Re: Desinvolture et al.

[fs6y097@public.uni-hamburg.de (John King)]

>I doubt that stars had anything to do with this, but rather a sense 
>of moral justice. (OK, so moral justice is perhaps out of place on 
>the EJ list, but what the hell . . .) 

Or maybe the feeling that Gorbachev and the Soviets had abandoned them and
the fact that they lacked the thousands year old authoritarian structures of
Deng's China which allowed Chinese state to slip into capitalism without
compromising traditional allocations of power. 

However, I'd like to turn back to the letter to FGJ cited by Armin Mohler in
"Die Schleife" which Bertil used to start the discussion on desinvolture. At
the risk of being pedantic, I'd point out that this incident took place in
Hannover, and not Berlin. One interesting aspect of this letter is the way
in which EJ treats the incident as a performance and passes judgement on
both sides in aesthetic terms - the mob and the police lines are referred to
as Künstler. Significant, I feel. Where is the desinvolture here? In the
figure of EJ writing to his brother. It is a trope which has been well
documented in criticism of his war writing - the transformance of the
dangerous into the aesthetic is a strategy of psychic self-preservation
deployed to keep the threatening at bay by distancing it from the self. (Cf.
the Anarch who struggles to preserve this distance and thus himself from
corruption). Bertil's second text from "Das Abenteuerliche Herz" backs this
reading up - desinvolture as divine armour. Much of J's writing is precisely
that - stand offish, concerned to observe and order into a coherent symbolic
system. Desinvolture seems to be deployed as a strategy in that endeavour
but also as a reaction to its failure to contain the world.

Just some thoughts,

John

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John King
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D-20355 Hamburg
Tel: +49 (040) 35 11 78
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