A Room of One's Own

I have signed a contract to lease an apartment from a couple in Paris.

She is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and he is a professor of modern literature with a side expertise in the philosophy of Hegel, a man whose work is so dense, so sprawling, that the only way to truly understand it is to travel back in time and force Hegel to attend multiple sessions with a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan, sometimes known as the 'French Freud', worked in the muck of the unconscious. Specifically, he worked in the gap between what we really, truly, desire and the language we concoct in an attempt to articulate that desire but which so often attaches to all manner of practical things that can be described only to miss the source.

As I climbed a series of near vertical steps leading up to the Sacre Cœur, only to descend on the other side having made a longcut out of a shortcut, while on my to the apartment to meet both the analyst and the professor, it reminded me of the terrible time at university where I went straight from being berated by a professor to see a psychiatrist for the very first time in my life.

The good grades just weren't coming on either score, for roughly the same reason.

Now an analyst and a professor held the literal key to my possible dream. Lacan would have had a field day. I imagined how our conversation might go as I walked.

'I would like to rent your apartment,' I would tell them.

'Would you?' she would ask.

'Yes I would like to rent your apartment.'

'Are you sure?'

And the answer, of course, would be no. Because what I really want is to write a novel, and I need a place to write it. Although that isn't quite true either. I want to have written a novel. Well, I want to imagine a world that is both more interesting and more alive than mine and I would do this through writing, or having written, a novel. Which is to say, now I come to think of it, that this isn't really about the novel at all it is about the life I have created for myself; the conditions I have imposed on it, that were were imposed on it by others. And by I, naturally, I mean my unconscious subject, the me that is not me, which exists beyond the ego and therefore beyond the grasp of self-awareness that the ego offers so falsely in its first-person pronouns and illusions of explanatory rigour.

Wow, I remember thinking as I walked, these Lacanian psychoanlysts are really good.

And then I got to the gigantic stairway where one of the final fight scenes in John Wick: Chapter 4 was filmed and thought fuck yeah as I imagined Keanu Reeves kicking Hegel down several flights of stone.

I did not mention any of this when I met the owners at their apartment, obviously, because that would be intolerably mad. But I think they are the kind of people who can pick up the scent of a person, spiritually, and seemed to approve at least.

The contract I signed was entirely in French which itself seemed quite Lacanian. I possessed not the the language to fully understand the subject that sat beneath it and could process only glimpses of its true form: the monthly rent owed, for example, or my obligations as locataire. Something about a requirement to read Hegel every other week.

As much as I poke fun, it has been beyond interesting to pay just a little bit of attention to the workings of my subconscious while I am away from ordinary life. That is almost tautological, for the subconscious exists beyond attention – otherwise it would simply be conscious – but I mean to say I am noticing the products of its churning. If the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way suddenly spat out a Toyota Hi-Lux you might wonder why.

I went down for a nap the other day, as is my wont, and while I hovered in a state not quite asleep and not quite awake the mechanism by which the protagonist in my novel moves beyond the confines of the opening chapter and into the story proper suddenly emerged. These two parts of the work had always been clear to me but for years I could never figure out how to move him from one to the other. And that how was somewhat important to the way it all hangs together, you see. And then, there it was. It was like I directly witnessed this miracle notion bloomp up from the deepwater of my unconscious in real time, as if some unidentified logic tied a life vest to it from beneath and then pulled the inflation cord.

That it happened does not necessarily surprise me. I have long understood the brain to be a finite resource. We never have more neurons and synapses in the thing then we do between toddler-dom and early adulthood, when the brain sets about cutting much of it away. This process continues into our early 20s.

A baby, and then the child it becomes, learns an entire language, modes of being in the world and a thousand other influences in what Lacan called the 'symbolic order' – customs, rituals, laws, norms, mores, culture and traditions, mediated via that language – with the power of her synaptic supremacy. But by our teenage years, with space at a premium and a growing need for specialisation, the brain begins its program of synaptic pruning. Some studies suggest there are 40 per cent fewer neurons in the adult brain compared to a baby, though the types of cells and the structures change, too. Us adults have far more glial cells, for example, and these sort of act like the neuron's Praetorian guard.

This developmental pruning – programmed in all mammals, at least, and distinct from the degradation that happens in older age – happens on a 'use it or lose it' basis. If the brain must make room, the brain must make room. And so, we can make room, too.

One of my pathologies is work. I just filed another piece for the paper back home, even though I am on unpaid leave for three months so that I might try and write a novel. But even this pace is relaxing compared to what I was attempting in Australia, and so when an idea fell out, or up, from that mysterious place at the bottom of my mind I was not surprised that it happened.

I was just delighted to sense it, almost to watch it, so clearly. There was an attempted nap and then an idea, loosed from its moorings. Alas, do not ask me how much of the damned thing I have written since I arrived in France. That is work, sure, but not nearly as important as the thinking. And now I have a place to become ensconced, thanks to the analyst and the professor who sound as if they have crawled directly from a fable.

They told me about an apartment they rent in Venice, on occasion, from a Parisien couple who are obsessed with European cinema. This couple will only rent to others of a like mind and, I am told, there is often a test. Can you imagine it? A pop quiz on French New Wave cinema or you don't get to stay in Venice.

I think, in a previous life, I must have failed that test so badly and that is how I ended up spending so much of this one in Boonah.

But what test could a Hegelian scholar and Lacanian analyst possibly administer?

None that I could answer.

One wants me to know Hegel and the other to know myself.

My sweethearts, I don't even know the address.

Addenda

No Kings!

Look, the United States of America is made a perfectly fine start or reasserting its original No Kings mandate but few did it with such panache as the French, who kicked the whole thing off on 14 July 1789 by storming the Bastille prison that held political prisoners without identifiable charge, turfed the monarchy three years later and executed the last of the kings and queens the year after that, in 1793.

Ah, it was a different time. Some of that mood remains on La Fête Nationale, or 14 July as it is simply called locally. We Anglophones know it as Bastille Day, of course, and even though I had no firm plans I knew I had to get out and about with the people to celebrate the republic. And, being a yes man now, I decided to head straight to the source: the Eiffel Tower. The tower is the centre of attention on the night of Bastille Day. 11pm, to be inexact. The fireworks were supposed to start at 11pm but it was closer to 11.07pm when they fired. How very French! Well have a nap. And zen fire ze pyrotechnics!

I took two Metro lines on the way to the Champs de Mars. The second was impossibly full. I waited for two trains to pull up and leave, each stuffed to the gills with people, before diving into a third and praying the crowd, now a single, writhing entity, would accept me into their mass. They did. I took up my allotted position somewhere near the end of a carriage, sutured by sweat and physics to 35 other people all at once, and inhabited a single consciousness with all of them for the remainder of the trip which, thankfully, was only a few stops across the Seine.

Emerging from the station on the western edge of the Champs de Mars, on the other side of imposing the military school, was an event in itself. People were in the streets like those animation videos of red blood cells we all had to watch during biology class. I saw a man unironically wearing a red beret and white and blue striped shirt. The Champs de Mars itself was, by 9pm, completely fenced off. I was not expecting this. I don't know what I was expecting. My plan had been to find a street cutting horizontally across the (correct) view of the Eiffel Tower so I moved one back, behind the military school, with approximately 20,000 other people.

It ended up being a tremendous spot, if you discount the fact it still very occasionally operated as a serviceable road that cars would drive down, forcing the crowd to part. If my belly was any larger I might have been taken by a Renault.

And then, we were as one.

The display was impressive, and I'm really not a fireworks guy, but the real event was the collective mood. It felt nice. And even as I walked the 4km across the river and then some to link up with my Metro line away from the hordes, the feeling remained. I was home by 12.30am, 29,600 steps later.

All Plan, No Responsibility

There is so much to say about Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal's 20 page brochure, sans a single reference or citation but replete with its own provocations and threats to withhold funding from universities and arts bodies if they fail to respond to a wide-reaching definition of the problem that conflates certain kinds of criticism of the state of Israel with persecution of Jewish people everywhere. But it has probably already been said by people more clever than me.

It should go without saying, however, that firebombing a synagogue or a Jewish institution is scum behaviour. Harassing Jewish people going about their faith is scum behaviour. And that goes for all of us, including those who weaponise the very real terror of antisemitism against their fellow Jews. One example of antisemitism given under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) proposed definition Segal wishes us all to use is this: 'Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel'.

Well, I agree.

And yet when the observing world – that is anyone who can see for themselves what is happening in Gaza and now elsewhere in the aftermath of the horrific October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel – speaks out about the catalogue of atrocities they are told this, too, is antisemitic, forever linking the inhumane and increasingly authoritarian actions of the state of Israel to Jews everywhere.

As Dr Max Keiser from the Jewish Council of Australia said:

This document reads more like a blueprint for silencing dissent rather than a strategy to build inclusion. The report’s vague language around ‘antisemitic narratives’ or ‘affiliations’ , coupled with its emphasis on the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism, make the actions recommended dangerously unclear. Consistent with her past statements erroneously linking antisemitic attacks with Palestine solidarity protests, Segal seems fixated on driving a pro-Israel narrative and repressing legitimate criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This is not true and never has been true. It is a scandalous weaponisation of sophistry to protect a foreign power against even the most reputable form of scrutiny. Numerous are the occasions when Israel has denied what it has later been forced to concede because of audio-visual evidence. These are documented

Another example given by the proposed IHRA definition of antisemitism is the use of the ancient 'blood libel' claim. It is indeed a pernicious myth dating back to the Middle Ages but I have seen it used with abandon to wave away many of the crimes committed by the state of Israel, crimes for which the state and some of its key political power players including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and colleagues who have openly called for the destruction of Gaza are being asked to answer. There are arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court which itself has been accused of Blood Libel. The ICC!

Hate crimes are just that in Australia. They are crimes and they were before February this year when expanded definitions and offences were included to the statute, largely off the back of a string of terrifying attacks on Jewish targets – for reasons that appear to be a melange of convenient criminal scam and antisemitism – and the outrage of the community that followed.

Segal's pamphlet, produced at great cost and which promises a greater cost, is concerned about penalties, of course, but it also wants to go further than anyone of any race or minority or religious group has ever had the power to seriously suggest on such a large platform as the office of an envoy. I wonder what would have been the reaction if the much more quiet envoy on Islamophobia had reached the same conclusions and released them first?

I think the very first story I ever did for The Saturday Paper was about world first research by Victoria University which showed the way far-right groups were laundering their extremist talking points through the mainstream media, the largest purveyor of which is News Corporation Australia, and my former employer at The Australian – surprise! – went after me and and the paper with gusto for daring to put it in the headline. They threatened Victoria University as well, the management of which walked back the official findings of their researchers' work to avoid the implied pile-on. The work had not changed. The findings were never misrepresented but cowardise is funny thing. I've been one myself more times than I would like to count.

I left The Australian newspaper due to my own personal reckoning which was eventually accelerated by the events of the 2019 Christchurch massacre.

This is my way of saying: I am the first person to talk about the power of language to create a world with suffering in it. The consequences of antisemitism are abhorrent. The consequences of Islamophobia are abhorrent. The consequences of hatred are obscene. We need not look far to find the most tragic examples in recent memory.

Segal's wish list proposes a host of obscenities to address a real one and, if it were ever to be taken seriously by those in power, would amount to a failure that threatens to stoke the far-right forces that harbour virulent strains of antisemitic custom – she praised Elon Musk's almost cartoonishly antisemitic social platform X – and dismantle the institutions that, however bumbling, are designed to protect us from the forces of creeping illiberalism.

It is a plan that will stoke division, not heal it, particularly in circumstances where the world is told time and again that we are the ones who are sordid for witnessing the atrocities committed by Israel on an almost daily basis. It is barbaric, according to the actual Pope. I am not a complicated human being, I don't think. My heart turns over on itself when I see death and destruction. What can I say, I find it hard to see the bodies of any child in rubble. Let alone thousands of them and knowing there are thousands more. It is not that these images in isolation are the only kind of suffering I care about – another subtle trick of the IHRA definition – but that they seem so senseless and could stop tomorrow were it not for the designs of Israel's leaders.

On that score, not wishing to see the slaughter of children in particular, I used to think I belonged to a unity ticket.

What a sick void it is to confront, for certain now, that this common humanity is not so common after all.

On This Note, Please Read Genocide Scholar Omer Bartov

The whole piece in the NYT should be required reading. Emphasis below is mine.

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.

To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.

This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out.