The Egyptians write, the Lebanese publish and the
Iraqis read. The Israelis use it to wipe their ass.
Manuel Joseph, La tête au carré

On April 27, I received an email and attached piece of writing from French poet Nathalie Quintane with the subject line “1 short text.” It was the week that the campus encampments for Gaza were popping up one after another, which she was following with excitement, and even if the calls in France for an end to the war on Gaza were also slowly starting to grow louder, she wrote, the cops were still hitting with a summons anyone (representatives, journalists, unionists) publicly calling for a ceasefire. The text she attached titled ‘Dans la bande de Gaze’ [In the Gaza Strip] is dedicated to Manuel Joseph (1965-2021), a poet whose work I had been unfamiliar with but have since been reading with great interest: his radical engagement with Israel/Palestine, the Gulf War, surveillance warfare and the continuities between Nazi and Zionist ideological formation are all preparative for Quintane’s text. They also both show a predilection for montage, cut-ups, satire, and transcription which aims at making actually existing lived experience readable in the gaps opened up between said experience and its spectacular representation. Quintane’s text is in my translation at bottom.

Joseph wrote his first book Heroes are Heroes are Heroes with ears to the radio reports from the Gulf War and eyes on Gertrude Stein’s poetry-making. Considered by not a few poets, critics, and readers as a generationally defining text for its clear-eyedness about the supposedly alternativeless present (1989 was declared the end of history, if we recall): there was no way out but through. “It’s enough to change the order of terms to change the terms of order,” a Josephian counter-proposal.

Heroes opens with a tour of Hitler’s favorite Bavarian alpine retreat, the Kehlsteinhaus, which sits at 1,834 meters elevation and was a gift from the Nazi Party on his 50th birthday. The allied forces later dubbed it the “Eagle’s Nest” and raced each other to be the first ones to reach it; now it’s a tourist destination with a beer garden.

EVERY DAY [IT] WOULD RECEIVE HUNDREDS OF TOURISTS ATTRACTED AS MUCH BY / THE SPECTACULAR VIEW AS BY THE SOMEWHAT UNWHOLESOME ATTRACTION /               ATTRACTED AS MUCH BY THE VIEW AS BY AN ATTRACTION / HUNDREDS OF TENS /              OF AMERICANS AND GERMANS CLEANING OUT THE GIFT SHOP OR ADMIRING / THE LARGE ROOM WITH GRAY GRANITE WALLS OF TENS / <ATTRACTED BY THE VIEW> / THE LARGE ROUND ROOM WITH THE WALLS OF STONE OF GRAY GRANITE THAT HE CROSSED HAD / ONCE SERVED AS THE CONFERENCE ROOM FOR ADOLF HITLER THE FÜHRER / NOTHING HAD CHANGED SINCE 1945 NEITHER THE BEAMS NOR THE /                                                     CHIMNEY / FROM THE WINDOWS ONE TAKES IN THE SPECTACULAR PANORAMAS OF THE BAVARIAN OBERSALZBERG / THE VIEW WAS SPECTACULAR THE EAGLE’S NEST WAS NEVER TOUCHED NEVER DEMOLISHED

A double-attraction defines the aura of the Eagle’s Nest; on the one hand there’s the view the visitor takes in and on the other, the realization that it’s the same view Hitler himself took in with his own eyes. Both view and attraction become inseparable from one another when the titillation of violence frames the view. The text continues: “THE EAGLE’S NEST WAS NEVER TOUCHED BY ALLIED BOMBS NOR DEMOLISHED ONLY ITS /                                       OCCUPANTS HAD CHANGED” It’s the formal unity of ATTRACTION which will determine Joseph’s approach; either a stein of beer is a stein of beer in a beer garden and or a stein of beer is an entanglement in Nazi fantasy. “NOTHING HAS CHANGED NEITHER BEAMS NOR THE             /
CHIMNEY” we are reminded again some twenty pages later, the architectonics of both the poem and historical determination having meanwhile grown more set, more fixed.

The book’s third section, titled The Surveyors of the Sky, introduces the role of surveillance, a recurring motif or even organizing principle of Joseph’s books, announcing the potential for state violence with every turn. Here the narration is less discerning, cycling through identifiable objects and creature-life before also re-sampling images and phrases that appeared in the first section, but in an unsequenced presentation, as if at random, as sensory inputs uploaded onto the page in the order of their appearance (“         THINGS / ALL AROUND”). Then a shift is signaled toward desire, or rather its transformation into an automatic subject, the screen reading the face reading the screen for what it wants on the screen: “I WOULD LIKE TO BE / HELPED CHOOSING                                / IT CAN BE READ OFF MY FACE HOLLYWOOD ALWAYS WANTS TO FUCK IT CAN BE READ OFF ITS FACE.”

The last section of the book, magma all photos represent scenes out of the film, is made up entirely of titles from a porn catalogue, registering in non-hierarchical list-form the production of visual desires. Beyond pointing out the facile equivalence fascism = pornography, we come to see what the aesthetic theorist Olivier Quintyn refers to as their family resemblance: we recognize in the “impoverished rhetoric of their usages and assignment fixed identity traits, by which they are recognizable and nomenclatured, as a matrix of enjoyments that return only the categorical persistence of the same.” On and on the roundabout without turn-offs.

In one sense La Tête au carré, Joseph’s 2010 book, evokes facial rearrangement, and in another the idea of one’s head framed in a box, the dominant function of which is Elsa (Engin léger de Surveillance Aérienne [Light implement of aerial surveillance]). She’s personified as a femme fatale who is unerringly trained on and for identification and elimination. There are several other points of plot positioned in and around Elsa’s movements: debates around biometric data collection in draft legislation of the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés [National Commission on Computing and Freedom]), assessments of the current state of poetry, the Qibya massacre of 1953, a character named Taser Bunker followed by a “message” from the designer responsible for coming up with the namesake “less-lethal” weapon, language games and lists, Gillette razor ads, emails and other notes and asides, making for psychogeographic, non-settled reading, as if a mad poet and an OSINT researcher had crashed into one another and jumbled up their files while on the run from the cops and authorities—and now, on second look, the plot grows thick with ideological determinations and the production of new subjectivities.

It has been said (including at the International Court of Justice) that the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza by Israel’s armed forces, Tsahal, with U.S. and European-supplied weapons, is the first genocide to be live-streamed for anyone with an internet connection to witness.

It has been said (including at the International Court of Justice) that the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza by Israel’s armed forces, Tsahal, with U.S. and European-supplied weapons, is the first genocide to be live-streamed for anyone with an internet connection to witness. A horrifying reality in which acts of violence perpetually double themselves, once to prove the killing machine is real, and again to show that it is; producing ugly enjoyments, as Nadia Bou Ali has termed them, one after another for consumption and reproduction.

 

Subject: 1 court texte

Tu peux faire circuler ce texte comme tu veux, comme tu peux, avec un rappel (ce que je dis au-dessus) si nécessaire. 

Amitiés, 

Nathalie

 

In the Gaza Strip

to Manuel Joseph

In the Gaza Strip, the roads are not impracticable and the boulevard that runs alongside the sea is not potholed, it runs alongside the sea.

There are water, potable water, electricity, and toilets. In the Gaza Strip, there are toilets for use, which are not crowded, there are personal hygiene kits and every person has their own bathroom, each person is not treated like some piece of filth.

Internet access was not cut, for the bombardments were nowhere near constant, and there are nearly no energy shortages. So, vital information is accessible and people are even able to call for first aid.

Likewise, since the banks have not been destroyed, as much money as one wants is withdrawable.

The residents of the Gaza Strip were not displaced, they continue to live in their non-bombed out, non-burned down houses, in the same way that their vehicles are non-bombed out, non-burned out vehicles. All was not flattened.

Nor, therefore, can it be said that cemeteries were razed and that the bodies of different tombs were mixed up together—and no one filmed themself dedicating the bombing of a building to their daughter for her birthday.

By the same token, the sick or wounded were not buried alive in the courtyard of the hospital where they were hospitalized, nor was fire set to the remains of supplies for the non-dead residents of a non-devastated neighborhood, almost naked civilians kneeling in the street were not filmed and when some bodies happen to be exhumed in the Gaza Strip, one digs a potter’s field near the beach, then sends for a power shovel to cover them up again with sand during the funeral.

Births take place in Gaza: the hospitals are non-bombed out hospitals, there is an abundance of medications and the newborn are not at risk of dying. The children are not amputated without anesthesia and no one asks to have their legs reattached.

When it is nice out, people go to the beach not to wash but to bathe and play ball, even if the tents are not burning hot like furnaces and the air is not like fire.

In their offices, on the grounds, in their homes, in the camps, in their cars, the residents eat: the bakeries were not targeted and none are not left.

As a result, the children do not have to go wander around in search of bread without finding any and no one distracts themself by kneading together seed or ground animal feed with which to make ersatz dough.

They subsist on favas, tuna, and cans of beans, for example, and if there are no more favas, tuna, and cans of beans they gather herbs, so as not to be reduced to eating fodder.

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Jonathan Larson is a translator-poet living in Brooklyn. His translations of Francis Ponge and Friederike Mayröcker were put out by The Song Cave and his translation of Nathalie Quintane’s The Cavalier will be put out by Winter Editions next year. Recent poems have appeared at Conjunctions online and he is currently working on a book project titled Negatives as well as more translations of Nathalie Quintane, Christophe Tarkos, and Manuel Joseph. He can be found on twitter @murmurmuring and at his website https://translavations.tumblr.com/