The use of the word alienation has a conventional sense that precedes Marx: Aleination as the alienation from the world produces by language. This is the heritage of Schelling in the larger milleu of German romantic thought. This shifts and becomes far more complex in Marxist Philosophy. What I have been describing in this blog however, and this is my central argument, goes beyond the commodification of social relations, and the fetishistic animation of commodities. While on thhe one hand the commodification of social relations through meta-corporations that colonize certain parts of the social fabric is very concerning, its after effect, a solitary individual simply determined by his exposure to violence of capital, is truly chilling.
It is precisely this interplay of factors that makes Lous-Ferdinand Celine's historico-surrealist novel 'Journey to the end of the night' invaluable to understand political formations and possiblities under circumstances of 'exposure' and as I described in my last post of weakened ephemeral social ties.
Celine himself is a problematic figure, and I dont read him as a purveyor of truth but rather as a kind of archive for the thinking of a particular time and as reflecting possiblities in politics outside of the confines of the novel. My fascination with celine is merely how easily he produces an account of utter alienation in response to the structuring of the world into different economic and political totalitarian formations.
A reading of extimate sociality as a condition of intensifying isolation, where social proximity produces estrangement rather than connection in the novel. The novel depicts a world of dense social life—war, colonialism, factories, cities—yet one structured by radical loneliness. What appears as social relations repeatedly hardens into alienation, and fleeting encounters crystallise into enduring political realities. Through its movement across sites of modern life, the text reveals how ephemeral social relations become concrete institutional forms, how momentary interactions escalate into structured domination, and how intimacy produces estrangement. This dynamic provides a literary framework for thinking about extimate sociality as a condition in which increasing population, density, and connectivity generate not solidarity but intensified isolation.
However what remains despite this exposure in the novel are a kind of comedic and surreal encounters that the isolated individual passes through. Jounrey is a story of the total exposure of subject that resembles a malicious version of Chaplin's tramp.
The narrative of Journey to the End of the Night follows Ferdinand Bardamu, a deeply disillusioned protagonist who moves through multiple social worlds—war, colonial Africa, industrial capitalism, and urban poverty—while encountering violence, exploitation, and emotional emptiness. The novel begins with Bardamu’s impulsive enlistment in the First World War, an event that immediately introduces the central theme of collective enthusiasm collapsing into terror.
-x-
The structure of Celine's novel is given to an analysis of extimate sociality. Baramdu's life story, his 'journey' in this sense, or in more technical terms or 'life path' is made through sudden detours or existential crises, or in a more technical sense 'mobility paths'.
The first of these occurs on the first few pages of the novel. Bardamu is talking to a conservative friend arthur about poliics at the precipice of the first world war. Bardamu's friend starts with a quite eloquent rant on the lives of the Parisian Bourgeosie:
"The people in Paris always look busy, when all they actually do is roam around from morning to night; it's obvious, because when the weather isn't right for walking around, when it's too cold or too hot, you don't see them anymore; they're all indoors, drinking their cafés crèmes or their beers. And that's the truth. The century of speed! they call it. Where? Great changes! they say. For instance? Nothing has changed. They go on admiring themselves, that's all. And that's not new either. Words. Even the words haven't changed much. Two or three little ones, here and there…"
The entire opening section is an argument between these two friends both of whom are sickened by the conspicuous consumption of the parisian elite but are on either side of the political spectrum. However the irony is as they progress they make many of the same arguments though Bardamu himself is opposed to nationalistic fervour.
Bardamu produces a long tirade again on Parisian life after Arthur declares that he is all for shedding blood for the country:
All in all, you're right. But the fact is we're all sitting in a big galley, pulling at the oars with all our might. You can't tell me different! . . . Sitting on nails and pulling like mad. And what do we get for it? Nothing! Thrashings and misery, hard words and hard knocks. We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's go! And if there's anybody that doesn't want to be killed on the sea, he can go and get killed on land, it's even quicker!”
Just as they are debating this point, a small military squadron passes by led by a colonel. Partly led by the desire to show his friend that he is just as brave and partly drawn by the mgnificence of the parade Bardamu decides to enlist to the army.
-x-
While Celine's novel still retains a sense of shock about the interruption produced by World War II the modern world has normalized the state of emergency, that is it has normalized totalitarian governments that work by producing financial and political crises and violence. The next scene finds us bang in the middle of the war, Bardamu is led by the same colonel who is searching for his horse which one of his adjutants has run off with to escape German bullets. The colonel who's courage Bardamu describes as 'monstrous' is such that he walks bang in the centre of the road without being hit by fire from two German soldiers a distance away who were bad shots. Bardamu within a few pages is convinced he wants to leave the war effort when confronted by the fact that such psychotic courage is a pre-requisite not just for the war but for modern life itself:
'Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! . . . All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles, bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling, digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, root-toot-tooting, shut up on earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it, Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshiping their madness (which dogs don't), a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and a lot more vicious! A pretty mess we were in! No doubt about it, this crusade I'd let myself in for was the apocalypse!'
While the colonel is pacing on the road reading dispatches from his seniors he is told that a Sargeant has been blown to smoke by a shell. The Colonel is unfazed. Bardamu is shocked but then thinkgs:
I thought of Sergeant Barousse, who had just gone up in smoke like the man told us. That was good news. Great, I thought to myself. That makes one less stinker in the regiment! He wanted to have me court-martialed for a can of meat. "It's an ill wind," I said to myself. In that respect, you can't deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then! I knew of three or four more in the regiment, real scum, that I'd have gladly helped to make the acquaintance of a shell, like Barousse.
Finally the colonel himself is killed by a shell and Bardamu immediately decides to leave the war effort.
I'd had enough, I was glad to have such a good pretext for making myself scarce. I even hummed a tune, and reeled like when you've been rowing a long way and your legs are wobbly. "Just one shell!" I said to myself. "Amazing how quick just one shell can clean things up. Could you believe it?" I kept saying to myself. "Could you believe it!”
Eventually Bardamu meets a reservist who is trying to get captured by the Germans and joins him to do so but is unsuccesful. He finally is injured in war and awarded a medal. What is striking right through the novel is the lack of clear friend enemy distinction in all social and institutional formations.
While the structure fn politics in society seems deeply dependant on being able to coherently adjudge and distinguish friends from enemies although with some apparent ambiguity, the world defining tenor and the globalized chaos of WWI produces weakened social networks, where hierarchies are too tangible to allow for simple friend enemy distinction. Celine's novel describes political formation that is always somewhere between the segmentary and the nakedly hierarhical.
-x-
Right through the novel, the dissocation from coherent and egalitarian social networks, the lack of time spent with familiar connections, the opening out of sociality to ephemeral social connections, made on the whim without a great investment of time dominate, creating a series of cascading and absurd scenarios. What goes strong in the narratorial voice is a cynicism that sheilds the protagonist from the total absurd violence of these scenrios he faces.
However I feel although the situations that Bardamu finds himself in are like a novel political praxis at a time of increasing globalization and alienation they are insufficient. Celine explicitly states his philosophy of 'journey' in a note at the beginning of the novel preceding the preface:
Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is dis appointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littré* says so, and he’s never wrong. And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes. It’s on the other side of life.
The novel on the other side of life, is a paradigm popular in anthropology particularly described in the notion of witnessing. Bardamu is a person beyond his own personhood, his experiences exceed anything that tribal formations of humanity determined as a form of intergrated personality. His on personality crumbles through existential crises throughout the novel. As a figure of the personal crises Bardamu is a witness to the deepest form of the alienation of his time. The quote above also recalls Benjamin's discourse on the dimuition of the position of the storyteller in the wake of a war that exceeds the human capacity to tell stories. Celine's novel is like a retroactive answer to this: in the absence of being able to tell a story one describes a non-story, a set of broken experiential encounters.
This mode of witnessing is one political paradigm when dealing with the numbness amniguous and globalized social and political formations impose on us. HOwever through my most recent work I have been intersted in the subject not as an intergration, but as a process of variance, or splitting, not in the Freudian sense of a personality separated from itself by an immeasurable gap, but as an endless process of splitting. This is precisely what the novel demonstrates. Right through Bardamu is drawn even through his numbness to make impulsive decisions, that push him past the 'self' he had accumulated in one milleu. However it is clear in Celine's writing that Bardamu reaches some sort of coherence as a subject only at the moment of this split, or detour, and the rest of the time is just a literary monlogue addressed to no one but as unseeing , before which these symbols without meaning shall remain unknowing, and
thus unheard, but read. In the abyss of the absolute loss of the other, in our
persistent attempts to fully fuse, to unify, to gain the other forever, to
outlast the limits bodily enchainment, we look to go beyond life itself. Claims have been made to this beyond, from the very beginning of
composed written thought, and then later and on and on.
It is not merely that human history ends here,
but that the brief possibility of an outward gaze that glimpses, in a certain
sense directly on the retina, images of perfect order, images of symmetries
that confound probabilistic reasoning, this very gaze loses its point of
return; it is untethered and set lose like vapor over forlorn Arctic ice,
forming crystal flowers that are for no one, a symmetry for no gaze.
In my next post I look at politcal formations that go beyond this particular paradigm of cynical witnessing.
Comments
Post a Comment