About the author:
Rui Eduardo Paes is a rare example of something rare: a journalist whose work is as essential and informative as it is well-researched and passionate. - Dan Warburton (Wire, Paris Transatlantic)
Music critic and writer free-lancer. Chief-editor of the jazz and improvised music online magazine JAZZ.PT, after six years of editions in paper. Artistic director of the festival Jazz no Parque, produced by Serralves Foundation. Author of nine books about music mixed with multimedia, politics and queer theory. Collaborative work with Culturgest and the recording labels Clean Feed and Shhpuma. Co-founder, with Carlos "Zíngaro", of the artists association Granular, and member of its direction for 11 years, until 2013. Co-founder of the Ernesto de Sousa Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation / Luso-American Foundation / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and member of its permanent jury for 20 years, until the last edition in 2013. Former assessor of the ACARTE Service / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's board of directors.
This is the first chapter, "Gilles Deleuze and the posining of Beethoven", translated in English:
We are experiencing interesting times in the
history of anarchist thinking. The avant-garde in this field has gained the
designation of Post-Anarchism due to having internalised contemporary critical reflections
such as those proposed by philosophers in the post-structuralist school, in
particular Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
At a time when Anarchy no longer needs to be adverse
to the divine, when we may encounter a flourishing Christian anarchist movement,
defending the return to a savage state, and an anarchist Paganism, with
incursions into Shamanism and ritual recourse to narcotic substances, these “new
persons” (as the Russian Nihilists of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries first got identified with the term surviving to identify their
intellectual descendants) have delighted in the discovery of occultism and all
its speculative potentials.
There is thus the clear pleasure that Christian
Kerslake found in one of the first texts written by Deleuze, published in 1946,
when the author was just 21 years of age. This represents the preface to an obscure
book written by a physician and occultist in the Romantic period, of whom we
today hear so little reference, one Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, an Austrian
of Italian origins.
“Mathesis: Studies on Anarchy and the Hierarchy
of Knowledge” provides the title to this introduction, immediately leading to
the suspicion of something other than a prior anarchist influence on the French
philosopher. While the term mathesis
universalis was advanced by the rationalist Descartes in order to designate
a science capable of explaining everything, we may nevertheless be certain that
its justifications prove platonic, theological and esoteric and it was within
this scope that Malfatti applied the term.
What the author wrote and what Deleuze himself
considered of “Mathesis” in this prose illuminates many aspects of his later
work Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Félix Guattari, such as the essay Difference
and Repetition and the concept of a «body without organs».
The fact remains that Gilles Deleuze would
never again mention Malfatti irrespective of applying the idea of mathesis in his essays on numerous
different occasions. Furthermore, he did not authorise the republishing of any
of the writings from his youth and a motive explaining the surprise of Kerslake.
Those had remained safeguarded from the majority of readers.
Indeed, Malfatti ended up playing an important role
in the secret societies of European occultism of the 19th century, among
the Martinists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati and Theosophists. As
a physician, he was a follower of the methods advocated by John Brown: all the therapies
involved the administration of drugs such as opium, arsenic, camphor, wine or cinchona
from Peru. It was not then rare to find, in the General Hospital of Vienna,
patients in extremely advanced states of drunkenness, stumbling along the
corridors or lying, prostrate in their beds…
Previously a theologian, Brown turned towards medicine
after having cured the gout he suffered from through the consumption of opium. He
put into practice with his patients the theory that the human organism functions
through a combination of external and internal stimuli with the symptoms of any
disease caused by imbalances in them. Recourse to opium simultaneously
functioned as a stimulant and a relaxant for the excitability of the body.
For somebody with a contemporary perspective, this
might appear strange. However, we need to take into account how two centuries
ago psychotropic substances were perceived as the best of panaceas and
commercially freely available and subject to prescription…
Not even the circumstances of their patients
dying along the way, whether through the lack of any more effective cure or
through an overdose, demotivated Brown and Malfatti from using those drugs and,
as the chronicles testify, both displayed behaviours typical to drug addicts. Indeed,
still furthermore, the latter became the clinic of preference for princes and
the bourgeois. And also by artists: his name is now best recognised as the
physician to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven than for any of his other
activities. Still better: as the physician who killed Beethoven.
However, we shall get there soon enough… For
the meanwhile, we need to be aware that the understanding prevailing in that
period was very different to that kind of moral judgement we might hand down
today. According to Schelling, the father of the then emerging natürphilosophie and also an inveterate smoker of Chinese pipes,
Brown «was the first to understand the uniquely genuine principles of all the
theories of organic nature». For example, those of «somnambulism» and «animal magnetism»,
which official medicine would later let fall by the wayside.
The «artificial fireworks» adopted by Malfatti to
stimulate the «bodies without organs» has experienced the longevity that we
know and encountered other defenders in philosophies of more recent influence,
such as the psychedelics Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, both, to a greater
or lesser extent influenced by the anarchist movements and, hence, by Romantic occultism.
Gilles Deleuze counts himself as among those radical thinkers that engaged in
experiments with drugs and thus joining a list that stretches back to the
post-Marxist Walter Benjamin and the anarchist Ernst Jünger in the final years of his life.
The orientalism of Leary and McKenna in the years
between the 1960s and the 1980s was already present in Malfatti over the course
of the years between 1790 and 1800, plunging into Hindu mysticism like few
other of his contemporaries and from which he derived the notion of a «hidden anatomy»
ordered according to polarities, powers and plans. Mathematical factors but from
an incredibly old, stretching back millennia, metaphysical mathematics.
The name Malfatti would prove the delight of
the hirsute bearded nihilists in their intentionally dirty clothing who, later,
would not rule out any means to assassinate the czar of proud Russia. In every
language, such is translatable as «Bad Deed» or «Badly Intentioned». Much gets
discussed around what really did happen. Might the enlightened doctor have
planned the death of Beethoven by poisoning, raising the dosage of arsenic in
the potions he would prepare him? Might this not have been a simple accident even
if foreseeable with such a dangerous medication? Might it even have been the composer
himself who exaggerated in the quantities ingested?
What nevertheless remains certain is that mathesis took the life of Beethoven. He,
at least so it would seem, was not actually infirm; he did however need some
kind of stimulation in order to compose and this was the role played by the occultist
physician. Arsenic contains aphrodisiac properties and these, when turned away
from the act of sex, thus when sublimated or “transcendentalised”, generate a
recognised creative potential. Beethoven was stimulated up to a level of absolute
non-excitability. In a certainway, he was symbolically deposed from his
conditions of genius.
The great irony to this story, which has Gilles
Deleuze as its mediator, stems from how another great name in music, the Zen anarchist
John Cage, sustained his entire musical theory on the negation of Beethoven. His
affirmation that the latter «was wrong» has become proverbial. And he was
wrong, in his opinion, because Beethoven defined sections of a composition by
harmonic means and Cage not only spurned any relevance to harmony but also had
a personal incapacity to deal with it.
Knowing the affinities between Post-Anarchism and
science fiction as well as the fantastic literature of writers like William
Burroughs, we have here all of the ingredients to imagine how Malfatti de
Montereggio was mandated by a Deleuze turned time traveller through magical
means, on the occasion of his death in 1995, to exterminate the person responsible
for the authoritarianism of harmony in music, Beethoven. Consider how this
would have made feasible the existence of a Satie, of a Webern and, of course,
the inventor of the prepared piano…
The secret imposed by the post-structuralist
thinker as regards his intellectual interconnections with the Italian born pre-nihilist
of Vienna might, in this context, be interpreted as indicating complicity in a crime.
It now remains to identify just who was the brains behind this Anarcho-esotericism
driven conspiracy. Hakim Bey? For all of the consequences that we might wish to
draw from this, the most mediatic of post-anarchists does have a criminal
record. He is a publicly assumed paedophile.
Mensagens
