undead' that Neocleous constantly attacks is 'mainstream cultural studies'; and one of the delights of this book is a long note (pp. 129-30) in which Neocleous, clearly on the side of the living, reports on an obviously heated and barbed conference debate with those from mainstream cultural studies about the relationship of tropes and metaphors to reality. This is not just a speculative work of cultural criticism, but is also intended as a properly (not a falsely) subversive political text: this book is also about winning the battle with fascism and capitalism.

Burke is taken in this regard as the key conservative thinker; Marx is supplemented with Walter Benjamin; and it is Hitler who is at the centre of the chapter on fascism. Part of the author's reason for selecting Burke and Marx (and Benjamin) is their quality as writers of richly allusive prose--a quality which, nobody will be surprised to learn, Hitler does not share. Neocleous hazards that 'if ... literary style has any connection with political presuppositions, then the choice of metaphor might be important' (p. 10). Much of this meditative, swirling discussion is fascinating, erudite and creative. For Burke, what is monstrous is the vulgar, inchoate, threatening and disrespectful mob that heralds the emergence of the organised proletariat. Neocleous notes that Burke's work influenced the rise of the gothic as a genre of fiction, central to which was the undead and monstrous figure of the vampire: 'The general point is that, just as the natural order is supposedly threatened by the various monsters it sometimes spawns, so the socio-political order appears to be threatened by the various monsters it spawns ... His [Burke's] monster is thus called upon to legitimize an intuitive vision of life in which "natural" order appears to be threatened by "artificial" monstrosities' (p. 21). Neocleous's descent into the darkest dreams of one of the greatest conservatives concludes brilliantly: 'we might say that the proletariat is an entity which cannot be killed because the bourgeois order requires it to be living, but which as a mob cannot be assimilated into the current stable order--it is essentially disorderly. And as a monster it also cannot be assimilated into the glorious and "safe" past. Why? Because as well as being an emblem of categorical anxiety, border concern and dis-ease, monsters are essentially undead' (p. 34). Marx (who has, in the main, been well served by his translators--except, perhaps, when they will translate 'Mensch' as 'man') is a brilliant, wonderfully imaginative writer in command of a cornucopia harvested from Western culture; but one contemporary image he uses is that of the vampire, which Neocleous describes as being 'at the heart of his work ... in his critique of political economy' (p. 37). This, then, is not simply a metaphor: 'For Marx is not just suggesting that capital and the vampire are alike in constantly sucking the life out of their victims, but is actually making suggestive comments about the connection between capital and death, and the extent to which this connection is embodied in the ongoing commodification of contemporary society' (p. 48). To perceive this metaphor as merely metaphor is to shrink Marx to a cultural critic, albeit a great one like Weber, perhaps. Marx is more than this: in his vision, 'communism would consist of liberation of living labour (that is, sensuous human beings) from the rule of dead labour (that is, capital)' (p. 55). Marx was fond of instructing fellow revolutionaries by paraphrasing Jesus Christ's words: 'and let the dead bury their dead' (Matthew 8: 22). But, according to Neocleous, it is Benjamin who develops Marxism's political understanding of the significance of the dead. Benjamin argues that, in Neocleous's words, 'A combination of a secret agreement between generations and the image of enslaved ancestors on the one hand, and a sustained class hatred on the other ... is the basis of redemption, in which liberation is completed in the name of oppressed ancestors' (p. 65). It is the section on fascism that causes unease. Although Hitler still looms over us all, this does not make him a great thinker. And although there are fascinating discussions here on the internal cultural relations between anti-semitism and the vampiric, the argument has a much more contingent quality as Neocleous casts about to make his case that 'the fear of a monstrous and vampiric force threatening national stability and racial purity ... became the organizing principle of fascism' (p. 88). This case is built even though there is 'no evidence that Hitler was familiar with Dracula' (p. 85), and 'We do not know if Hitler saw Nosferatu' (p. 87). Much more solid is the argument and the evidence that 'Death, like war, is for fascism the basis of renewal or rebirth: death is the crucial step on the road to resurrection, a form of resurrection of the mass, a means of achieving and exercising one's immortality' (p. 112). Neocleous argues that the preponderant mood of Hitler's Mein Kampf is that of fear; but Carl Schmitt, who made a positive case for fascism, only gets two passing mentions. The Nazis might not have been in love with death per se, as Neocleous avers; but they were in love with and in awe of violence, and used it to consummate effect in order to achieve power and subvert the quasi-liberal-democratic German state in the direction pointed to by Schmitt's 'decisionism'. Mark Neocleous also returns twice to a phrase that he attributes to Adorno. The sentiments are admirable, but sadly the expression is demeaning. He quotes Adorno as follows: 'One of the basic human rights possessed by those who pick up the tab for the progress of civilization is the right to be remembered' (Adorno, 1984b: 72; Neocleous: 3, 62). But Neocleous is singularly ill-served (as is Adorno) by Lenhardt's much-criticised translation. The phrase that affronts me, and which I could not envisage Adorno writing, is, in the original, 'welche die Zeche der Kultur bezahlen' (Adorno, 1984a: 78), which is somewhat archaic and could be translated rather straightforwardly as 'who pay the reckoning for culture', or even 'who suffer the consequences of culture'. Hullot-Kentnor translates the relevant sentence as follows: 'Among the human rights of those who foot the bill for culture is one that is polemically directed against the affirmative, ideological totality: That the stigmas of degradation be dedicated to Mnemosyne [the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses] in the form of an image' (Adorno, 1997: 48). This is much more accurate, both in its sense and in conveying Adorno's convoluted, highly allusive and abstruse prose. But this is a substantial problem with this kind of analysis: metaphors are one of the hardest things to translate. It is true that 'Zechegenossen" can mean 'drinking partner'; but did Adorno really mean to imply that 'footing the bill for culture' was a trivial matter between friends? And, once I had noticed this use of the verb 'to pick', I kept coming across versions of the word, such as 'pick up' and 'unpick' (see pp. 3, 9 [three times], 18, 30, 55, 56, 62, 85, 88, 89, 110), and wondered what this particular use of language, even if it was not a metaphor, signified.

Despite, it seems to me, conceding a little too much to 'mainstream cultural theory', Neocleous invites us, at the beginning of the book, to ask of it not so much, 'Is it true?' but 'Does it work?' (p. 8). The answer has to be that it does, but only in part.

However, some books are machines for thinking with, and this is one of those. I found myself, as I read it, stimulated into scribbling notes of thoughts about other things that I was writing.

This book, then, is a brilliant but uncompleted project that is far from dead. There is much more to do. Why, for instance, does the Right try to filch some of our dead, but we never want theirs? And I would very much like to see the kind of analysis developed in this book extended to feminism.

References

Adorno, T.W. (1984a) Aesthetische Theorie (Suhrkamp Verlag).

--(1984b) Aesthetic Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Adorno, T. W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory (Athlone Press).