by Emma Bell
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| Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), dir. Lars von Trier |
Lars
von Trier’s Dogville and Manderlay formed the first two segments
of a planned trilogy of ‘USA Films’, the third of which (Washington) has not yet been realised. The films tell the story of
Grace - a fiercely moral gangster’s daughter who tries to radically
reorganise the wretched conditions of the poor people she comes into contact
with, yet with tragic consequences. In Dogville she willingly becomes an
indentured labourer for a deeply impoverished town that initially protects her from gangsters, and in Manderlay she tries to liberate plantation workers still bonded into
slavery.
We can think about Dogville
and Manderlay as working through
political and moral problems that face the left in the West; and it is very
probable that they are not, as so many have claimed, ‘anti-American’. This thinkingfilmcollective
piece hopefully makes a good case for interpreting the films as critiques of European
- particularly leftist and liberal - moral ideals, and for a therapeutic reading of the film as exposing the paradoxical pains of ressentiment - or liberal guilt. The piece is based on interviews I did with von Trier and Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, with whom von
Trier collaborated on the photomontages that end the USA films. The interviews went
into much depth about von Trier’s work on America as a ‘metaphor’ and on Holdt’s
ideas about ‘liberal guilt’.
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| Lars von Trier and Jacob Holdt |
Dogville and Manderlay can
be analysed separately, as critiques of liberal guilt and the aftermath of slavery respectively.
But as a moral critique they are contingent. This is because together the films
explore the development of an individual’s moral ideal as effected by her socio-political
circumstances – in this instance, ostensibly ‘democratic’ systems of power.
Moreover, it is a moral idea that has profound political resonance in that
Grace’s moral struggle is at the nexus of the individual and the collective. I think the films deeply problematize liberal
morality, and this is evident through two basic concepts that explicate the
moral paradoxes von Trier’s USA films.
The first is Nietzsche’s ideas of the slave-morality of ressentiment, and
the second is on the dangers of liberal guilt. What follows is divided into two
parts – the first is on ressentiment and focuses mainly on Dogville, the second is on Liberal guilt and focuses on Manderlay and Jacob Holdt's anti-racism photowork, American Pictures. Helpfully, von Trier’s
quasi-autobiographical film was a self-satirising comedy entitled Erik Nietzsche: the Early Years - ‘Erik
Nietzsche’ being a pseudonym von Trier has used since film school. I think that von Trier’s USA
films are peppered with images of
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, and that they unflatteringly
reflect liberal politics. The films can be seen as a painful interrogation of
liberal humanism and as a gradual working through of what Nietzsche identified
as a morality of ressentiment
underpinning liberal guilt.
Firstly, though, there arises the issue of to what extent, if
at all, are the films political? Manderlay was controversial long before its release. A Lars von
Trier film about slavery was bound to provoke nervous anticipation, and
political groups started to protest about it even as it was in production. Originally,
the film featured a deeply upsetting scene showing the slaughter of a live
donkey – presumably the ex-slaves slaughtered the animal as famine set in. This scene
prompted actor Phillip C Reilly to quit and animal rights groups to campaign to have the scene withdrawn. Von Trier conceded because he didn’t want the politics of animal rights issues to obscure the film’s
political message. So what is this message?
When I interviewed von Trier
about Manderlay, I told him that I
wanted to talk about the political themes in his recent films. He looked
distraught: "Oh shit! That sounds dangerous…!" he said. I was confused because the publicity campaign for Manderlay allowed no such qualms and broadcast that the film is an
allegorical critique of the Bush administration and the conflict in Iraq. This
declaration prompted angry reactions against the ‘anti-American’ attitude of
his recent films - from the tough-justice meted out to the immigrant Selma in Dancer in the Dark and the rise and fall
of Grace in Dogville and Manderlay, his films scandalised morally
righteous American critics while provoking countless valuable column inches. The
USA trilogy informed by Holdt’s work is unmistakably critical of America’s
aggressive foreign policies, specifically its enforcement in Iraq and
Afghanistan – strongly supported by British government as well as the
governments of other countries - of what is apparently democracy. And
conspicuous scare quotes in the film's publicity material suggested that Manderlay is a critical allegory of
enforced regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet von Trier told me that that
there are other very important factors that problematize this anti-American
interpretation. I asked him whether this is really what the film is about - whether anti-American intervention in the middle-east is the film’s
political message that he was so keen to make known. He said, “you can see [Manderlay]
like that, but it was written before Iraq. So, no, it can’t be. But I believe
that’s the way [my producer] Peter [Aalbaek-Jensen] thinks it should be sold.
No, I do not object to the fact that you can see that in it, but why make a
film that would do just that? I would never make a film like that. And it was
written before we shot Dogville,
actually."
As
a rule, Dogville and Manderlay are labelled as straightforwardly ‘anti-American’ political screeds - a
liberal European’s resentment of American capitalism and American
imperialism. This political reading is not so problematic: the films are set in
America and feature typically Yankee characters such as gangsters, molls, hicks, and plantation owners; in vertiginous overhead shots, characters scurry
across a vast map of the USA, neatly tessellated into states referred to as
‘hunting grounds’; and the finale credits of photo-montages are set, rather heavy-handedly, to David Bowie’s ‘Young
Americans’. In the montages, Danish
photographer Jacob Holdt’s pictures from the 1970s are juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange’s iconoclastic images of depression-era America – the same period in
which the USA films are set. These
are scandalising photographs of young America’s urban poor sinking wide-eyed
into squalid demise without a liberal welfare state. These photographs make
powerfully apparent that economic inequality is the rational exploitation of
need. The photographs seem more like images from war-torn and developing
countries, and shatter America’s public image of equality, prosperity, and
self-sufficiency. Overall,
the image of America is of the cruelty of the American Dream's victim-blaming myths of
opportunity, equality, and community.
Elsewhere, von Trier has said that Manderlay
is not an allegory of the occupation of Iraq as economic colonialism and
self-interested nation-building: “I think that might be true” he said “that
there is a parallel [between Manderlay
and Iraq] but I don't consider [nation-building] an originally American
problem, it's originally a European problem” [i]. And he also related the USA films to his earlier
work on European history: "about the political side of [the films]: I
don’t think that there is such a big difference in the films now from what I’ve
done earlier" - referring to the ‘Europe Trilogy’ films of 1980’s
films, namely The Element of Crime,
Epidemic, and Europa/Zentropa. These films disinter Europe’s unhappy memories and
challenge the idea that post-war Europe is a straightforward situation of
freedom. In
this sense, one might see the diegetic
space of the films as the work of a forensic pathologist – the sets marked out
rather as the absent body and the weapons are described in chalk by police at a
crime scene. The films, then, might be unsolved crimes.
At this point, it’s important
to bear in mind that the content of the USA films is in many ways a product of
their neo-Brechtian form. Von Trier told
me emphatically that his idiosyncratic use of such stylistics are not intended to enhance the content of
the films. Rather it is the other way around. “The style of the film” he said,
“is something much more than just the servant of the content, or a character,
or some theme the film might contain… the content that could be the moral or
political whatever … [but for me] the form comes before the content … It is
difficult to divide, of course, form and content. But I am just objecting to
this idea that you have some content then you make a form that pleases the
content. That is the wrong way.”
So, how is a film like Manderlay a product of a desire to make
a quasi-Brechtian film? Brecht’s depression era and gangster ridden America of
impoverished workers, corrupt officials and ruthless gangsters is comparable to
the milieu of Dogville and Manderlay such that that one can safely
assume that von Trier’s form has dictated similar alienation effects and
similar politically critical ideas. In an age where self-consciously political
films are increasingly seen as dangerously unmarketable, von Trier’s USA films
are a brave unification of form and content. Some of Brecht’s most famous plays
are set in a similar sort of figurative and noir-esque America. But when Brecht
set plays like The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1930s America, he was targeting European political problems. Von
Trier’s films have never been popular in the USA. In part his desire to solicit
American stars like Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Willem Defoe, and
Ben Gazara were a bid to break the American art-house market. But the main and
faithful audience of von Trier films is predominantly European. In a
quasi-Brechtian von Trier film, then, the European art house filmgoer could very
well be faced with an unpleasant demoralisation of a sense of moral superiority
over the USA.
Brechtian theatre is, of course, designed to encourage audiences
to see reflected on stage their own political condition and beliefs through techniques of epic theatre, alienation, and other verfremdungseffekts [distanciation effects]. But von
Trier did not want the form of the films to alienate us in the sense that we do
not identify with the characters, or have any emotional response to them: “compared to Bertolt Brecht” he said, “I am
very decadent! [Brecht] had all these theories about why theatre should look
this way, and I don’t. He somehow wanted people not to be emotional about
things, right? And that’s why he took out all the natural elements. At least
that’s how I understand it. But I want to be emotional. That’s maybe not
the right word, but I want things [in my films] to be alive, even though they
are in this stark surrounding. I take it more as an obstacle, and as a way to
make emotional things even stronger. Maybe that’s what [Brecht] also wanted to do.
But he also wanted to take away all sentimentality, and that is not my scope.” It
is von Trier’s scope, then, to provoke in the audience very strong and often uncomfortable
feelings.
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| Brechtian staging in Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
Von Trier agreed that this
idea of questioning European liberal values is significant in the USA films: “the deeper conflicts in the films are not
something that is especially American. It is something that is from right where
you are yourself.” All in all, though, he told me, his films are political in
the sense that they challenge his own left wing political ideals: “All I can say is that my
technique is to go where it hurts, somehow. And of course that goes for
memories and history. The way I see people and things is through my upbringing
as left-wing cultural radical humanist. But no matter where you are, there are
a number of questions that can be raised that hurt. That is the only
explanation. But on the other hand, what I have actually tried in all my films,
also the old ones, is to challenge myself and my beliefs. That’s the
technique.”
So Dogville and Manderlay are
not straightforwardly 'anti-American'. The tagline for Dogville, after all, is ‘a little town not far from here…’ If the
films are political, I think it is by showing how democracy and ideals of
freedom fail in an economically and racially unequal society predicated on
myths of democracy, freedom, equality, and self-preservation. Dogville
and Manderlay, then, can be said to
explore the ways in which moral liberalism and enforced democracy might, in
pious forms, lead to exploitation and dictatorial vengeance. Dogville explores the idea that power and cruelty are
mutually reinforcing and the interdependence of charity and exploitation,
credit and debt, cruelty and revenge. With Tom’s encouragement, Grace makes a
social and personal experiment out of her desperate situation. She tests out
her political ideals such that, rather than Dogville,
it is her own compassion, her stoicism, left-wing clemency, and faith in moral
integrity, that are on trial.
These are not, it seems to
me, films about democracy in the sense of the individualistic capitalist idea
of democracy. Rather, the democratic processes attempted in Dogville and Manderlay are
collectives. Certainly, In Dogville the people are in individual business enterprises – in
glassmaking, apple trading, and merchandising. However, it seems that the
democratic freedom of individualistic economic struggle is partly to blame for
the people’s poverty, and their need for what the philosopher Tom Edison calls
‘moral re-armament’. In fact, in Dogville,
the townsfolk actually can’t vote,
and their dubious commercial practices – one might say immoral business ethics
– and economics are, it is inferred, a result of their poverty and their political
powerlessness. Tom tells us that the Hensons grind cheap glasses to try to make them look expensive so they can
sell them for more than they are worth. Ma Ginger has cornered the market in
goods: she overprices her goods to make a profit by exploiting the fact that people
are too poor to leave. In Dogville,
people can’t afford to be democratic, as Tom tells us, they "used to leave to go vote, but since [the
state imposed] the registration fee [to vote]
about a day’s wage for these people, they don’t feel the democratic need
anymore."
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| The novel practice of 'voting' to see if Grace can stay in Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
So, the moral political law
in Dogville is dictated by economics
and the unfreedom of the capitalistic democratic process: people’s moral
behaviour is compromised by powerlessness and poverty. The potentiality for
ruthless competition and even lawlessness are, in a deeply impoverished and
desperate society. This is why Grace’s moralistic sacrifice is - as a needy and desperate refugee she is –
in Nietzschean terms – a debtor whose moral obligation to her creditors is the
basis of her moral behaviour. Tom, for example, critiques Dogville for not being a community – for suffering as individuals
and not pulling together for the common good.
The moral laws of Dogville, then, are those intended to
keep poverty and at bay. The laws take the form of a collective moral political
process tested out in experiments with labour, welfare, and collective rule. At
first, elections seem a good way of ensuring moral social agency through
democratic collective action. Her labour is exploited as she is forced to earn
her keep. She can stay only if she ‘offers’ to work far too hard and for free. Her self-sacrificing kindness and
vulnerability make her a scapegoat for good folks’ moral shortcomings. She believes the more she sacrifices herself
and the harder she works, the more she will be accepted and valued. But her immigrant zeal is commandeered by the foot
soldiers of the democratic capitalist ideal. The harder she works, the more
contempt Dogville has for her, and the harder she is made to work. She
does not strike back because she pities her abusers; the poor can’t help being
opportunistic and cruel, she decides, because poverty leaves them morally
bankrupt. Her goodness will be the moral rearmament Tom promised.
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| Grace 'pulling her weight' as obligated slave labour in Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
Economic outsiders and immigrants are
a recurrent theme in von Trier’s work: the minor character ‘Miguel’ in The Idiots is seeking asylum in Denmark
when he falls in with the politically satirical radical commune of idiots. In Dancer in the Dark, Björk played an
immigrant caught in the poverty trap and forcibly criminalised for her
desperation. Grace is herself a kind of refugee dependent on the kindness of
strangers. I asked von Trier if Dogville’s
abuse of Grace can be fairly through of as is an allegory of the refugee’s need
for protection as causing vulnerability to exploitation? "It’s true" he said: “I agree…being an
immigrant or being a refugee was very important in my family since my father
and my mother both escaped to Sweden during the Second World War in a life or
death situation. So, the whole thing about what you do with people who come to
you fleeing from somewhere bad has always been very important in my family.”
The film can also be seen as
a sharp attack on the moral panic surrounding multiculturalism and race
relations in Europe. Recent right-wing and neo-conservative politics have been
on the rise in Europe for some time. In the UK, for example, the far-right part
the BNP has been gaining power and popularity for the last few years. And, like
many Danes, many other Europeans are reacted very strongly to the asylum
seekers and immigrants, and to the inclusion of Eastern European countries into
the EU. Denmark has set very strict restrictions on
immigration, much to von Trier’s disgust: “It’s a very bad sign to send to the world” he said “Denmark is still
this comparatively rich country where people do not normally starve to death.
In a way, it’s very spoilt to have this attitude towards strangers. But it’s
one thing towards strangers; it’s another thing towards refugees. You must
always be very hospitable. That was very important to my father. He saw that,
in the way country treated refugees, you can see what their moral standards
are. Not towards its own vulnerable people, but towards people in need coming
from outside …foreigners are not necessary. Maybe you could say that they are
necessary for the moral life of the country. But they are not necessary for the
state. They are not necessary.”
Around the
time of the film’s European release in February 2006, controversy and backlash
about allegedly Islamaphobic cartoons of the prophet Mohammed printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. This scandal reframed the film as yet another example
of unhelpfully provocative Danish arrogance about the rights of Europeans to
exert unrestrained freedom of speech. In an interview in the Manderlay Pressbook , von Trier said: “Racism
has reared its ugly face in Denmark [so the film] is also about things in
Denmark, perhaps”[ii]. Migrants to Europe can be feared and abused like Grace, and they have been treated with suspicion and
contempt, because of, and not in spite of their perceived willingness and need
to work. Their use value as a cheap and exploitable labour force is tolerated,
even encouraged, and sometimes used to justify to the public their presence in
‘our’ country. In contemporary Europe,
asylum seekers and immigrants habitually provoke the same kind of moral panic
that Grace’s arrival triggers in Dogville; they are used and abused in
ways similar fashion to the ruthless treatment of Grace, being coerced and
often forced into multiple and menial low paid jobs as well as sex work in
order to justify their presence as an economic burden. While immigrant zeal is
a threat to the aspirations of nationals, the perceived willingness to
undertake low-wage, menial labour is tolerated, encouraged even, when it
validates the immigrant’s unsolicited shelter in ‘our town’, encouraging people
to work harder for the accolades of prosperity, equality, and freedom that
compose the classless liberal ideals of freedom, respectability and social
welfare.
If Dogville is critical of
American ideology, then it is by showing how economic compensates for a lack of
stands in for democracy in economically unequal society. In fact, his films
increasingly seem to express simultaneous melancholy and resentment about
liberal morality and leftist hopes. Grace’s abuse at the hands of
poverty-stricken people and their aggressive need to preserve themselves only
serve to confirm the predator ideology of her gangster fathers. When her belief
in the essential goodness of the virtuous poor is destroyed, it shatters an
important aspect of her humanist liberal ideals in that she decides to use her
power and to change society by force.
Grace’s vulnerability makes her a scapegoat for the good folk of Dogville’s moral shortcomings and an
exploitable slave for their deep-rooted political powerlessness, bitterness and
ambition. This can be well explored by turning to Nietzsche’s ideas of ressentiment and the liberal moral
ideal. What is ressentiment? Firstly,
it’s a very strongly held moral ideal that finds its social expression in moral
suffering. The difference between Nietzschean ressentiment and mere resentment is that ressentiment has an
ambivalent heart. Ressentiment describes
a reaction to unequal relationships of power. The word is derived from resentir and ressentement, both meaning a strongly held sense of woundedness
and injustice that have no means of outward expression – it is an anger
intensified by a sense of powerlessness. But the feeling-strongly of resentir also means actually expending
such overwhelming feelings, often in reactionary internalized aggression and
compensatory moral suffering. Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment also has two meanings. He used the ambiguous French ‘ressentiment’, rather than German words
like Verstimmung (irritation) or groll (rancour/pain/spite) to describe a double movement of
reactive violence and the psychological internalization of such violence in
excessive guilt.
Ressentiment,
for Nietzsche, describes a moral idea that reacts to inequality by enslaving
itself to the value of suffering. When Nietzsche’s resentir compares those who
suffer to those who do not appear to suffer, a relationship of cause and effect
is assumed. This gives suffering a meaning as well as a target for its
feeling-strongly. Ressentiment goes
beyond mere jealously and becomes desperate conviction that inequality will end
only when those who do not suffer are shamed into capitulation. Freedom, power,
and cheerfulness, then, seem immoral; those who do not suffer become needful
objects of confrontation. The resentir
thinks something like: “those who suffer are powerless; those who do not suffer
are powerful and cause suffering; so the powerful are bad and the powerless are
good; I want to be good so I freely choose to be powerless; In this way, I
shall put an end to suffering.” For Nietzsche, this is the ‘slave’ or ‘ascetic’
morality that ‘only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless,
the lowly’[iii].
A ‘slave morality’ is deliberated self-negation in
reactionary suffering. It’s opposite – the noble morality is not necessarily
the will to have power over others; but the slave morality invariable is the
will to have power, not only over others, but over oneself. It is the
perversion of a will to change society and those who rule over it.
We can see this most
obviously in the way in which Grace causes herself to suffer in Dogville, by the way that she condemns
herself for both having power and for reacting to desperation by stealing a
bone. The town philosopher, Tom Edison, immediately sees Grace’s vulnerability
and need as an opportunity for moral-re-armament. He thinks to himself: “She
could have kept her vulnerability to herself, but she had elected to give
herself up to him at random. As….Yes….a gift. Generous, very generous”. He offers her some of his bread so
that she doesn’t have to steal the bone. The bone was anyway mistakenly given
to Moses the watchdog who was supposed to be kept hungry so he would stay
vicious. This already is an allegory of the anger of destitution. As a morality
of ressentiment, Grace thinks that those who suffer are – and should be -
morally virtuous. So she refuses Tom’s bread: "I can't, I don't deserve that bread!
I stole that bone, I haven't stolen anything before. So now, now I have to
punish myself. I was raised to be arrogant, so I had to teach myself these
things." As in ressentiment, she condemns herself for being immoral. She thinks
that she can rid herself of guilt by choosing to suffer. As though suffering
itself were a moralistic act of atonement. Her downfall
comes when she refuses to extend these moral ideals to others by condemning the
poor of Dogville.
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| Graces chats with apple farmer Chuck in Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
In terms of contemporary
politics, Grace's moral dilemma take the form of the refugee’s debt to her
sanctuary, illustrated in a dialectic of indigent suffering, need, and
exploitation. Grace is a political fugitive, an economic migrant whose
vulnerability and illegality is easily exploited by the destitute citizens of Dogville. Migrants to Europe are feared
and abused like Grace, and they have been treated with suspicion and contempt,
because of, and not in spite of their perceived willingness and need to work.
Their use value as a cheap and exploitable labour force is tolerated, even
encouraged, and sometimes used to justify their presence, encouraged even.
Social inequality forces people to work harder for the accolades of prosperity,
equality, and freedom that compose the classless democratic dream of freedom,
respectability and social mobility through capitalistic endeavour.
The logic of ressentiment is a strategy of revenge
against whatever or whoever is assumed to cause suffering. For Grace, her
revenge is against her father’s and his gangster morality that takes no pity on
the poor and exploits anyone for not fighting back. But ressentiment is only imaginary revenge in that the only person who
suffers is the moralist himself or herself. Grace’s weakness is her generosity
and her compulsion to moral instruction, they know she will not protest because
she pities them. They see in her the possibility of financial embetterment, as
well as a scapegoat for their sense of powerlessness – a have-nots vengeance
against a trapped have. She is enslaved in a dialectic of charity and
exploitation, debt and credit that intuits ressentiment in the high Nietzschean style. As
with ressentiment, Grace wilfully
enslaves herself the illusory consolation of ‘goodness’ in compensation for
powerlessness and anger because of it. But when her gangster father appears,
she is confronted with her unwitting complicity in her fate. Paraphrasing
Nietzsche, perhaps, Grace argues that "dogs cannot be punished for doing what
it is in their nature to do" and, accordingly, she cannot punish the impotent,
ignorant townsfolk for exploiting her. Grace changes her mind when her father
reminds her that dogs must be trained to be good by discipline and punishment and - implicitly - that she was 'trained' to be a gangster but rebelled by her own free will.
Nietzsche understood that
the excessively moral conscience is produced not through self-sacrifice but
through the will to power. Grace has ensnared her own instinct for freedom, and
the moral ideal of freedom she lives by, in the idealist trap of ressentiment. She is torn between her
father’s gangstertorial diktat and her liberal humanist compassion. Empowered
by a sort of Faustian pact with father, Grace sees the supercilious,
self-refuting and arrogant righteousness at the heart of her moral stoicism.
She forgave Dogville its cruelty only
because she thought them too poor and ignorant to be answerable to her own
moral standards. In doing so, she became enslaved as a selfless gift of ‘moral rearmament’. Romanticizing
suffering was a futile means of trying to effect social change; such ressentiment perverts the moral piety it
cherished. Grace is not an escape from ressentiment,
but a coming-to-awareness of it without martyring oneself to force others to be
good. Ressentiment is always vengeful, but it takes itself as the object of
violence. When she relinquishes her moral suffering, Grace uncovers an abscess
of vengeful violence that she releases on the people she tried to help. She
does not escape ressentiment, as
Nietzsche said one could not. But she understands it. Then she changes her
mind. She comes to awareness of ressentiment’s vengeful benevolence and then
takes literal revenge. She does not move entirely beyond ressentiment but she does stop despising herself and sacrificing
herself for it. While one wants to cheer her on for overcoming the martyr’s ressentiment, it is not unequivocal that
vengeful fury is the only alternative. Graces’ revolting conscience is an image
of the morally frustrated liberal turning against themselves before becoming
tyrants of the even less fortunate. What should have happened is that they
actively turn against the political system that ultimately causes suffering.
In Dogville, Grace’s moral ideal of equality and of not taking power
over others leads her to run away from her father’s powerful gangsters. He is
trying to force her to take power over others and she chooses not to. But more
than that, she chooses to be powerless. She runs from power, and protests the
very idea of power over others. Yet her supremely moral act is to relinquish
power entirely – when at the mercy of other powerless people she acts by not
acting, by not protesting. Her moral law, then, does not apply to the
powerless. She believes that the lowly are not to blame for immoral acts and
that, as a powerful and privileged woman, she can help them by the gift of
passivity and benevolence. But her morality of passive charity fails
utterly exactly because she chooses to be powerless, such that people in fact
do take power over her. Unlike her gangster father, she initially forgives
them. This is perhaps because the power inflicted on her by the people of Dogville is a grotesque amplification of
their own state of powerlessness - a kind of displaced vengeance is caused by
her own choice to be powerless as a moral act. vengeance for their
powerlessness. So Grace’s vengeance is borne of her moral ideal of suffering
and of the virues of non-intervention. Really, her morality is a will to
violence that has already condemned violence as immoral. Moreover, ressentiment is entirely rational; its
‘perversion of morality’ can be found 'in the very effects and affect that gives
rise to and fuel ressentiment' -
i.e.: social inequality[iv].
Ressentiment,
Nietzsche tells us, is self-defeating in that it actively obscures social and
political critique in its over-determination of moral suffering. Dogville’s
key scene comes when, arguing the philosophy of liberalism with her gangster
father, Grace’s morality is transformed from suffering martyr to vengeful
angel. Her father, ‘The Big Man’, dismisses as ‘arrogant’ both Grace’s sympathetic
conscience and her magnanimous belief in social accountability. Grace argues
that dogs cannot be punished for their natures, and so she cannot punish the
impoverished townsfolk of Dogville
for exploiting her like a slave:
The Big Man: You don’t
pass judgement, because you sympathise with them. A deprived childhood and a
homicide really isn’t necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can
blame is circumstances. Rapists and murderers may be victims, according to you.
I call them dogs, and if they’re lapping up their own vomit the only way to
stop them is with the lash…
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| Graces argues politics with 'The Big Man' in Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
The Big Man goes on to discredit Grace's refusal to bestow upon the people of Dogville the same ethic of personal
responsibility with which she constantly berates herself; Grace exonerates
their wickedness because of her ‘arrogant’ notion that nobody can possibly
attain her high ethical principles. Dogs, muses Grace, "only obey their own
nature. So why shouldn’t we forgive them?" Her father retorts that "dogs can be
taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey
their own nature." Grace can be merciful, but morally she owes Dogville the right to be treated
equally; she should maintain her own standards and treat the townsfolk as she
would treat herself, giving them the right and responsibility of accountability
for their actions. Grace prevaricates before reasoning that, by taking the
mantle of power that underlies Nietzsche slave-morality. She uses her newly
righteous power to "make this world at little better" and ensure that what
happened to her cannot happen again; she yanks the leash hard, delivering Dogville a sound and unforgettable
beating: she murders her tormentors and razes it to the ground.
 |
| Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier |
Grace’s
morality switches not to self-sacrifice but to a queasy equality of judgement – to the idea that
her moral laws are not just applicable to those who have power but who choose
not to use it by choosing to suffer. I trying to understand why the poor abused her, and with the aim of making sure it does not happen again, she changes her mind and decides that personal responsibility is not a privilege of economic security and class position. Through a coming to awareness of the
inequality of her moral ideals, she comes to awareness of a profound and
righteous resentment. This resentment brings her to a new moral agency – she
comes to see that destroying Dogville
could be in itself a moral act. In order to do this, she accepts the lawless
form of power. To be moral, she has to be immoral. She has to relinquish her
own moral ideals. Yet, in Manderlay, her
moral disillusionment will lead her not to passivity and self-sacrifice but to
intervention – ‘liberation, whether they want it or not’. As Nietzsche had it, ressentiment’s underlying anger forges
irresolvable internal struggle and self-sacrifice that changes nothing. Were
freedom really desired, that power ought to be outwardly directed. It is
plausible, then, that ressentiment
explains the moral preconditions of the interrogation of liberal humanism that
we see in Manderlay.
Manderlay is in many ways a inferior film to Dogville - the cast seem too self-conscious, the script is clanging and histrionic, and Bryce Dallas Howard simply could not bring the voiceless intensity to the role of Grace that Nicole Kidman did. Nonetheless, the ideas expressed by the film are equally as devastating as in Dogville, and the film deserves critical recognition for its skewering of the dialectical destruction of unfettered liberal guilt. In
Manderlay, Grace’s experience in Dogville
incite her to use her power to do good. She decides to forcibly intervene in
slavery. Manderlay's Grace is a
spirited idealist with whom one sympathizes as her genuinely benevolent
imposition of liberal democracy end up in dictatorial ferocity because, as von
Trier has said, "it’s impossible to impose democracy by force. Every other
system of government is easier to enforce [than democracy]"[v].
Idealists, von Trier has it, are unwittingly bondsmen in that they feel morally
compelled to force their way of thinking on other people – especially people
who live in undemocratic or perhaps even dictatorial regimes. In doing so,
political idealists run the risk of trapping people into new moral laws which
are, for Nietzsche –as I hope to convey - another kind of un-freedom. If people
do not free themselves, they are – by definition unfree, and therefore
vulnerable to being forced into political and social systems they may not want,
or which – as in Manderlay – do not
protect them from oppression, inequality, or danger. These films are, for the
most part about is a spirited moral idealist who cannot understand why her
compassionate imposition of democracy fails. Again, the people she is trying to
help should be grateful – as the people of Dogville
were desperate, as she herself was, the people of Manderlay are slaves, as she was. She feels guilty and she thinks
she has the power to compensate black for what photographer Jacob Holdt has called
‘internalised racism’. In Manderlay,
Grace believes it her duty as a middle-class white woman to compensate black people for the brutality of slavery: “We
brought them here and we abused them and made them what they are.” This sense of liberal responsibility is touches on deep political concerns in Jacob Holdt’s work.
Manderlay is a reworking of Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures photo diaries. In the 1970s, Holdt was a middle-class
Danish drop-out who chose to become a vagabond in the most deprived areas of
America. Holdt responds to the poverty surrounding him with an urge to document
it – to make the world see what was happening in prosperous democracies. Holdt’s
involvement with the development of Manderlay
was more extensive than is widely known; he was not only involved in creating
the photo montages that close the USA
films, but was very much involved in the progression of the narrative. Lars was
very inspired by Holdt’s theories of ‘mental slavery’ and ‘internalized
racism’. He was especially drawn to Holdt’s photographs of black workers in
peonage in the deep South – the first offered to the and which still goes on
today all over the world. When he returned to Denmark, he began giving lecture
tours and showing the pictures all over the world. He wanted to raise awareness
about the lasting effects of slavery and about ongoing racism in the west. In American Pictures, Holdt writes much
about ‘internalised racism’ in which oppressed people begin to despise
themselves because they resort to desperate, sometimes criminal measures to
survive. And because they live in a country where they are allegedly free and
where there are opportunities for all. They blame themselves for their
oppression. Holdt told me about his work on Manderlay
and why it was an important film for him:
Jacob Holdt: [Lars
von] Trier asked me to photograph some pictures for him for [the film] Dear Wendy from a ghetto in America
after which I helped him doing research on a good location for the movie. They
wanted my photos so they could build up an exact American town up in Film city.
Therefore we had a meeting in [his studios at] Zentropa at which he told me
that his wife, Bente, was a great admirer of me, since she is a child care
worker. Pedagogues use my shown all the time in their schools. Bente therefore
suggested Lars that he should see American
Pictures and we agreed to do a private showing for him and other Zentropa
employees.
Afterwards
Lars got the idea to use my pictures in the end of Dogville which he was just then finishing. But over the summer he
was thinking a lot about two themes in my show – “the continuing mental slavery
of blacks” and “internalized racism”. So when I later that year was sitting in
Zentropa cutting my pictures into Dogville
he kept running into the cutting room saying: “Jacob, Jacob, I have to talk to
you. I want to make American Pictures as a comedy”.
After
three meetings with me about “internalized racism” he said: “Ok, Jacob, now I
go home to write the manuscript.” Only 3 days later he sent me an email with
the finished manuscript to Manderlay
in which I felt he expressed all my ideas better than I had myself been able to
express them through 25 years of workshops.
 |
| Jacob Holdt, American Pictures (1985) |
Manderlay overtly tackles race politics, civil rights, and
political reform. It was considered so inflammatory in the USA that few black
actors would go near it. Danny Glover
initially turned down his part, objecting to the film’s overpoweringly white
point of view, but eventually signed on because so few films tackle the subject
at all. Far from being saintly or heroic, the black
characters in Manderlay solicit
their own oppression, preferring the certainties of enslavement to the dubious
freedom of a morally destitute and undeniably racist America.
Glover wanted to show the
horrendous oppression that faced newly freed slaves in America, as well as the
hypocrisies of the American constitution, founded over the issue of slavery
following the civil war and in anticipation of the burgeoning industrial
capitalist state. Liberated slaves found free America to be hostile and
antagonistic. And anti-discrimination legislations were exploited more by newly
founded corporations than by black workers. The
film’s denouement points to the economic and political reality of
post-Civil war era America as starkly contradiction of the more generally
accepted ideal of emancipation. It’s about the reality of reconstruction in
which life actually did become a lot worse for many blacks after abolition and
liberation.
Holdt initially conceived of
his book as an attack on Denmark and as a warning to European liberals about
what happens when you try to create an ideal of economic freedom in a racially
segregated society. Holdt responded to racism and the on-going slavery of black
people with a strong sense of liberal-guilt. He felt guilty for poverty but
also because he felt compelled to document poverty. Holdt despised the
aesthetics of pity that uses the suffering of others to embolden political
indignation and moral righteousness. Sanctimoniously political art is radical.
Liberals, he says, can be "the buffer troops of capitalism who absorb any
critique of the system and distort and avert it by constantly raising it to the
level of art [and] saccharine sentimentality"[vi].
 |
| Jacob Holdt, American Pictures (1985) |
Can we see von Trier as a similarly leftist, 'anti-art' artist? Well, his well stated liberal
politics express a great faith in anti-realism as well as in solidarity, collective power and
ownership. This is reflected in projects such as Dogma’95, 100Cameras, The Advance Party, Filmbyen, The Five Obstructions, and other collaborative ventures and in the - albeit heavily scrutinised - spirit de corps of his films, such as satirical leftist-critique The Idiots. He seems to
enthusiastically advocate collaboration, yet the ideal of collective power and
egalitarianism is, he says, a thing of the past. And that, for him, is a sad
state of affairs. While he works in collaborative venture, he is also a very
purposeful auteur whose collective projects are an important defining facet of
his oeuvre. And, as in the case of Dogma ‘95, his distinctive signature form is
what actually defines the form that the collective project will take. "[It] is the same problem as the problem of
democracy" he bemoaned “80% of Danes are too stupid for democracy, right?
Because they think something else, or because they don’t agree with me! I would
love to work in a community but I haven’t found others that would be stupid
enough to do what I think is right! The will for this collective idea, nobody
really seems to have it these days.” Von Trier explained the basic
political premise of Manderlay thus:
"it’s impossible to impose democracy by force. Every other system of government
is easier to enforce than democracy. You can say a lot of nasty things about
Bush, but don’t you think his heart is in it and he believes in what he is
doing?" What on earth does this say about democracy? Similar tensions between
the law of democracy and the individuals who enforce it are, of course, the
dominant theme of Manderlay.
This seems to me be more of
a liberal, one might say a left-wing model of democracy, rather than the more
individualistic and economic self-sufficiency model offered by western
countries. In Manderlay, the model of
democracy is perhaps more obviously socialist : the plantation will be run
without salaried workers – it will be a collective with communal ownership,
shared labour, and equality of
provisions. In Manderlay, the will of
individual is subject to the will of the equal majority: rule by the people for
the people. This results in a different kind of unfreedom in that the
individual is still subject to laws. Should the individual’s will disagree with
the majority, they will be forcibly curtailed. This is the kind of freedom
offered to Manderlay’s ex-slaves to
combat deep racial and economic problems. Democracy – or, rather the kind of
democracy we are offered in Dogville
and Manderlay, is, it is strongly
inferred, logically and inevitably immoral.
Democracy, one might think, is benevolent laws to ensure the moral
quietude of all member s of society for the good of all. The social, then, is
the consequence of failed moral ideals. In Manderlay,
the social machine Grace wants to manufacture is borne of the disappointment of
her moral ideal.
Ressentiment
is not just a morality, it is a politics. Ressentiment
is political when it becomes the basis for an enforced collective such as that imposed upon Manderlay. Indeed, it needs to be
collective to have any kind of social expression. The moral and democratic
collectives that Grace tries to set up in Manderlay
seems to me to be redolent of the concept of liberal guilt. Holdt’s diaries, on
which the film is based, often express this idea of liberal-guilt and what
might be called leftist self-loathing. Holdt notes that any attempt to
represent the suffering of others is neutralized by its being ‘art’ or, worse,
as ‘outsider art.’ In the USA Trilogy, von Trier reproduces such these themes as well as shocking episodes from Holdt’s
book of starving and destitute black people still, in the 1970’s, picking
cotton, bonded as debt slaves in peonage. The modern system of indentured
labour replicates the democracy in Manderlay
that renders black shareholders dependent on white Grace. Criticizing the
liberals’ approbation of genuine suffering is not to devalue a desire for
social change, it is to question Grace’s assumption that suffering could be the
basis of an ethic.
Like Grace’s willingness to
suffer, liberal guilt can be understood in terms of a morality of ressentiment. The instinct for freedom
is felt to be immoral in that those considered free are not ‘all instincts
which are not discharged outwardly turn
inwards’[viii]. This is the unhappy consciousness of leftist guilt. Nietzsche’s central idea of
the ‘will to power’ is not compromised by the idea of moral guilt In fact, ressentiment is will to power and even
subjection is will. Liberal guilt is contingent on a sense of moral wrongness
and injustice, yet it becomes a kind of cruelty that embattles its own ideas of
freedom. If those who are free cause suffering, then being free is immoral. The
political dynamic she places her faith in, then is collective democracy in the
form of a co-op. What Manderlay
grapples with is the idea that moral law and enforcing moral law are necessary
preconditions of a democratic collective. In Nietzschean terms, enforcing
equality through punitive laws is driven by a slave-morality of ressentiment. According to Nietzsche,
the formation of a community of masks liberal guilt in that ‘the individual’s
dissatisfaction with himself is overridden by his delight at the prosperity of
the community’[ix].
Grace is profoundly guilt
about the situation of the slaves at Manderlay.
believes it her moral duty to compensate and liberate violently displaced
slaves: “We brought them here and we abused them and made them what they are.”
She turns Manderlay into a democratic
co-op where reluctant ex-slaves are taught to organise themselves and vote on important issues. She forces them to be free and take control of the financial
security of Manderlay. But no-one is
really in control and Grace increasingly bullies them into voting on what she
thinks is important. They are soon starving and mutinous – they blame Grace for
their terrible situation. She turns to ‘Mam’s Law’ because it is what the
people understand and because it worked in the past. It worked because Wilhelm
wrote it to keep the blacks safe. The rules ensured that they always had a roof
over their head and food in their bellies without having to suffer the
insurmountable difficulties of finding work outside the plantation gates. They
had already been liberated and faced the terrors of unfreedom in an impoverished
and unequal land where they will never really be free. They chose slavery over
poverty. They do not want to vote on their own future as they have already
taken control of their own fate. They want benign dictatorship. They vote not to be democratic. So Grace is
enslaved in the role of un-free dictator. Her slave-morality led her to be the
new Mam, forced to take control in a role in which she has not control
whatsoever. Grace’s will outlaw domination by forcing people to be free -
rehearses the slave-morality of ressentiment. In her liberal guilt and her pity, Grace
allows herself to become a slave to the suffering of people who cannot survive
in the kind of democracy that thrives on inequality.
 |
| Slavery in Manderlay (2005), dir. Lars von Trier |
Wendy Brown’s contemporary
reading of ressentiment is that it
finds its expression exactly in liberal guilt. Brown reconfigures leftist ressentiment by showing how it operates
on the moral pain of failure underlying what Walter Benjamin called
‘left-melancholy’ – a stubborn attachment to a failed ideal as well as to
mourning its loss. The celebration of those who suffer might
keep the fires of hope alive. Liberal guilt is imagines freedom to be dependent
on social democracy: ‘Left melancholy’, according to Benjamin, is the
bitter onetime radical’s sadness at the failed hope of a political ideal.
According to Brown, this enacts a politics of ressentiment that is always doomed to failure. Like ressentiment, left-melancholy is
sustained by compensatory suffering, self-limitation, and self-reproach of the
kind that drives Grace in Manderlay
- Vengeance and violence only ever crouch beneath Grace’s political morals –
what Brown might call ‘a politics of recrimination and rancour … a tendency to
reproach power rather than aspire to it, to disdain freedom rather than to
practice it’[x]. Left-melancholy
is ‘attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the
failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the
present’[xi].
Grace seems, on the surface,
to transcend vulgar self-interest by feeling guilty and taking responsibility
for the suffering and the moral failings of others. Liberal guilt is
politically injurious in that it glorifies suffering and inculcates guilt that
does not reach those who actually do have political power. Liberal guilt seems
to covet power – as Grace takes the power she has to try to do good.
Self-induced guilt is depends on social change to release it from suffering. It
is passive. The liberal guilt that seems to drive Grace’s moral impulse is, as
Brown tells us, forged in vengeful anger that hides in Manderlay seems to be a coming to awareness of the destructiveness
of paternalistic guilt and of the violence of moralistic piety. It is to realise ressentiment’s self-imposed
insistence on the moral superiority of the powerlessness.
In the slave-morality,
liberals actually aspire to outsiderness, but cannot transcend the guilt of
being bohemian, white, and middle-class. Their rage against the immorality of
the powerful is, as it is for Grace, self-loathing. AS Nietzsche put it: ‘the
‘idealists’ and ‘beautiful souls,’ are all decadents’[xii]. For brown, leftist guilt is ‘blind to any way of changing society in a meaningful way’
because it chooses guilt and accountability instead of solidarity: ‘the language of recognition becomes the language of unfreedom’[xiii].
Guilt is a substitute for equality in that, as Holdt emphasised to me, it is
paternalistic and does nothing to equalise the balance of power between
marginalised people and the dominant social force, and it does nothing to bring
people together. As Brown puts it, leftist guilt ‘re-inscribes incapacity,
powerlessness, and rejection’[xiv].
Does contemporary liberal politics really seem resentful to von Trier? After
all, his films often explore political and ethical problems in a left-ish
stance. “Well”, he told me, “I felt
like an idiot!” The political part of the work is a desire, not to destroy, but
to challenge and rejuvenate leftist ideals.
The democratic ideal that is
demoralised in Manderlay is a struggle
to unforget the pain that drives Grace’s caricature of leftist morality. In my
opinion, von Trier’s USA films, and especially Grace, reflect the leftist and
the liberal European who (rightly) condemn American conservatism, but who do so
in an attitude of moral superiority and political self-certainty. Grace is
partly a cynical image of leftist guilt - the privileged daughter of a powerful
family who refuses to rule over the seemingly powerless by exerting immoral
social control. Her family signifies that power is taken through immoral acts.
Grace is radicalised by liberal guilt at her station in life. Her leftist
rebellion is her refusal to use her social privilege and financial muscle and
instead makes herself indigent. She takes on a consolatory and excessively
subordinate role in excess of her actions. She seeks to help others with her
power and places her faith in the moral promises of liberal democracy. Grace’s
morality is social and political. She places her trust in democracy, clemency,
and moral integrity. von Trier’s targets are racists as well as supercilious or
resentfully disillusioned leftists. Expecting, perhaps, a dark satire on
American conservatism, the leftist cinema goer of the ‘USA films’ is hit smartly
in the face by their own cartoon. As an allegory of moral conceit, von Trier’s
The Idiots and USA Trilogy expose the self-defeating strategy of ressentiment. Ressentiment’s self-defeating nature, its moral over-investment in
suffering, yields only irresolvable discontent.
 |
| Grace imposes the law of freedom in Manderlay (2005), dir. Lars von Trier |
Left-melancholy stagnates
into terminal irony, caustic nostalgia, and imagined losses. An aesthetics of ressentiment is pseudo-catharsis;
protest folded back onto its own piteous shame, fuelled by revenge fantasies of
the intractably impotent. Backed into a corner, the liberal moviegoer might be
tempted to throw away ‘the fragment to which he had attached his hopes’[xv].
For A.O. Scott, the leftist guilt that
pervaded contemporary leftist art-house films such as The Idiots, Dogville, Manderlay, Moodysson's Together, Bertolucci's The Dreamers, or Haneke's Caché,
might have an unhelpfully consolatory purpose and ‘a salutary effect, since the
discomfort they provoke, even when it takes the form of defensive anger, is an
antidote to the soothing reassurance that we find elsewhere. Any masochistic
embrace of art that tries to hit us where we found strength can provide its own
perverse form of comfort. Feeling bad about oneself, feeling guilty, can be a
way of affirming one’s goodness, a sign of moral virtue and political concern
that costs nothing more than the price of a ticket’[xvi].
To be consoled in this way by art, to capitulate to leftist self-loathing and
throw up one’s hands in defeat, would be to fall back again into the mire of ressentiment - to take oneself and one’s
hopes as objects of hatred and ridicule. Thereby, one fails to effect any
change at all except in one’s sense of political rightness and will to
participate in political life – a sort of embarrassment of the will. Leftist
art is reduced to attacking leftism and leftist audiences per se. Again, Nietzsche already warned us of this: ‘he who
despises himself nonetheless esteems himself thereby as a despiser’[xvii].
In condemning America, the
liberal movie goer of Dogville and Manderlay has already entered the game
of ressentiment, have already failed to be political and has decided that it is
futile to try to affect change. What, then, is the
way out of ressentiment that does not
depend on paternalistic moral excess? The remedial work of the USA films is to confront the
disappointment of an incontrovertible moral ideal, and the angry sadness that
fuels it, and understand the misdirected violence of powerlessness that ought
to be directed at the political system.
Von Trier’s USA films are in
many ways a means of somewhat reconciling leftist self-loathing by facing up to
the anger and violence that are dispersed in liberal guilt and in undemocratic moral
force. We see Grace’s liberal morality change as she faces and tries to change
different social systems of democracy and freedom. Grace’s
targets are first her aristocratic gangster class, then herself, then the
working classes, then the meddling philosopher, then slave owners, then willing
slaves, then, finally, politicians (the title of the unrealised third film, Washington, strongly implied that Grace
would eventually exert her resentments on the so-called democratic political
system that affects the social real she struggled to make good. The film was likely not made due to Manderlay's failings both artistically and financially). Despite its flaws, Manderlay's philosophical critique remains valid in the context of Dogville. Grace's moral ideal
is disillusioned, yet her desire to change society is not. Marx himself
wrote that disillusionment is the happy end to the state of unproductive
labouring under falsified beliefs. Relinquishing the consolations of ressentiment
ought not to lead to nihilism or resignation. Disillusionment is a good thing:
disillusionment liberates one to ‘think, act, and fashion his reality as a man
who has lost his illusions and regained his reason’[xviii]. Perhaps, as von
Trier has joked, his greatest work will be called ‘The
Happy Ending…’
[i] www.indiewire.com/article/lars_von_trier_chats_with_new_york_audiences_virtually_speaking
[iii] Nietzsche (1887 rpt. 1994) On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
I:§8, p.19
[iv] Morelli, Elizabeth (1998) Rationality and Ressentiment, 20th
World Congress of Philosophy, University of Boston: Paideia Archive
[vi] Holdt, Jacob, 1985, American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass,
Denmark: American Pictures Foundation, p.165-7
[viii] Nietzsche, op.cit., II:§16, p.61
[ix] Ibid, III:§18, p.106; I: §19, p.7
[x] Brown, Wendy (1995) States of Injury:
Power and Freedom in late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton UP, p.55
[xi] Brown, Wendy (1999) “Resisting
Left-Melancholy”, in: Boundary, v.2:26.3, Fall 1999, p.20
[xii] Nietzsche, “
Nietzsche contra Wagner” in (1887 rpt.
1974) The Gay Science, New York:
Vintage, IV:§370, p.328, n.120
[xv] Bürger, Peter (1974) Theory of the
Avant-Garde, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, p.xlix, n2
[xvii] Nietzsche (1886 rpt. 1973) Beyond Good and Evil,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, IV: §78
[xviii] Marx,
Karl (1843-4) “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, cit. Bürger, op cit. p.9
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