Anth and me, Christmas 2006 at Caracas
On torture
From: Oscar Reyes, Caracas, Venezuela
To Anthea Jones, Canberra, Australia
Dear Anth:
When I said during the chat that I was thinking strongly in you it was not a simple desire to catch your attention: it was something more deep and true. My life has changed radically –in the roots, although perhaps the most of the superficial affaires remain equal- since the moment I moved to Sebucan, very close to Federico's. It's a beautiful house, divided in two; the main residence and an independent extra studio, lovely furnished, were I live. You and Joe, the next time you come to Caracas, please be my guests here, in this small paradise. Here, I recovered my desire to read day and night, to be again a philosopher and to write interesting things. How did it happen and how are you linked with those feelings?
1.- Well, I began to write my dissertation on Rawls vs. Buchanan concerned with the best starting point of view to formulate justice rules, or more accurate, to formulate or reshape political rules (it includes constituent assemblies, reforms, referenda and so on). One of the contributors to the Buchanan point of view is Geoffrey Brennan. So, I have to read Brennan, Buchanan and Rawls. Only for curiosity, I searched Brennan in Google and, where is him? He's at your university in Canberra, in 90% of the possibilities.
2.- The best book on politics I read the last year was 'On Revolution' by Hannah Arendt. Thanks to Federico's advertise 2 years ago, something he said in a conference at Simon Bolivar University –'In this moment in Venezuela we cannot behave like Heidegger, who supported the Nazis and joined the Nazi party himself…'- I joined the Hannah Arendt Counter Totalitarian Observatory in Caracas on behalf of the Andres Bello Catholic University.
3.- Being at the Observatory, one of Arendt's students and her biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, came to Caracas last year, and I hosted her at UCAB. How can I explain what happened later? I only can say that we became friends. She said 'you have the most trustee feelings I observed in Venezuela' and it ashamed me, for my scare to fall in flatter. You gave me good words too before, saying that I was a brilliant man, after reading me in Spanish. I hate flatter, sorry, and that's because I didn't say my opinion about you: it's very simple, you're the most brilliant Australian young political scientist, and the Australian academy recognized it a little late, because they should give you the fellowship one year before. Federico agrees with me, whenever we remember you. Sorry if I didn't express before my admiration for you, and we only discussed onto the parochial difference between the Australian English or the Yankee English.
4.- Sat at home, watching the squirrel every afternoon comes to my garden, I recovered slowly the notion of the three virtues of the old Romans in times of the Republic, something I learned during my years studying philosophy with the Jesuits, something to make jokes among the students while we were translating from Latin into Spanish De AEternitati Mundi Contra Murmurantes by Boetius of Dacia: gravitas, serveritas and comitas. Gravitas: the sense of the importance and responsibility you must give to the things you're doing in the world. Severitas: the control of your life, the austerity recommended against the dissolution of the banquets, the circus and the corruption. Comitas: the necessary good humor to equilibrate the other two virtues.
I asked to the squirrel (comitas): 'Hey, what if Anthea and Elisabeth are right?' Yes, it sounds like an ego trip, but is not so easy; if you accept this judgment, certainly your ego becomes hardly rejoined. But two minutes later you feel on your shoulders the weight of such a high responsibility (gravitas). Yes, you are the most brilliant young Australian political scientist: so, you have to live being that and in the most of the cases being and doing what is expected from the most brilliant young Australian political scientist: you are the only authorized driver of your life and decisions and you cannot deviate your route from what is expected from you whatever it means (severitas). I have no fear, I accepted my condition many years ago, with an interruption that end nowadays: In this small paradise I recovered the notion that I write very well in my mother language: Cervantes, Borges, Garcia Marquez and all my masters were not red in vain.
5.- At the bookshop, I got Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's 'Hannah Arendt, a Biography'. I smiled and said: 'Hey, that's my friend's book in Spanish' and bought it. It's been an earthquake in my life. In the 530 pages I've red I founded my life explained (or to be understood) in the words of Hannah, in the commentaries of Elisabeth, in the chain of hundred of coincidences hard to explain through rational means. Probably it's an act of faith; one I had no felt since 23 years ago, in Argentina, and that saved my life.
6.- To make a list of those coincidences could be pathetic. A single one:
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:52:05 -0400
Dear Oscar --Thank you so much for sending the translation and now the link to the site. Again, I appreciate your work on this, and will be glad to hear what response comes to it. Thank you, too, for sending it to the Observatory people. I had already heard from Federico his appreciation (…) The Nation, where the article was published here, is probably going to conduct an online discussion about Venezuela, which Federico has agreed to participate in. Would you like to join it? The editor at the Nation, Richard Kim, has not been in touch with me about this for several weeks, but when he does write to let me know the arrangements, I could suggest that he contact you if you would like. Let me know.
All the best,
Elisabeth
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:52:57 -0500
Dear Oscar –
The Nation online magazine did not have a forum on Venezuela in the last months, as the editor there had suggested; but, suddenly, over last weekend, he asked me for a commentary on the referendum (thankfully, defeated on Sunday) defeat and is now putting together a discussion around my comment --which I had to write very quickly--and four others. If you want to join in, the discussion will open online today. I'd be very glad to read what you think about the situation now, and would like to have had time to consult with you before I wrote (relying a lot on what can be learned from the English language commentaries and blogs, and the New York Times).
Hope this note finds you well (especially your wrist!), and still hope to in haste.
Elisabeth.
7.- Her article was published at The Nation:
Behind the Student Movement's Victory
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/young-bruehl
And my letter as a comment too:
http://www.thenation.com/bletters/20071224/young-bruehl
Yes, it's simply a letter, but: why my first English approach was at The Nation and not somewhere else? Should I add that Hannah Arendt published brilliant articles at The Nation, something I didn't figure out until I red Arendt's biography, wrote by her student Elisabeth Young-Bruehl this week at my retire in Sebucan? Yes, sounds like over interpretation but…
8.- My philosophical formation was on American pragmatism. First, reading Richard Rorty for my MBA dissertation. Later, I studied political science at Simon Bolivar University with Sir Federico Welsch, but my concern is the political theory, and thanks to the Venezuelan academy filled of stupid and arrogant professors I hate to call myself a philosopher one. Exactly the same words Hannah Arendt used to describe herself, as I realized today reading Elisabeth. Just in the moment when you catch me in the chat. This is the same concept expressed by Rorty about himself in an interview. After reading Rorty, I invited through the Fulbright program to a specialist in classic pragmatism to give us a seminar, Thomas C. Hilde, from Maryland University. Thanks to Tom and Andrea Giglio –my Argentina's ex-girl friend- we realized that the pragmatic epistemological program to teach democracy (epistemological circle) is exactly like the one Ignatius suggested, and that is applied by the universities ruled by the Jesus Company, like UCAB. It gave me the chance to find out my PhD theme: the relation between the two projects at America: the Puritans one and the Jesuits one. Both, puritans and Jesuits came to America to build a well ordered and Christian society: a city over seven hills, a New Jerusalem and both built an emporium: the puritans in New England and the Jesuits in the Misiones between Paraguay and Argentina.
After this seminar, Tom and I became good friends, and sometimes we made jokes about our pragmatist intellectual link. Tom studied with Sidney Hook, who studied with John McDermont, who studied with John Dewey, who studied with William James and Charles S. Pierce: it means that we are linked in a relation master-pupil with the fathers of American pragmatism, although as I advertised Tom: 'In my case I'm a kind of bastard, a Latin one with extravagant ideas and influenced by stranger people'. Ah, the jokes in the Freudian sense! Writing this mail to you at 2:30 am (reading and writing day and night) I remembered this mail:
Fecha; 20 de agosto de 2008 18:21
Asunto; Tom Hilde te ha enviado un mensaje a través de Facebook...
'The torture book is basically done. It'll be in print in October. In November, there will be a symposium on the book at the Organization of American States. It's a strange juxtaposition - in some ways, it's a symposium in the belly of the beast.
One of the chapters is dedicated to the torture in Argentina...
9.- By the first time in my life, I said sober and in English what I tried to forget during 23 years, something I never said in Spanish except three of four times when I was hardly drunk and nobody could understand, believe or remember it the following day. 'Alas, my dear friend...! The torture in Argentina! I have a story about that... Something that ruined my youth, something that made me to became a philosopher...'
10.- Arendt's brilliant perceptions caught Kant's acceptation of the radical evil, something you cannot avoid when dealing with real political philosophy, something that accounts when you are trying to frame political rules, as I suggest in my dissertation. Another concept, the banality of evil, was developed in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', the book Federico commented when advertised me to be not like Heidegger, at the beginning of this story. According to Elisabeth, this concept was fully developed on Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'. What was exactly the Eichmann affaire? Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazis Hunter, discovered that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires. Many Nazis did it, and submarines, notes, pictures and many others of their artifacts were founded at Argentina. They were accepted by Peron, and Argentina became a kind of sanctuary for them and Chile too. As a counterpart, they trained the Argentina's secret services in torture, execution and many other Nazis totalitarian techniques to control and repress the dissidents. Eichmann was deported and sent to Jerusalem, for a trial (Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' analyzes it, when she was sent to Israel on behalf of The New Yorker). When she published some of her opinions onto this and other Jewish questions, one of the most offensives responses came from... Sidney Hook...
11.- Eichmann and the other Nazis trained to the secret services in Argentina in how to destroy peoples' Self, peoples' mind, peoples' lives. They applied it against the leftist dissidents, against people tortured, as Tom's book mention, as Ernesto Sabato's 'Never Again' accounts: people who was tortured, disappeared, murdered, like Andrea's first boy friend Marcelo Colombo, who run to the Buenos Aires Cathedral (she was preparing herself for her first communio) to save her in the moment when the soldiers began to shot against demonstrators at Plaza de Mayo. Marcelo took her hand and they began to run, but suddenly Andrea didn't feel again the physical contact of his hand: 'Run, Andrea, run and go home!' cried him. 'My beloved Oscar, I only remember the yellow sweater and the red color of the blood growing in his back' she said to me crying many times. 'But the worst was at home, when I told my Mom what happened at the Cathedral. No answer, no tears. Marcelo never came back, but the militaries sent to his mother his right hand. Mom, Marcelo's mother received his hand: he's death. And mom answered to me 'There are not disappeared people in Argentina.' This are the methods people like Eichmann taught to the Argentina's secret services, to be applied to simple people like Marcelo whose only guilt was to run at the Cathedral to save a beautiful Argentinian girl he had fallen in love, giving her the hand that later was sent to his mother. Probably Eichmann taught them some other more criminal methods to be applied against brilliant minded people like me in 1985, people whose only guilt was to fall in love for the same beautiful Argentina girl whose father was a bastard who denounced and accused him (me) at the secret services, a guy whose only guilt was to be member of a socialist but strongly democratic political party (the MAS) not in Argentina, but in Venezuela, during the beautiful, blue and shiny days when we loved each other and every street, every coffee at Maracay was a signal of the Paradise to be enjoyed for us, like Adam and Eve… until we had to escape to Argentina because here we were besieged. We were so candid-.. Argentina… Eichmann, the dictatorship… the 'desaparecidos…' all this horror machine was invisible but untouched the first years after Videla, during the Alfonsin presidency. But we didn't know. That's the way I learned in my own flesh the meaning of 'biopolitic', 'torture', 'totalitarianism'. They didn't touch my body: not electroshock in my balls, not kicks with a bat on my knees, although I had preferred it and not what they did: destroy my deepest beliefs, my Self, all my words, all my feelings, all the things I loved, trying to convince me that I was not human but a kind of beast, trying to induct me to cooperate with my own punishment committing suicide, what I didn't do, thanks God.
12.- I survived. With a new Self furnished with the words I could find all around me: philosophers, journalists, poets... I never spoke about this with my friends, and never wrote it in Spanish. I began to do it in English with that comment on Tom's book. Perhaps this story is too heavy for you, my best Australian friend, but I need to tell it to ask your help. As Randall Jarrell said to Hannah Arendt, his mother language was English, but his mother land was the German. My mother Language is Spanish, but my homeland is English. I'll try to write interesting things, but I know they will never publish me in Spanish. So, I'll try to accurate my poor English, like did my (now) Jewish German American philosophical hero Hannah Arendt to write The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution. In comparison with this magna opera, my writings of course are stupid: but is the only I can offer to the world. Randall Jarrell did for Arendt something: he helped her to convert her texts from German thinks simply bad translated into English to English written thoughts. I'll not ask you to translate my texts because I have to write those in English like this letter; but please, just check these and help me to put it in real English thoughts. As a counter part I promise you to be the person that will translate your English thoughts into the most beautiful Spanish words and thoughts you can imagine. I have to translate a short story I wrote years ago and about what I'm very proud: 'Aurelius, at the sunrise...' Yes, a story about the different ways of love in Saint Agustin, just the theme of Arendt's PhD dissertation. It's a Christmas gift for Elisabeth, and a tribute to mother Arendt.
Richard Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:
Pain is nonlinguistic: it is what we human beings have that ties us to the non-language using beasts. So victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much (to do) in the way of language. That is why there are no such things as the 'voice of the oppressed' or 'the language of the victims'. The language the victims once used is not working anymore, and they are suffering too much to put new words together. So the work of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them for somebody else. The liberal novelist, poet or journalist is good at that. The liberal theorist usually is not.
Caracas, September 15th 2008, 5:00 am
