Re: Desinvolture et al.

[Bertil Haggman <bertil.haggman@helsingborg.se>]

John King wrote:

> 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.

Thanks for correcting me. I did not use Mohler as source for the letter
and the details of the geographic setting was not given. I associated
with Berlin and the actual coup. Thanks for your views concerning
desinvolture.

At one point EJ quotes Bacon's _Essays_: Overt and apparent virtues,
bring
forth praise: but there be secret and hidden virtues, that bring forth
fortune;
certain deliveries of a man's self, which have no name. The Spanish
name,
desemboltura, partly expresseth them: when there are not stonds nor
restiveness
in a man's nature; but that the weels of hism ind, keep way with the
wheels
of his firtune."

EJ concludes that it might bring good fortune to have something of a
fool in one,
and not too much of the honest man. Well, well.

Greetings

Bertil Haggman
bertil.haggman@helsingborg.se