The theme of the new issue of Wespennest is Eigensinn – literally ‘the sense of self’, translatable into English as obstinacy, wilfulness or idiosyncrasy.
However, the meaning of Eigensinn is best understood in contrast with Gemeinsinn, literally the ‘sense of community’. In an exchange of letters, Karin Nungeßer and Wolfram Ette explore this conflict between the insistence of the individual on their own will, and the dictates of sociality. Nungeßer asks why obstinacy or defiance, having been the purview of the Left at least since the 1960s, has more recently been exercised primarily by the political Right. This shift can also be seen on the level of power, with office holders and Silicon Valley oligarchs celebrating disruption as their modus operandi.
Nungeßer and Ette identify key difference between Left and Right disruption: the former breaks the rules with a view to establishing fairer and better ones for the whole of society, while the latter breaks them without concern for the community. The current type of charismatic leader, Ette argues, is not even obligated to their own rules, but wields power with erratic wilfulness. The powerless masses are fascinated and seduced by this, because the unprecedented concentration of power and money in the hands of a very few has detached the individual so utterly from the common interest.
Nungeßer cites Gisèle Pelicot as an example of a good wilfulness: as a survivor of unspeakable abuse, Pelicot obstinately refuses to comply with expectations placed upon her by society at large – but with the aim of establishing a new culture of solidarity.
Radical consistency
Obstinacy, writes Ilija Trojanow, can be seen as teetering between the courageous refusal to submit to the status quo and the intransigent refusal to respond to criticism, or to revise one’s views in the face of new evidence. The obstinate stick to their principles with a radical consistency; they are unwavering to the point of rigidity. Noam Chomsky’s scepticism toward the common sense of public opinion led to an absolute commitment to freedom of speech, going so far as to defend the right of a Holocaust denier to claim that gas chambers were not used to exterminate Jews. For Chomsky, if freedom of speech is a right, it must be a right everywhere and for everyone.
Without an obstinate principledness of this kind, all of history would be nothing but submission to power, writes Trojanow. At the same time, Chomsky’s suspicion of public consensus led him to side with Jeffrey Epstein, overlooking that his accusers were not simply rehearsing ideology, but speaking for the powerless victims of real crimes. Trojanow concludes: ‘Obstinacy does not produce the truth; it makes the freedom of knowledge possible.’
Climbing trees for justice
Gisela Steinlechner guides us through Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, a tale of the childish refusal of a father’s authority that becomes a life of determined independence. Because he doesn’t want to eat the snails served for dinner, the titular character climbs a tree and vows to stay there forever – abdicating all feudal privileges and all participation in the family and society into which he was born.
His perch, however, provides him with new privileges: that of perspective, of new insights into the ways of the world, into the lives of the poor who are dependent on the forest, into the injustices and destructions imposed upon them and upon nature by a cruel societal system. This allows him to develop the concept of a new society that is just and in which all living beings, including trees, can live in dignity.
Steinlechner traces a line from Calvino’s tale to the environmental activists of the 1990s and 2020s, who climbed trees in acts of resistance to the violence of the timber industry and capitalism at large. Usually very young, these people were driven by a ‘wilful perseverance’ in the service of political aims risked their lives for their convictions. Both Calvino’s fiction as well as these real acts of resistance highlight ‘the relevance and reach of individual responsibility toward society, nature, the planet as a whole.’
The wilfulness of Francis Bacon
‘Only too much is enough’ was one of Francis Bacon’s mottos. Uwe Schütte takes this to be not only an expression of the painter’s lifestyle excesses but an encapsulation of his idiosyncratic fascination with sacrifice. Memories of the spectacle of human sacrifice, which in early human history served as the guarantor of social stability, are still stored in our bodies and neuroreceptors, and it is this deep imprinting that Bacon wants to connect to with his work.
Gruesomely suffering bodies, mouths open in screams of pain, the body as meat, crucifixion after crucifixion – these images are not to be read as a critical engagement with Christianity, but as an attempt to address the sacrificial violence underlying our humanity.
Schütte looks to Georges Bataille, whose works Bacon studied, for a philosophical exploration and celebration of sacrifice, excess and expenditure, such as in the potlatch ritual. Schütte finds echoes of the destruction of value as luxurious squander in Bacon’s wilful destruction of his own works, as well as in the destruction of his own body with alcohol and violent sex.
Bacon sought for himself and for the recipients of his paintings nothing short of the bodily sensation of our origins in slaughter and pain. The sacrificial drive, Schütte suggests, is still with us today in sublimated form in such phenomena as cancel culture, which creates social cohesion by eliminating wayward individuals from the community.
Review by Millay Hyatt