Farewells To Justice God Politics And The

Farewells To Justice, God, Politics And The Europe Essay, Research Paper

Farewells To Justice, God, Politics And The European Way Heinrich Boll, Women In A River Landscape, translated from the German by David McLintock, London: Secker & Warburg, 1988. (Originally published in 1985.) Albert Camus, The Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien , N.Y.: Modern Library, 1958. (Originally published in 1956.) Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Execution Of Justice, translated from the German by John E. Woods, N.Y: Random House, 1989. (Originally published in 1985.) Graham Greene, Dr. Fischer Of Geneva Or The Bomb Party, London: Penguin Books, 1980. by David Cook Four career ending works for the end of the post-Nietzschean festival. Four clearing- house works for the new Europe bringing to culmination centuries of reflection over four grand signifiers; morals, justice, politics and the European way. Four “pleasant” reads. Each work is cast in the style of Camus’ The Fall with its metaphysic of reversals of guilt and innocence in the self-laceration of the judge-penitent. Each work presents “superior” judgments tinged with a moralism of those who “fornicated and read the papers”; a moralism that constantly moves out of sight in the spaces of old Europe – whether this be Amsterdam in the case of Camus or Switzerland for Greene and Durrenmatt or Boll’s Bonn. Works that are at once “more real than real” in order to become “more just than just” in the melancholic blend of “cynical reason/wisdom” and of “experience” of the “superior” suicides that litter each of the landscapes. Suicides and murders that constitute the sacrificial ground of old Europe’s culture: the price demanded each time the old values appear when the landscape must be cleared leaving corpses as the sign of the transvaluation of values of the late twentieth century “supermen”. Four novels then, that are after-images of worlds that have imploded, where the grand signifiers shine brightest before their relegation to the depths of ressentiment of the museum culture of old Europe. Each work is also in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade: this time not on the sexual axis, for sex has disappeared into rape and boredom, but in the “discharge of justice” of the inverted “heroes” of each novel. The exchanges, no longer fluid but withered, that at the limit eviscerate the subject who disintegrates under the stress of morals and values constituting the debris of old Europe at the vanishing point. Greene’s novel, similar to the other three works, revolves around the suicide of the wealthy and powerful Dr. Fischer, a “toothpaste millionaire”, to quote the promo at the end of the book, who through a succession of dinner parties “plays” the “host” with his guests, the “parasites”, offering “prizes” to those who fulfill his wishes. At the “final party” each guest is asked to choose a party cracker one of which purportedly is a bomb. There isn’t a bomb, the wasteland ends after all with a whimper not a bang, through a dramatic play with Fischer’s son-in-law Jones who, from time to time, is called Smith to keep the reader abreast of his “everyman” qualities. Jones, an employee of the local chocolate factory, represents, as well, what is left of dialectical opposites and true love which is ended appropriately enough in the demise of Fischer’s daughter on the Swiss ski hills. Fischer, as is only fitting in these reversed Christian myths, at the end of the party takes his own life and Jones returns to everyday life. The metaphysical allusions and the parable aspect of Greene’s faith are, of course, quite evident in the novel. Fischer is a reversed Christ figure giving away his money on the basis of hate rather than love. This is an updated version of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals; a form of human experimentation, a mutant science of morals, that results in a hardly surprising failed transvaluation of the morals and greed of Swiss high society. The novel ends very much like Camus’ The Plague, with things back to normal, the party being over for the day. Greene undoubtedly viewed this as a call to moral revival but the novel stands much easier as a demonstration of morals as the game of the wealthy which like the television docudrama, creates temporary extermination spaces to play out a drama. Once the “event” happens it disappears immediately; morals or God if you will only as post mortems for those interested in the debris after the crash: old Europe’s leftovers providing the carrion for the next cultural suicide. Durrenmatt’s The Execution of Justice, as with many of Durrenmatt’s earlier works, expels justice to the realm outside the “cave” where the “just judges”, to use a phrase from Camus, finally preside. Again the theme of the necessary expulsion of each site, its destruction as a space in the same way as in The Visit, in which the old woman destroys the town. Here the call to justice exterminates not only the inhabitants but goes beyond to the extermination of events and values themselves. The novel’s plot turns on the reversal of the judgment of guilt of Dr. H. C. Kohler who had shot and killed Professor Winter in a restaurant. The murder was “witnessed” by the Chief of police amongst other diners. Kohler, of course a wealthy Swiss, hires lawyer Spat, who is best known as counsel for the local whores, to investigate the possibility that he, Kohler, did not commit the murder in question. The story then plays out this possibility which ends in the acqui