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Event by Slavoj Žižek

An event at its purest and most minimal - something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation. There is, by definition, something ‘miraculous’ in an event.

In the same way, the rise of a new art form is an event. Let us take the example of film noir. In his detailed analysis, Marc Vernet demonstrates that all the main features that constitute the common definition of film noir (chiaroscuro lighting, askew camera angles, the paranoiac universe of the hard-boiled novel with corruption elevated to a cosmic metaphysical feature embodied in the femme fatale) were already present in Hollywood films. However, the enigma that remains is the mysterious efficacy and persistence of the notion of noir: the more Vernet is right at the level of facts, the more he offers historical causes, the more enigmatic and inexplicable becomes the extraordinary strength and longevity of this ‘illusory’ notion of noir - the notion that has haunted our imagination for decades.

At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes - and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes.

From its very inception, philosophy seems to oscillate between two approaches: the transcendental and the ontological or ontic. The first concerns the universal structure of how reality appears to us. Which conditions must be met for us to perceive something as really existing? ‘Transcendental’ is the philosopher’s technical term for such a frame, which defines the co-ordinates of reality. The ontic approach, on the other hand, is concerned with reality itself, in its emergence and deployment: how did the universe come to be? Does it have a beginning and an end? What is our place in it? In the twentieth century, the gap between these two methods of thinking became most extreme: the transcendental approach reached its apogee with German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), while the ontological one today seems kidnapped by natural sciences - we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism.

Both approaches culminate in some notion of Event: the Event of the disclosure of Being - of the horizon of meaning which determines how we perceive and relate to reality - in Heidegger’s thought; and, in the Big Bang (or broken symmetry), the primordial Event out of which our entire universe emerged, in the ontic approach, upheld by quantum cosmology.

The only appropriate solution is thus to approach events in an evental way - to pass from one to another notion of event by way of bringing out the pervading deadlocks of each, so that our journey is one through the transformations of universality itself, coming close...to what Hegel called ‘concrete universality’, a universality which is not just the empty container of its particular content, but which engenders this content through the deployment of its immanent antagonisms, deadlocks and inconsistencies.

Stop I - Framing, Reframing, Enframing

1. The known knowns - things we know that we know 2. The known unknowns - things that we now know we don’t know 3. The unknown unknowns - things we do not know we don’t know

4. The unknown knowns - things we don’t know that we know - the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself’, as French psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan (1901-81) used to say. For Lacan, the Unconscious is not a pre-logical (irrational) space of instincts, but a symbolically articulated knowledge ignored by the subject.

At its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way eg. novels (or films) in which a play performed by characters (as part of the plot) mirrors the characters’ real life amorous entanglements. It is the exposure of the reality that nobody wanted to admit, but which has now become a revelation, and has changed the playing field.

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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George Orwell, 1984

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU An enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about 45, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features.

The telescreen - an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which former part of the surface of the wall. The instrument could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. Babbling about the production of pig iron and the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound made above the level of a very low whisper would be picked up by it; so long as one remained within the field if vision which the metal plaque commanded, one could be seen as well as heard. You had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Blue overalls - the uniform of the Party. The Police Patrol in helicopters which scooped into people’s windows. “Only the Thought Police mattered.”

The Ministry of Truth towering vast and white above the grimy landscape of London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. An enormous pyramidal structure of white concrete bearing the three slogans of the Party: War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength

Just three other buildings were of similar appearance and size - the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of the government was divided: the Ministry of Truth concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and fine arts; he Ministry of Peace concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love maintained law and order and the Ministry of Plenty, responsible for economic affairs.

Emmanuel Goldstein, 'the Enemy of the People' - a renegade and backslider who had once been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, then had engaged in counter revolutionary activities, been condemned to death, mysteriously escaped and disappeared. Commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. Whispered stories of a book of which Goldstein was the author, without a title, which circulated clandestinely here and there.

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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Gustave Flaubert: Bouvard et Pécuchet

Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 without having finished Bouvard et Pécuchet, his comic encyclopaedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge and the inanity of human effort. Nevertheless, the outlines of his vision are clear and supported by the ample detail of his novel. The two clerks are members of the bourgeoisie who, because one of them is the unexpected beneficiary of a handsome will, retire from the city to spend their lives on a country estate doing what they please. As Flaubert portrays their experience, doing what they please involves Bouvard and Pécuchet in a practical and theoretical jaunt through agriculture, history, chemistry, education, archaeology, literature, always with less than successful results; they move through fields of learning like travelers in time and knowledge, experiencing the disappointments, disasters and letdowns of uninspired amateurs. What they move through, in fact, is the whole disillusioning experience of the 19th century whereby they turn out to be the bumbling victims of their own levelling incompetence and mediocrity. Every enthusiasm resolves itself into a boring cliche and every discipline or type of knowledge changes from hope and power into disorder, ruin and sorrow.

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote an analysis of what he called the poetics of space. The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house - its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms - is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name or feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here.

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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Dante’s Divine Comedy

“Nati non fummo a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza” We were not born to live as animals, but to pursue knowledge and virtue.

Dante’s achievement in The Divine Comedy was to have seamlessly combined the realistic portrayal of mundane reality with a universal and eternal system of Christian values. What Dante the pilgrim sees as he walks through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is a unique vision of judgment. Paolo and Francesca, for instance, are seen as eternally confined to hell for their sins, yet they are seen as enacting, indeed living, the very characters and actions that put them where they will be for eternity. Thus each of the figures in Dante’s vision not only represents himself but is also a typical representation of his character and the fate meted out to him.

“Maometto” - Mohammed - turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno. He is located in the 8th of the nine circles of Hell, in the 9th of the ten Bolgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan’s stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal, the blasphemous. After Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Brutus and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, where Satan himself is to be found. Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante calls seminator di scandalo e di schisma. Mohammed’s punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante’s verse at this point spares the reader none of the eschatological detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Mohammed’s entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy. Mohammed explains his punishment to Dante, pointing as well to Ali, who precedes him in the line of sinners whom the attendant devil is splitting in two; he also asks Dante to warn one Fra Dolcino, a renegade priest whose sect advocated community of women and goods and who was accused of having a mistress, of what will be in store for him. Dante saw a parallel between Dolcino’s and Mohammed’s revolting sensuality, and also between their pretensions to theological eminence.

But this is not all Dante has to say about Islam. Earlier in the Inferno, a small group of Muslims turns up. Avicenna, Averroes, and Saladin are among those virtuous heathens who, along with Hector, Aenaes, Abraham, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, are confined to the first circle of the Inferno, there to suffer a minimal (and even honourable) punishment for not having had the benefit of Christian revelation. Dante, of course, admires their great virtues and accomplishments, but because they were not Christians he must condemn them, however lightly, to Hell. Eternity is a great leveller of distinctions, but the special anachronisms and anomalies of putting pre-Christian luminaries in the same category of “heathen” damnation with post-Christian Muslims does not trouble Dante. Even though the Koran specifies Jesus as a prophet, Dante chooses to consider the great Muslim philosophers and king as having been fundamentally ignorant of Christianity. That they can also inhabit the same distinguished level as the heroes and sages of classical antiquity is an ahistorical vision similar to Raphael’s in his fresco The School of Athens, in which Averroes rubs elbows on the academy floor with Socrates and Plato (similar to Fenelon’s Dialogues des morts [1700-1718] where a discussion takes place between Socrates and Confucius.)

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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George Orwell

George Orwell, who was born in 1909, described himself as from ‘what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle-class.’ Before the war, he wrote:

you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be...Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting ‘Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law,’

‘I was very young, not much more than six,’ recalled Orwell, ‘when I first became aware of class-distinctions. Before that age my chief heroes had generally been working-class people, because they always seemed to do such interesting things, such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and bricklayers...But it was not long before I was forbidden to play with the plumber’s children; they were “common” and I was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents.’

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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Edward W. Said: Orientalism

Introduction

Part One

Orientalism - a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. It is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.

The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient - and this applies to whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian or philologist - either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. It is a vague and general term, and connotes the high-handed executive attitude of 19th century and early 20th century European colonialism. Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specialisations and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time), “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind”, destiny and so on.

The third meaning of Orientalism is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late 18th century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient - dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.

In brief, because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that particular entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what the book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between Franco-British involvement in the Orient and - until the period of American ascendancy after World War II - the involvement of every other European and Atlantic power. To speak of Orientalism is therefore to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands”, an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies and wisdoms domesticated for local European use - the list can be extended more or less indefinitely.

Orientalism thus derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early 19th century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the 19th century until the end of World War II, Britain and France dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist.

Part Two

The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average 19th century European, but also because it could be - that is, submitted to being - made Oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.” This fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.

One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient.

Gramsci made an analytical distinction between civil and political society. Civil society is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families and unions. Political society consists of state institutions (the army, police, central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony - an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans. It can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe - the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or a more skeptical thinker might have different views on the matter.

In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. Especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present - the scientist, scholar, missionary, trader or soldier was in, or thought about the Orient because he could be there or think about it - with very little resistance on the Orient's part. There emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in a museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.

Part Three

Three aspects of my contemporary reality:

1. The distinction between pure and political knowledge

The distinction between “humanists” and persons whose work has policy implications, or political significance, can be broadened further by saying that the former’s ideological color is a matter of incidental importance to politics, whereas the ideology of the latter is woven directly into his material.

My idea is that European and then American interest in the Orient was political according to some of the obvious historical accounts of it, but that it was the culture that created that interest, that acted dynamically along with brute political, economic and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and complicated place that it was in the field called Orientalism.

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (two unequal halves of Orient and Occident), but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Because Orientalism is a cultural and political fact, it does not exist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, what is thought, said or even done about the Orient follows certain distinct and intellectual knowable lines.

I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires - British, French, American - in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.

2. The methodological question

There is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them. For Orientalism, there is not simply the problem of finding a point of departure, but also the question of designating which texts, authors and periods are the ones best suited for study.

My starting point therefore has been the British, French and American experience of the Orient taken as a unit, what made that experience possible by way of historical and intellectual background, what the quality and character of the experience has been. I limited that set of questions to the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost 1000 years together stood for the Orient.

My principle methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analysing the relationship between texts and teh way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large.

3. The personal dimension

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet deep early awareness has persisted. My study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

Anyone resident in the West since the 1950s, particularly in the United States, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West. The “East” has always signified danger and threat during this period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia.

One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. So far as the Orient is concerned, standardisation and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the 19th-century academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient”.

Three things have contributed to making even the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam into a highly politicised, almost raucous matter: (1) the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; (2) the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its affects upon American Jews as well as upon both liberal culture and the population at large; (3) the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately discuss the Arabs or Islam.

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Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism

On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on Egypt. Egyptian nationalism was on the rise and the continuing British presence in Egypt was no longer so easy to defend.

The choice of the word “Oriental” was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope and Byron. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood.

Two great themes dominate his remarks: knowledge and power. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with “our” knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilisation from its origins to its prime to its decline - and of course, being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changers, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilisations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge is to dominate something and have authority over it. Balfour takes British superiority and Egyptian inferiority for granted.

Between 1882, the year in which England occupied Egypt and put an end to the nationalist rebellion of Colonel Arabi, and 1907, England’s representative in Egypt, Egypt’s master, was Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer.

Since the middle of the 18th century there had been two principal elements in relation between East and West. One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual, exploded by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology and history; furthermore a sizeable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators and gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination.

As far as the West was concerned during the 19th and 20th centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The period of immense advance in the institutions and content of Orientalism coincides exactly with the period of unparalleled European expansion; from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35% of the earth’s surface to about 85% of it. Every continent was affected, none more so than Africa and Asia. Th

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litbites-blog · 9 years ago

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Niccolò Machiavelli (High Renaissance)

A contemporary of Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is often paired with him since he also wrote a guidebook on behavior - The Prince - a manual for princes and rulers.

Like Castiglione, Machiavelli was well educated in the Renaissance humanist tradition. Like Castiglione’s courtier, Machiavelli’s prince is a type or model of an ideal. The difference between the two writers “ideals”, however is dramatic. Castiglione supported the tenets of Renaissance humanism, but Machiavelli challenged them by introducing a radically different set of standards, standards that inform, among other things, Mannerist art.

Young Machiavelli was employed as a clerk and secretary to the Florentine magistrates responsible for war and internal affairs. From 1498 to 1512, he also served as an ambassador to, among others, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, the King of France and Pope Julius II. During his lifetime, the Italian city-states were almost continually at war either with one another or with outside countries such as France and Spain. Machiavelli himself suffered from the changing fortunes of various ruling families. Notably, when the Medici came to power in Florence, he was accused of conspiracy, tortured, then imprisoned. Later, when the Medici government collapsed, he was accused of being a Medici sympathiser. At the time some claimed that he wrote The Prince for the Medici as a guide to tyrannical rule.

The Prince was written in 1513 and published in 1532 after Machiavelli’s death. It quickly acquired fame or, as some would have it, notoriety. Based on a series of premises about human nature - none favourable - The Prince asserts that people are basically selfish, deceitful, greedy and gullible. Accordingly, Machiavelli advises princes to rule in ways that play upon these fundamental human characteristics. A prince, therefore, can be, indeed should be, hypocritical, cruel and deceitful when necessary. He should keep faith with no one but himself, and employ ruthlessness and cunning to maintain his power over the people. For, as Machiavelli writes, “it is far better to be feared than loved,” though as he also notes, “the prince must nonetheless make himself feared in such a way that, if he is not loved, he will at least avoid being hated.”

The view of human beings that forms the foundation of Machiavelli’s arguments in The Prince reflects political expediency, based upon Machiavelli’s observation of Florentine politics and the politics of other city-states and countries he visited as a Florentine ambassador. Having witnessed the instability of power in Italy, particularly the surrender of parts of Italy to France and Spain, Machiavelli wrote that a ruler must be strong enough to keep himself in power, for only with the strength of absolute power could he rule effectively.

After the Bible, The Prince was the most widely read book of its time. The questions it raised about the relationship between politics and morality, the starkly realistic depiction of power it presents and the authority, immediacy and directness with which it is written, ensured its success. In addition, The Prince influenced the creation of a stable state in the section of Italy known as the Romagna, where Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), put its ideas into practice.

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Baldassare Castiglione (High Renaissance)

Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529) spent his life serving as an important and influential courtier and diplomat. He grew up in the company of nobility, counted the princes of Mantua among his friends, and studied at the university in Milan. He served as a courtier to the Italian ducal courts, first at the court of Francesco Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua in the early 16th century, and then at the court of Urbino, established by Federico de Montefeltro, the father of Guidobaldo de Montefeltro, in whose service Castiglione prospered. Later unrest caused him to return to service in Duke Francesco’s court. After then serving as ambassador to Rome for a number of years, Castiglione was appointed by Pope Clement VII as papal ambassador to Spain, where he lived out the remaining years of his life.

While at Urbino, Castiglione wrote the Book of the Courtier, which memorialises, celebrates and idealises life at court, especially Urbino, where Castiglione was impressed not only with the nobility of the Montefeltro dukes but also with the Duchess of Montefeltro, Elisabetta, who often appears in the book. It is cast in the form of a series of four dialogues spread out over four evenings at the court of Urbino. The central topic is the manners, education and behaviour of the ideal courtier, whose virtues Castiglione extols throughout the book. Most important for the courtier is the range and substance of his accomplishment. He must be a man of courage who has experience in war, he must be learned in the classics and in classical languages, he must be able to serve his prince with generosity. Castiglione’s ideal courtier had to be physically and emotionally strong, able to perform feats requiring agility, skill, courage and daring. His physical prowess was measured by his grace as a dancer and elegance as a singer and musician. He was also expected to be an engaging and witty conversationalist, a good companion, an elegant writer, even a bit of a poet. In short, Castiglione’s courtier was the ideal Renaissance gentleman - of sound mind, body and character and learned in the ideas of Renaissance humanism. Leonardo da Vinci exemplified this ideal during the Renaissance; people such as Thomas Jefferson have been cited as “Renaissance men” since. In addition to the ideal courtier’s range of accomplishments, Castiglione applauds sprezzatura, the ability to make difficult tasks look easy, in the manner of a great athlete or musician.

Castiglione’s blending of the soldier and the scholar, his merging of the ideals of medieval chivalry and Renaissance humanism, made his Book of the Courtier popular both in its own time and afterward. Its emphasis on good breeding and elegant manners suggests that, as in the codes of chivalry, polish was as important as prowess. Elegant speech, graceful demeanour, and consummate skill were all expected of the courtier. Castiglione himself was no exception and embodied the ideals his book celebrated. Raphael’s portrait of him displays many of the qualities Castiglione extols, from the nobility of the graceful head to the intelligence of the shining eyes, complemented by the elegant refinement of the attire.

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Petrarch (Early Renaissance)

The first great figure of Italian Renaissance letters as well as the first important representative of Italian Renaissance humanism was Petrarch, a scholar and prolific writer, whose work simultaneously reflects the philosophy of Greek antiquity and the new ideas of the Renaissance. Born Francesco Petrarca in Arezzo and taken, at the age of eight, to Avignon, where the papal courts had moved in 1309, Petrarch studied law in Bologna and Montpellier, then returned in 1326 to Avignon. He also traveled widely in France and Italy, hunting down classical manuscripts.

Unlike his Florentine predecessor, Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy summed up the sensibility of late medieval culture, Petrarch positioned himself at the beginning of a new literary and artistic era, one that placed greater emphasis on human achievement. Without rejecting the importance of spirituality and religious faith, Petrarch celebrated human accomplishment as the crowning glory of God’s creation but gave human beings praise for their achievements as well. With an emphasis on humanity, Petrarch inaugurated a series of intellectual and literary experiments better suited to his psychological interests and human aesthetic.

Petrarch’s work is poised between two powerful and inextricably intertwined impulses. One is the religious and moral impulse felt by early medieval thinkers such as St. Augustine, the other is the humanist dedication to the disciplined study of ancient writers, coupled with a striving for artistic excellence.

Petrarch was especially affected by the elegance and beauty of early Latin literature. He disliked, however, the Latin of the Middle Ages, seeing it in a barbarous falling off from the heights of eloquence exemplified by ancient Roman writers such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca and Cicero. Petrarch strove to revive classical literature rather than absorb its elements into contemporary Italian civilisation. He considered classical culture a model to be emulated and an ideal against which to measure the achievements of other civilisations. For Petrarch, ancient culture was not merely a source of scientific information, philosophical knowledge or rhetorical rules, it was also a spiritual and intellectual resource for enriching the human experience.

Soon after his return to Avignon in 1326, Petrarch fell in love with a woman whose identity is unknown but whom he called Laura in his Canzoniere (Songbook). This is a collection of 366 poems in various forms - sonnets, ballads, sestinas, madrigals, and canzoni (songs) - which he wrote and reworked over a period of more than 40 years. The poems, many of which are about love, are notable for their stylistic elegance and their formal perfection. Those about Laura are the most beautiful and the most famous. They spawned a profusion of verses written in imitation of him, borrowing situations, psychological descriptions, imagery and other forms of figurative language, and particularly the sonnet form Petrarch devised.

The Petrarchan Sonnet

Thematically, Petrarch’s sonnets introduced what was to become one of the predominant subjects of Renaissance lyric poetry: the expression of a speaker’s love for a woman and his experience of the joy and pain of love’s complex and shifting emotional states. Laura’s beauty and behaviour cause the poet/speaker to sway between hope and despair, pleasure and pain, joy and anguish. Throughout the sequence of poems, Laura remains unattainable. Like so many figures in Renaissance painting, she is at once a real person and an ideal form, a contradiction expressed in the sometimes ambivalent feelings the poet/speaker has about her.

As an extended sequence, Petrarch’s sonnets inspired poets throughout Europe to write their own sonnet sequences. The most famous examples in English are Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), and William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Petrarch’s sonnet structure established itself as one of the two dominant sonnet patterns used by poets.

The Petrarchan (sometimes called the Italian) sonnet is organised in two parts: an octave of eight lines and a sestet of six. The octave typically identifies a problem or situation, and the sestet proposes a solution; or the octave introduces a scene, and the sestet comments on or complicates it. The rhyme sequence of the Petrarchan sonnet reinforces its logical structure, with different rhymes occurring in octave and sestet. The octave rhymes abba abba (or abab abab), and the sestet rhymes cde cde (or cde ced, cde dce; or cd, cd, cd).

The following sonnet was the most popular poem in the European Renaissance; it depicts the lover’s ambivalence in a series of paradoxes or apparent contradictions:

I find no peace, and all my war is done. I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice. I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise; And nought I have, and all the world I season. That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise— Nor letteth me live nor die at my device, And yet of death it giveth me occasion. Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain. I desire to perish, and yet I ask health. I love another, and thus I hate myself. I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain; Likewise displeaseth me both life and death, And my delight is causer of this strife.

I Find No Peace by Sir Thomas Wyatt

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Descartes: Discourse on Method and Meditations

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences

(Part One)

The disciplines of schools:

The languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients

The delicacy of fiction refines and enlivens the mind

Famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one’s judgment

The reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times: it is even a studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts

Eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties

Poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness

Mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and to diminish man’s labour

Treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue

Theology teaches us how to go to heaven

Philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned

Law, medicine, and the other sciences bring donors and wealth to those who pursue them - it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false, in order to recognise their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby.

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Singlit: Fistful of Colours by Suchen Christine Lim

“Singapore must seem strange to you now,” Mark said politely to the old lady as he handed her a glass of juice.

Dr Susantha Menon looked out of the window of her grandniece’s apartment, the towering blocks of offices and flats glowing in the distance.

“Singapore is a very new and young nation,” she paused, looking at the faces before her, and added, “and very brave too. Every major community is represented in your government.” She turned to Jan and Zul, “You’re a very lucky people. I don’t see that happening in India and Sri Lanka in my lifetime.” An almost inaudible sigh escaped her lips before she turned to Zul again, who was writing a feature on her for his paper. “During my young days, it would have been unthinkable for a Malay to marry a Chinese, or a Chinese to marry a Malay. He would be ostracised by his community...I was amazed by the changes in your society. Nica introduced me to two lovely Chinese women. Mrs Fernando, wife of a Eurasian judge, and Mrs Sandosham, wife of an Indian lawyer....Over there, the other side,...two Caucasians talking to the Indian lady by the window. And she introduced the Indian lady as Mrs Natalie Tan, and the Caucasians as Mrs Mah and Mrs Tay. Imagine the old lady’s surprise and amazement!

Delight and laughter rang round the room. “Yeah Auntie, we Chindians and Eurasians will change the world!” Nica quipped. “Chindians?” Mark was puzzled, and so was Dr. Menon. “Oh ya, I forgot. That’s the term we give ourselves, Chinese-Indian or Indian Chines. People like me,” Nica grinned. Her grandmother smiled indulgently at the young people.

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Singlit: &Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond

Grandfather by Chandran Nair

the seventy six years beneath his eyes burst like rain, flood my earth with desolation. his seventy six years have compromised my eyes into a hardness that grows on me, the imprint of his frown I wear without his laughter grandfather walks the bunds of seasons, ploughing, sowing and harvesting years. in drought stricken months he wears old age as lightly as his beard, his smile transcends to be born from unlucky seeds, a friend once wrote, is tragedy; the curse flows unmuted, immutable-- only the hot stares of the gods persuade the proud gods bothered him, but temples missed his sacrifice. he found truth, relief, away from divinity, spacing out years in padi fields, unfolding particular nuances, lack of attainment like the padi stalk, once green, easily bent, he grew with age, aged to ripened toughness to resist anger, misfortunes of stricken years with dignity, unpersuaded

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Placenames by Boey Kim Cheng

So late in his life my father starts naming the vanished places: Buffalo Road, Robinsons, The Arcade and Satay Club, places now remote as the stars in a galaxy already extinct. He draws on his cigarette, but his breath is cold, his voice ashen as if he is already dead. The night listens to the reel of names, to the echo behind, to the blanks in the man’s geography. I don’t know if it is the dead places calling him to come home or my father summoning them for a last walk. He intones Johnson Pier, Malacca Street, Old World, New World, as if piecing together the alleys, the streets and neighbourhood of his body, reassembling the ruined city of his vanished self. His cigarette has gone out and the ash dangles. Soon his name will be erased like the street names and I will take over the chant: Raffles Place, Change Alley, calling the dead places and my father home.

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Kueh Belanda by Desmond Sim

the fragile wafer hot from the mould is folded with delicate fingers. each roll perfectly consistent from the practice of years; each bite, a memory that lingers.

what heart beats behind the hand-beaten batter, what patience faces the open heat for fifty years to turn out these fragile reminders, these letters from her wellspring of love.

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A Grandchild’s Monologue by Bryan Cheong

How am I called to say all that I feel? She speaks a tongue I was told not to learn. We are the dumb and mute, Conscious of warmth though we cannot share in it.

You push a little candy, and a bit of fruit. An egg, a piece of cake made with real cream, Things you could not have when you were young, Starved by war and parents too early leaving, Into my hand, and gesture “Eat, eat” In hoping to place on my tongue the sweetness Yours cannot express And my ears cannot receive.

So I look at you, and you at me; Neither speaking, and neither called to speak Each other we now more than understand.

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Leaving (in memoriam Grandmother) by Aaron Lee

Six years on, I look back and realise how young I was, and how easily comforted.

This was the way you did everything else; no clamour or fuss, or asking too many questions. I’d watched you since I was two.

And now, even after, knowing the worst, your quiet preparation spoke to me of how beautiful the world was, how good; as if it was merely some place you were stepping out from one sunny afternoon; some place I’d been before and was coming home to.

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Malacca Grandmother by Robert Yeo

Grandmother, departures such as yours and your brother to Southampton snaps something in me I don’t know what. It is not that you won’t come back neither that your brother may not return nor that more than a person an age has passed, of whom you were the sole remaining representative.

Could it be that I realise now how your going has severed (something I could not then acknowledge) relationship to a family rich in history, name and wealth but aloof and strangely antique like the silver kerosene their none's wear?

Your generation trespassing on mine left me with two tongues that I sputter recurrent memories of that towkayneo who would only sell me things in Teochew, and an aggressive sense of modernity.

On Heeren Street the past peels in paint. Even on this midday twilight is trapped in long, grey interiors. Do the womenfolk here still grow up in kitchens and in bedrooms? Is there a house here which is the source of my indifferent Malay and my Hokkien splutter?

Grandma, you have broken now the tenuous links between the Tans and the Yeos Malacca and Singapore I guess that is what departure’s about.

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Old Wives’ Tales (My Country and My People) by Aaron Maniam

There was one for every event Or occasion: from the simple, well-meant And probably true, to the more crazy, Laughable; and those in between, more hazy.

Onion juice was good for mosquito bite; The pulp itself went further, to cure fevers While fingernails and plants could not be cut at night. Like us, they too needed rest.

There was ‘hujan pants’ it simply wasn’t done To be caught in drizzly sunshine; the confusion Of convecting cold would clearly induce fever (And one could never be sure there would be Enough onions around the house...)

My favourite: switching of seats During meals meant we would marry Twice - which, at first, made me carry Myself to different chairs, before remembering That perhaps multiple nuptials were a challenge Even onions could not meet!

The palimpsest of these tales - part Guarded reserve, part need to preserve, Part quest for an Asian four-leaf clover - Digs deeper too. To imprints of prior lives Lived on in mine: Stories scribed from others’ lines and, In the writing, already written over.

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Uncle Never Knew by Edwin Thumboo

He lived - if you could call it that - two streets off Boat Quay north. Tranquil as leaves left in a tea cu, Always alone but never lonely. The daily bustle Of barge and coolie ferrying rubber, rice and spice, All energy and profit, for tokays and Guthrie’s, Slipped past without ripple or sound or promise. No enterprising cleverness to make his brothers Happy, as nothing drew him to our hot meridian.

Often after rain, he would watch the day dry out. But if a few fine drops caught the sun and glittered Against that thinning blue strip of northern sky, He was back in Swatow. At his table. Preparing Ink and brush; fingering his father’s piece of jade; Intoning Li Po, Tu Fu and reading Mao. Sipped tea; Fed his carps, while waiting for his drinking friend.

Great houses are history, clan, essential unity; belief. A way of life which brooks no breaking of fidelity. Rooted comforts reaffirm; nothing is extinguished. Memory is full and whole: he was ensconced; secure. For a few it’s the only pulse. Many need this bedrock, This island, so little that Cheng Ho barely noticed. Post-astral, Uncle

Stroked his undernourished beard. Spoke to clouds, Not people. The moon climbed roofs as he waited For glow worms to signify the darkening bamboos. Coming with self, he was his favourite neighbour.

He could not hear migrant hearts change rivers, From big to a small, smelly one. Or feel dreams Gather along Carpenter Street, then roll down Telok Ayer, up Ann Siang Hill, to answer temple bells. The world was hard language, felt daily, as heart, And will, drop into soft releasing opium working Up hungry lungs, as shadows flickered on the wall.

He never knew our age in full; had no transplanted way To name its joys, its follies. True exile, he denied our Home, till life do us part, in ‘51, leaving companions Marx, Engle and Mao, Lu Shun, the Li Sao, T’ao Ch’ien.

When I am by you, river, I feel Uncle watching me. I hear much from inside his spirit, his affirmations. Old Country stories re-surface, tell their tale. That house I’ve never seen, tries to sketch itself.

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