One of the X-MEN

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Giorgio Agamben, the Melancholy Angel in The Man Without Content

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prologue

I was immediately attracted to The XMEN for obvious reasons, as anyone who has perused the Public Domain site will attest (or who have read a few of these reviews). The X-Men were, after all, called the 'Uncanny' X-Men in Stan Lee's first Incarnation of them, the 'uncanny' having a special place in my 'vast, cold, and indifferent' (H.G. Wells' description on page one of the Martians about to invade earth) heart--and of course the 'X' standing for the chiasmatic inversions which we have met with more than once on our allegorical journeys through these reviews. (and something else which just occurs to me: the insignia for the X-Men, the big steel circle with an X inside, functions mytho-semiologically to signify in the same archaic way that the National Socialist swastika, AND in the same way that those omnipresent fans turning lazily signify--the ominous energy fields of the eternal return.)

But what immediately endeared me to the film was the (no , not the girl in the live-flesh fish outfit...neat eyes though) the second scene taking place in, of all places, Meridian Mississippi, the same area I was born and raised. That scene features the moment of discovery of a young mutant girl who has disovered that her touch kills because it sucks all the life force out of the person she touches. Basically, her power is that she can take other folks' powers, while she herself is blank (-much like, I must say, the generations of the south who have become particularly vulnerable to the predations of upper echelon predations by certain sectors of corporate americabut of couse that's all old hat, nobody wants to hear it...frankly, I'd rather turn into a mutant myself, given a choice between that and working at the local Mcdonald's or the Casino down the street).

So, ok, like, that's pretty cool and everything (well, for me anyway and I know you're happy when everything is cool and everything for me, right?) but that one scene (don't get anxious, we're going to start at the very beginning soon-which of course there never IS, but I realize you need re-assurance in these troubling and confusing times of overwhelming prosperity and grief) reminds me of 'The Meridian,' an essay by Paul Celan. Now, for those of you who don't know any better, Paul Celan was a poet of amazing power, density, and depth, who committed suicide in Paris. He was taken to the Auswitz concentration camp during world war two with his mother and was the only survivor. 'The Meridian' was a speech given to a literary group in 1958. I will quote selectively from the speech:

Now, I want you to keep that in mind (we'll come back to it, in fact we can never leave it) as we go to the opening sequence in 'The X-Men' which takes place in Poland in 1944, in a concentration camp which we can presume to be Auschwitz. There, we see a group of Jews being loaded into the camp. A young boy becomes separated from his family. As he tried to get back to them, with the gates closing, with German soldiers holding him back, the small boy begins to exert an uncanny magnetic force on the gates of the camp, partly shredding them and threatening to pull himself in midair from the grasp of the soldiers until he is knocked unconscious by one of the soldiers. Here we see the birth of Magneto, one of the...well, you can't exactly call him a BAD guy so let's just say that he forms a dyad with Patrick Stewart (almost like two sides of single personality in fact)(1). Um, maybe we could even call it a Judeo-Christian dialectic if we were so inclined, which, given the framing of the movie we HAVE to be so inclined (and oh yes, there is an end frame also: at the end of the movie, Magneto is caught and locked away in an isolated, plastic cell, suspended in the middle of this great void. One is instantly reminded of Rudolf Hess, private secretary to Hitler and deputy leader of the Nazi party who parachuted into Scotland ostensibly to negotiate a peace treaty and was imprisoned for the remainder of his life in Spandau prison in Berlin. Originally imprisoned in the fortress-like prison with seven other prisonersHess being the seventhby 1966 he was the only one left, until committing suicide in 1987.)

So, given the the framing of the movie, let's rehearse the plot, such as it is, for a bit. In the New World Order, shall we say, 'mutants' have become of some concern to a politician who wishes to make a name for himself. He makes the claim that they are a danger to 'normals,' having uncanny powers. being able to walk through walls being one that he mentions specifically, the whole world becoming porous to the mutants, private property becoming a thing of the past (on no! the dire threat of a communism due to some sort of biological propensities not racial typologies this time but a more broad based system of superiorities) . He wants to have processes of registration which will track them. And of course we in the audience know what the next step will be, since this is a rather thin allegory for the fate of 'non-normals' in Germany in WW II.

However, Magneto and his somewhat animalistic pals (Sabertooth, who is kinda lionlike and the toad guy, and the fish girl....I don't want to start a fight here or anything but...jeez, that's the same kinda conjunction with the jews that is, beastialitythat the Nazis were aiming at...lots of chiasmatic inversions in this movie that seem to wind up at the same old place now that I think about it...except that the jewish guy, Magneto, is sorta the nazi-even has some spiffy jackboots, raising his hand in a sort of nazi salute which sets the metal flying around him. and of course he wants to exterminate all the normals. After all, turnabout is fair play).

(At this point we should also make a mention of family values. The films 'Gladiator' and 'The Patriot' were all about family values combined with revenge and resentment. Certainly the type of movie represented by 'The X-Men' could as well be the ex-men I suppose struggles with the concept of 'family,' substituting affinity groups perhaps. I am reminded of another mutant film, 'Fly II', starring Jeff Blum wherein he asks the rhetorical question, "What politics do insects have?" and he answers emphatically, 'They don't have ANY!", meaning himself as the combinatorical fly-human.

Presumably we could answer along with Agamben that what he meant was that we have entered a new era of biopolitics, bare life against (and hence subsumed into) powers and principalities. And in the case of mutants, perhaps it is the case that they are sui generis, one of a kind, like mules, unable to reproduce and so, Sparta like, having to form military type units. Nice uniforms those X-Folks had.)

Well, it appears that there is some conflict among the mutant population about how to handle this attack by the normal senator. Patrick Stewart is the head of another group of mutants who are trying to harness their powers through a rather elite school and who apparently wish to live in harmony with the 'normals' although how that would be accomplished is not quite clear. (Stewart is Professor Charles Xavier, a mutant with great telepathic abilities.) In biology, mutants are rarely successful in their habitat and when they ARE successful, the mutations tend to be very successful and drive out others. So maybe Professor Xavier had a more subtle breeding-and-weeding program in mind. At any rate, I'm not at all sure that the ultimate aims of a Professor Xavier and a Magneto can ever be that far apart.

Much of the early byplay in the movie concerns Wolverine, a good/bad guy (he seems to be the only beast-type on the non-jewish team, therefore his is seen as more marginal) who has these metal knives pop out of his knuckles when he's under stress. He seems to be a sort of transit point between team A and team B. As it turns out, he's somewhat of a cyborg, being operated/experimented on and having basically a skeleton installed of this special metal, such a thing only being possible because of his mutant recuperative powers. Wolverine has been scooped up by the White Team but Magneto shows an extraordinary interest in getting hold of him, presumably because of his neat metal innards, but that is never made clear. It IS clear that Wolverine has been experimented on, in the tradition of the Nazi experiments on human subjects-and in fact, the flashbacks that we see of Wolverine undergoing the operation of which he has no memoryhave the kind of dark ambiance that we associate in the movies with the Nazis (and also Darth Vader from Star Wars, which amounts to the same thing).

For the mutant, the 'state of exception' (2) is the rule. In the state of exception, 'bare life,' or "the interlacing of politics and life...so tight that it cannot easily be analysed" (3) as Giorgio Agamben terms it, becomes the fertile ground of the uncanny, with its delays and relays and apparitional revenants. And baldly speaking, it is also the ground of trauma, that wounding which requires the injury to be temporally displaced, allowing a ghostly future appearance of apparently groundless symptomologies, barely susceptible to any nosology, and instead forming the very grounding of most twentieth century -ologies and -isms; here traumatic re-enactment and an indeterminate Derridean hauntology (his word not mine) form the groundwork for twenty first century 'bare life' aka mutant life aka cyborg life aka biotechnopolitical life.

This tight interlacing of politics and life in the interregnum of the rapidly approaching exceptional/extreme life of the 'mutant' which we are all becoming, finds its most powerful ally in the merging of all representational agencies in the computer and their projections in our dream-caverns we call the movie theater. There, the most extreme and exceptional event can be acted out with impunity, tried on for size. There, the merging of subject and object takes on rhapsodic qualities hardly imagined by even its most fervent early admirers. There, events are held in suspension, an indeterminate gel, waiting for the precipitate of the experiment to sediment into an 'object'.

Where the 'experiment' becomes the most extreme statement in 'real' life of these mergings and exchanges, the special effects movie (and let's face it all movies are the result of, quite literally, 'special effects') becomes the furthest speculative moment of the experiment.

And hovering, still, at this late date but beginning to slightly dim as all its survivors die off (and with unforseeable consequences), is the mega-traumatic event known as the Holacaust and the second world war, the recognition event of the traumatic loop which it simultaneously acts out and begins to sublimate via 'entertainment' into new unknown, and possibly unknowable, directions.

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Wolverine on his metal knuckle knives

At one point in the film, upon being prodded by Magneto as to what he wanted, Professor Xavier comments 'I'm looking for hope.'

How different from that the oft quoted comment by Walter Benjamin in one of his many letters that: "There is hope...but not for us."

Magneto (and perhaps Hamlet) would definitely understand the 'romantic pessimistic' place from whence Benjamin utters that statement. Those dark strands of star-crossed fate are best expressed by Fredrich Nietzsche's exposition of the desire for destruction, change and becoming that can move in two opposing directions, the less felicitous one being "the tyrannical will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. [...] romantic pessimism, the last GREAT event in the fate of our culture.' (4)

Perhaps the pessimism of the future belongs to the mutant, the cyborg, a Dyonysian pessimism, hardly separable from it’s romantic cousin and being a great mimic of optimism up until the very last stroke of the clock.

"Thread suns

above the grey-black wilderness.

A tree-

tunes in to light's pitch: there are

still songs to be sung on the other side

of mankind."

paul celan

NOTES

1) "Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two sided-formation? One aspect founded by murder and the social bond made up of murder's guilt-ridden atonement, with all the projective mechanisms and obsessive rituals that accompany it; and another aspect, like a lining, more secret still and invisible, non-representable, oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity toward the fagilityboth threatening and fusionalof the archaic dyad, toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion?" Julia Kristeva/Powers of Horror/p 58

2) the state of exception or emergency comes from the national socialist jurist Carl Schmitt...and also from Walter Benjamin's notion of the extreme. this ... dyad fractalizes and forms a chiasmos all the way through these concerns, invaginating itself into its opposite and continuing to confuse at every other step.

3) "One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. [...] And when natural life is wholly included in the polisand this much has, by now, already happenedthese thresholds pass [....] beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man." and: "When life and politics, originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare lifebegin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception." pp 131/148, Giorgio Agamben, homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

The 'camp' is the extreme limit of 'bare life', exception, and emergency.

4) from "Nietzsche Contra Wagner". This quote bears uneasily on Benjamin's 'destructive character': "The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

The destructive character is yound and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away the traces of our own age; it cheers because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed eradication, of his own condition."