If a man dies intestate, it is his natural heirs who inherit. Only if there is a Will & last Testament can the property go to someone outside the natural line of succession. It is only in those circumstances that eyebrows might be raised or the question of forgery or undue influence could be bandied about. Inheritance without testament is thus a more legitimate, for more in keeping with oikeiosis, manner of claiming one's heritage.
Hannah Arendt, being very very fucking stupid, didn't get this. In 'six exercises in political thought', she wrote
'Notre heritage n'est precede d'aucun testament "our inheritance was left to us by no testament" this is perhaps the strangest of the strangely abrupt aphorisms into which Rene Char, French poet and writer,
i.e. a guy who liked 'testaments' coz he was more concerned with words than things.
compressed the gist of what four years in the resistance had come to mean to a whole generation of European writers and men of letters.
Fuck off! The Allies liberated France. Since it was Churchill & Roosevelt, not Stalin, whose troops were on the ground, France went in one direction while Poland, because of the presence of Soviet troops, went in the opposite direction. Liberation was a gift, not an inheritance, but it was a gift with strings attached. Rene Char may have been stupid, but he was French- i.e. belonged to a nation too humiliated not to grasp its own abjectness- and thus a suitable interlocutor for Heidegger who, being from an even more humiliated, abject and vivisectioned nation, had ceased to snarl for fear of once again being kicked in the teeth.
The collapse of France, to them a totally unexpected, event,
but to other Frenchmen an unexpected, but welcome, opportunity to get rid of the Jews and the Commies,
had emptied, from one day to the next, the political scene of their country, leaving it to the puppet-like antics of knaves or fools,
Why did France not have an offensive military doctrine? Why was its diplomacy in the interwar years so utterly crap? Why could it not pull together in the face of an existential threat? The plain fact is there were plenty of knaves and fools in high positions during the Great War and after it. Though the Right might be suspected of preferring Hitler's rule, it must be said the older 'Radicals', like Joseph Caillaux, supported Vichy. Blum was astonished at the greed and corruptibility of many of his Socialist legislators. If, as he said, the French bourgeoisie were selfish and short-sighted, so were the representatives of the proletariat. As for the Communists, while the Hitler-Stalin pact held, they were traitors pure and simple.
and they who as a matter of course had never participated in the official business of the Third Republic were sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum.
They weren't 'sucked into politics'. They may have participated, in a desultory manner, in an ineffective resistance which, but for Operation Overlord, the Germans would have had little difficulty stamping out.
Thus, without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm where without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word.
Fuck off! They had no power or influence and played little role in post-War politics.
It did not last long.
It never existed.
After a few short years they were liberated from what they originally had thought to be a "burden" and thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless Irrelevance of their personal affairs, once more separated from "the world of reality" by an paisseur triste, the "sad opaqueness" of a private life centered about nothing but itself.
France needed an offensive military doctrine. De Gaulle had always understood this. The French did get their own nukes- maybe in cooperation with the Israelis- and thereafter their country was secure. Indeed, once they gave up Algeria, they could rise rapidly in material standards of living and, in the process, stop being so fucking French.
And if they refused "to go back to [their] very beginnings, to [their] most indigent behavior/' they could only return to the old empty strife of conflicting ideologies which after the defeat of the common enemy
the Communists? Mitterand, who had started out on the Right, working for Vichy, moved Left and ultimately delivered the coup de grase to that bunch of shitheads. Poets and playwrights played no part in this deft bit of business.
once more occupied the political arena to split the former comrades-in-arms into innumerable cliques which were not even factions and to engage them in the endless polemics and intrigues of a paper war. What Char had foreseen, clearly anticipated, while the real fight was still on "if i survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure" had happened. They had lost their treasure. What was this treasure? As they themselves understood it, it seems to have consisted, as it were, of two interconnected parts: they had discovered that he who "joined the Resistance, found himself," that he ceased to be "in quest of [himself] without mastery, in naked unsatisfaction," that he no longer suspected himself of "insincerity," of being "a carping, suspicious actor of life," that he could afford "to go naked." In this nakedness, stripped of all masks of those which society assigns to its members as well as those which the individual fabricates for himself in his psychological reactions against society they had been visited for the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom, not, to be sure, because they acted against tyranny and things worse than tyranny this was true for every soldier in the Allied armies but because they had become "challengers," had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without knowing or even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear. "
Nothing of the sort happened. Sooner or later, but for Overlord, some of them would have been turned by the Gestapo and their networks would have been rolled up. They knew it. De Gaulle knew it. But, the Commies said, they would have soldiered on without the burden of pseudo-intellectual allies or some pretence of a Union Sacree or other such bougie shite. But, no doubt, the Royalists or Catholics were saying something similar. Still, the good news was that worthless French intellectuals- or German refugee scholars- could find a market in America for their absurd, self-regarding, histrionics.
'At every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set."
Nonsense! There was always someone shitting in his seat and claiming his turd was 'freedom' or 'authenticity' or some such shite.
The men of the European Resistance were neither the first nor the last to lose their treasure.
Armies won or lost treasure. Pseudo-intellectuals were not an army.
The history of revolutions from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia
after which an American Army defeated a British Army
and the summer of 1789 in Paris
the French Revolutionaries armies prevailed against internal and external foes
to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest
the rebels had no army and were easily crushed
which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age,
Fuck off! That story is about the technological industrialization of military operations and the global balance of power. It has nothing to do with scribblers whether or not they played at 'Resistance' or 'Revolution'.
could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which,
never existed
under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana.
In other words this is a fairy story. But it could be told about anybody or everything. The cat could have become Chairman Miaow and led China to Catholicism but for a Fata Morgana which turned out not to be Mickey Mouse at all.
There exist, indeed, many good reasons to believe that the treasure was never a reality but a mirage, that we deal here not with anything substantial but with an apparition, and the best of these reasons is that the treasure thus far has remained nameless. Does something exist, not in outer space but in the world and the affairs of men on earth, which has not even a name?
Sure. It is the smell of a poignant fart expelled while wistfully contemplating a plate of imaginary pomegranates.
Unicorns and fairy queens seem to possess more reality than the lost treasure of the revolutions. And yet, if we turn our eyes to the beginnings of this era, and especially to the decades preceding it, we may discover to our surprise that the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic possessed a name for this treasure, a name long since forgotten and lost one is tempted to say even before the treasure itself disappeared. The name in America was "public happiness," which, with its overtones of "virtue" and "glory," we understand hardly better than its French counterpart, "public freedom"; the difficulty for us is that in both instances the emphasis was on "public." However that may be, it is the namelessness of the lost treasure to which the poet alludes when he says that our inheritance was left us by no testament.
This is incredibly stupid. America and France had Revolutions and Constitutions and plenty of lawyers and legislators and Judges. Nothing in the public realm was nameless for the simple reason that nothing was not justiciable. Political Philosophy may have been unaware of this but then Political Philosophy was wholly ignorant. Lawyers and Legislators knew all about such matters and made a very good living for themselves thereby.
The testament, telling the heir what will rightfully be his, wills past possessions for a future.
Nope. Probate does so. My testament may bequeath you my valuable collection of Faberge eggs. Probate discovers I have no such things. Also, it doesn't matter if I die intestate. Probate will apportion my Estate amongst my natural heirs.
Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it.
Rubbish! People die intestate all the time. In any case, possession is nine tenths of the law. Who grabs what, when a dude dies, resolves the matter of inheritance.
Thus the treasure was lost not because of historical circumstances and the adversity of reality but because no tradition had foreseen its appearance or its reality, because no testament had willed it for the future.
Suppose a meteor containing some valuable mineral unknown to science crashes into my meadow. This is a 'treasure' which my heirs discover. It does not matter if I died intestate or if they took possession of the meadow without going through probate. The fact is that the treasure, whose value has now become known, suffered no occlusion, diminution, or loss by reason of the lack of a will or testament. Arendt simply didn't understand that Wills don't matter. Probate may matter. But possession trumps all.
The loss, at any rate, perhaps inevitable in terms of political reality, was consummated by oblivion, by a failure of memory, which befell not only the heirs but, as it were, the actors, the witnesses, those who for a fleeting moment had held the treasure in the palms of their hands, in short, the living themselves.
I suppose it is possible that a guy discovers a piece of glass is really a big diamond but falls dead before he gets to tell anybody about it. In this case, his heirs might not know they have inherited a fortune. Is that what Arendt thinks happens in 'political reality'? If so, she is very fucking stupid. Why? Well, politics is about talking. A guy who gets something valuable tells everybody about it. Others try to get it from him. Politics works only in that way. On the other hand, if a guy gets something but dies before he can tell anyone about it, the thing is not political at all.
For remembrance, which is only one, though one of the most important, modes of thought, is helpless outside a pre-established framework of reference, and the human mind is only on the rarest occasions capable of retaining something which is altogether unconnected.
This lady has just been gassing on about unicorns and fairy queens. We can have no memory of such beings. Yet our minds have no difficulty 'retaining' them along with vampires and werewolves and the Great Spaghetti Monster.
Thus the first who failed to remember what the treasure was like were precisely those who had possessed it and found it so strange that they did not even know how to name it.
In which case it wasn't political. It may, however, have been associated with the memory of the smell of a ruminative fart emitted in the context of the contemplation of an imaginary plate of pomegranates. It is a public scandal that much much more political philosophy has not been devoted to this enthralling topic.
At the time this did not bother them; if they did not know their treasure, they knew well enough the meaning of what they did and that it was beyond victory and defeat:
Arendt is wrong. The French Resistance really was about resisting. Getting killed by the Gestapo would have defeated the Resisters.
"Action that has a meaning for the living has value only for the dead,
Nope. Nothing, save perhaps Heaven, has value for the dead.
completion only in the minds that inherit and question it."
No. An action has a meaning for people who are effected by it or who seek to emulate it. But emulation is not inheritance. Also, anybody can question any action whatsoever.
The tragedy began not when the liberation of the country as a whole ruined, almost automatically, the small hidden islands of freedom that were doomed anyhow, but when it turned out that there was no mind to inherit and to question, to think about and to remember.
So, there was no fucking tragedy because it never began. There may be some little comedy in the notion that stupid French shitheads thought the Gestapo was making them freer than ever (probably because Jews and Commies and Freemasons were being killed) but, the truth is, there were no 'hidden islands of freedom'. There was England- which was an island- and there was an invasion across the English Channel. That is what liberated France. If the French didn't get this, no 'tragedy began' but, rather, a particular type of farce continued to play out.
The point of the matter is that the "completion," which indeed every enacted event must have in the minds of those who then are to tell the story and to convey its meaning, eluded them;
coz they didn't see that Petain was in prison and Hitler had eaten a bullet while De Gaulle and Churchill and Truman were strutting around as cocks of the walk
and without this thinking completion after the act, without the articulation accomplished by remembrance, there simply was no story left that could be told.
Also, unlike unicorns of fairy queens, the words were lacking to describe what treasure had been lost. Thus, the first and most vital 'exercise for political thinking' is to investigate and seek to accurately describe the smell of a ruminative fart expelled during the contemplation of an imaginary plate of pomegranates. For of such is the Fata Morgana of the intestate treasure which befalls those who must forever remain unaware of the infinite kenosis or self-loss of that which to which they can only stand in the position of ineffectual and uncomprehending legatees. Yet, if they but wistfully fart, Political philosophy may proceed to greatly exercise itself as to whether or not a plate of imaginary pomegranates was being contemplated. So sayeth Hannah's Aunt. Requiescat in pace
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