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Count Dracula is an aristocrat only in a manner of speaking. Jonathan Harker — the London estate agent who stays in his castle and whose diary opens Stoker’s novel — observes with astonishment that Dracula lacks precisely what makes a man ‘noble’: servants. Dracula stoops to driving the carriage, cooking the meals, making the beds, cleaning the castle. The Count has read Adam Smith: he knows that servants are unproductive workers who diminish the income of the person who keeps them. Dracula also lacks the aristocrat’s conspicuous consumption: he does not eat, he does not drink, he does not make love, he does not like showy clothes, he does not go to the theatre and he does not go hunting, he does not hold receptions and does not build stately homes. Not even his violence has pleasure as its goal. Dracula (unlike Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula, and all other vampires before him) does not like spilling blood: he needs blood. He sucks just as much as is necessary and never wastes a drop. His ultimate aim is not to destroy the lives of others according to whim, to waste them, but to use them. Dracula, in other words, is a saver, an ascetic, an upholder of the Protestant ethic. And in fact he has no body — or rather, he has no shadow. His body admittedly exists, but it is ‘incorporeal’ — ‘sensibly supersensible’ — as Marx wrote of the commodity, ‘impossible as a physical fact’, as Mary Shelley defines the monster in the first lines of her preface. In fact it is impossible ‘physically’, to estrange a man from himself, to de-humanize him. But alienated labour, as a social relation, makes it possible. So too there really exists a social product which has no body, which has exchange-value but no use-value. This product, we know, is money. And when Harker explores the castle, he finds just one thing: ‘a great heap of gold … gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground.’ The money that had been buried comes back to life, becomes capital and embarks on the conquest of the world: this and none other is the story of Dracula the vampire.
Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear” (via bourgeoisentimentality)
“It seemed that this poor ignorant Monarch—as he called himself—was persuaded that the Straight Line which he called his Kingdom, and in which he passed his existence, constituted the whole of the world, and indeed the whole of Space. Not being able either to move or to see, save in his Straight Line, he had no conception of anything out of it. Though he had heard my voice when I first addressed him, the sounds had come to him in a manner so contrary to his experience that he had made no answer, ‘seeing no man,’ as he expressed it, ‘and hearing a voice as it were from my own intestines.’ Until the moment when I placed my mouth in his World, he had neither seen me, nor heard anything except confused sounds beating against—what I called his side, but what he called his inside or stomach; nor had he even now the least conception of the region from which I had come. Outside his World, or Line, all was a blank to him; nay, not even a blank, for a blank implies Space; say, rather, all was non-existent.”
From Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. Flatland is an extraordinary Victorian satirical fantasy in which A Square (the narrator) describes life in two dimensions before encountering the third dimension and imagining the existence of a fourth – and more. It’s a total delight and one of our favourite less-well-known Oxford World’s Classics.
On the Nietzschean Concept of ‘Midday’
What is so extraordinary about this figure or theme of midday? Nietzsche invents and uses this theme in order to provide a figure for the idea of a new beginning, the idea of an event after which nothing will be as before. Is this idea not something that we usually and spontaneously associate with the metaphor or theme of the morning? For instance, after the night of nihilism (the proverbial “dark night of the soul”), a new day will arise, a fresh start.And yet, in relation to this idea, Nietzsche keeps insisting upon another metaphor, that of midday, of “great midday.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which traces the path for this New, actually ends in the morning; but the morning is here only as the prelude to midday: “This is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!” are Zarathustra’s last words. If Zarathustra does not hesitate to suggest to his last companions, the “higher men,” that they might just as well drown in their passion for the Nothing, their death or disappearance is in no way the condition of a “new beginning.” Just before the end, Zarathustra separates from them, leaving them in his cave.
Thus, the time of the event is neither the time of birth nor the
time of death but, so to speak, the time of the “middle.”Why does Nietzsche keep insisting on this?Let us briefly sketch the crucial points of the figure of midday that will interest us throughout this study. There are three closely connected points. The first is the dimension of separation, whose logic is not that of the end, of achieving or finishing (off), but the logic of subtraction, withdrawal, or split. The second point concerns the singular temporality of the event, implying a curving of time as something like a temporal loop coiling in upon itself—midday is a “time-within-time” (in the same sense that the “mousetrap” in Hamlet is a play-within-the-play). It exists in time, it has its time, but it further “hollows out” time from the inside (“the hand moved, the clock of my life drew a breath”). The third point is what Nietzsche formulates in terms of the “shortest shadow”(“Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind”). Midday is not the moment when the sun embraces everything, makes all shadows disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two become one, but, rather, that one becomes two.Why? The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and its shadow.When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (“naked,” as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. This poetic description should not distract us from the epistemological issue involved here, given that it plays a crucial part in Nietzsche’s theory of truth.
All three points evoked above are articulations of a certain figure of the two. And this figure of the two constitutes—such is my claim—the event “Nietzsche.” This figure of the two is Nietzsche’s fundamental invention. It involves his breaking out of the field determined by the sterile alternative between realism and nominalism. It involves a specific articulation of the relationship between the Real and representation. This articulation does not place the Real somewhere beyond or outside representation, nor does it abolish the Real in the name of reducing everything to mere representational semblances. It suggests that the Real exists as the internal fracture or split of representation, as its intrinsic edge on account of which representation never fully coincides, not simply with its object, but with itself. This figure of the two, together with what it implies, is the thread we will follow and explore further, especially in Part II (Part I deals primarily with Nietzsche’s detecting and analyzing a growing “discontent in civilization”).
After his illness broke out, Nietzsche lived for another twelve years. He died in August 1900, at the “break” of the century. He is said to have died at midday.
From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič
She is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.
Khaled Hosseini, A thousand splendid suns (via passport-to-her-world)
I heard the sound of a door opening in the darkness. An أ fell through it, prancing and letting off a purple light. It stood in front of me and plucked the ء from on top of its head, tipping it to me like a cap. He threw it behind him and plunged into the wall that had become a mirror. He bowed to me with respect and signaled to the ب, who was poking out his head, to enter. The ب came and bowed, and then went in, and behind him the ت and the ث. They all dropped their dots when they bowed, and afterward they would look in the mirror and laugh, dancing and spinning in giddy circles. Each of the letters of the alphabet followed: the ج, the ح and the خ, the د and the ذ, the ر and the ز, the س and the ش.
The laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. The letters that take no dots began to pick them up from the ground and put them in their buttonholes or on their heads, or to stand on them and look at themselves in the mirror. One began to fight with the others, and stole their dots. The س stole ش’s dots and then raised its fingers to its lips, with a loud, “Shhhh!” The م lay down on his stomach and raised his head to swallow the two dots he had picked up off the ground. A lustful laughter swelled up, and the letters danced together, coupling in forbidden positions. Then the mirror broke and soldiers raided the party, felling the letters with a spray of gunfire.
And I awake to find myself (t)here.
Sinan Antoon, I’jaam (via qamaranwzaytoun)
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