C A R L S C H M I T T , ” T H E B U R I B U N K S : A H I S T O R I C O - P H I L O S O P H I C A L
M E D I T AT I O N ” ( 19 1 8 )
Today, because we have been granted the privilege of enjoying the glorious notion of the diary at its zenith, we tend to overlook what a majestic deed man performed when—perhaps as the unknowing instrument of the world spirit—he planted with the first innocuous note the first seed, which now overshadows the earth as a gigantic tree. A certain, I would say, moral feeling of obligation urges us to question what historical personage embodies the precursor to this wonderful epoch, the messenger pigeon that the world spirit has sent in advance of its last and most highly refined period. We are obliged to put this question at the center of our principal investigation.
It would be a mighty triumph for Buribunkology if it could identify a hero such as Don Juan as its ancestor and—in opposition to the charge of scholarly absentmindedness—take pride in its paradoxical descent from this virile and decidedly unscholarly cavalier. Indeed, Don Juan’s conquests have been registered, but the crucial point is to whom the intellectual property of this idea can be attributed. In his champagne aria, Don Juan himself sings-
Ah, la mia lista doman mattina
d’una decina devi aumentar
d’una decina devi aumentar
—a feeling of which the true Buribunkologist is frequently possessed when he ponders the daily increasing scope or the daily rising number of his publications. He may very well be tempted to compare his sense of achievement with the plucky self-confidence of the frivolous conqueror of women. Still, this seductive parallel should not distract us from the profound seriousness of our endeavor or lead us to lose the distance from our possible founding father, which sober objectivity and detached science dictate to us. Did Don Juan really have the specifically buribunkological attitude that urged him to keep a diary, not for the sake of recording, superficially, his manly conquests, but—if I may say so—out of a sense of sheer obligation and debt vis-a-vis history? We cannot believe so. Don Juan had no interest in the past, just as he fundamentally had no interest in the future, which for him did not go beyond the next conquest; he lived in the immediate present, and his interest in the individual erotic adventure does not point to any signs of a beginning self-historicization. We cannot detect any signs of the attitude characterizing the Buribunk, which originates from the desire to record every second of one’s existence for history, to immortalize oneself. Like the Buribunk keeping a diary, Don Juan relishes each individual second, and in that there is certainly a similarity of psychological gesture. Instead of consecrating his exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple, however, he drags them into the misty cave of brutal sensuality, devouring them animal-like to satiate his base instincts[1]… Not for a single moment does he have what I would like to call the cinematic attitude of the Buribunk—he never apprehends himself as the subject-object of history—in which the world soul, writing itself, has become realized. And the register that Leporello keeps for him he takes along only as an afterthought, as a delectable flavoring for his horizontal delights. Hence, we have legitimate doubt whether, for example, from the 1,003 Spanish representatives, more than three owe their entry into the register to the very existence of the register itself. Put differently, we wonder whether Don Juan has been prompted into action by his inner need to start and keep a register, if only in those three cases, the way numerous major achievements in the arts, in science, in everyday life have been produced solely with the idea of their recorded existence in a diary or newspaper-the diary of the masses-in mind. The register was never the final cause; in implementing the acts of innervation at issue, it was—in the rectangle of psychological forces—relegated to the role of an accidental, of an accompanying positive motor. Thus, for us Don Juan is finished.
All the more interesting is the behavior of Leporello. He relishes the sensuous leftovers of his master, a couple of girls, a couple of choice morsels; for the most part, he accompanies his master. A Buribunk does not do that, for a Buribunk is unconditionally and absolutely his own master, he is himself. Gradually, however, what awakens in Leporello is the desire to partake in the escapades of his master by writing them down, by taking note of them, and it is at this moment that we see the dawn of Buribunkdom. With the aid of a commendable trick he surpasses his master, and if he does not become Don Juan himself, he becomes more than that; he changes from Don Juan’s wretched underling into his biographer. He becomes a historian, drags Don Juan to the bar of world history, that is, world court, in order to appear as an advocate or prosecutor, depending on the result of his observations and interpretations.
Was Leporello, however, cognizant of the implications of starting his register as the first step in a gigantic development? Certainly not. We do not want to dismiss the mighty effort behind the small register of the poor buffo, but we cannot under any circumstances recognize him as a conscious Buribunk—how should he have done it, anyway, the poor son of a beautiful but culturally retrograde country in which the terror of papal inquisition has crushed and smashed all remaining signs of intelligence? He was not meant to see his nonetheless significant intellectual work come to fruition; he holds the treasure-laden shrine, but he does not hold the key to it. He has not understood the essential and has not said the magic words that open the way to Aladdin’s cave. He was lacking the consciousness of the writing subject, the consciousness that he had become the author of a piece of world history and hence a juror on the world court-indeed, to exercise control over the verdict of the world court, because his written documents were proof more valid than a hundred testimonies to the contrary. Had Leporello had the strong will to this kind of power, had he ventured the magnificent leap to become an independent writing personality, he would first have written his own autobiography; he would have made a hero of himself, and instead of the frivolous cavalier who fascinates people with his shallow disposition, we would quite probably have gotten the impressive picture of a superior manager who, with his superior business skills and intelligence, pulls the strings of the colorful marionette, Don Juan. But instead of taking pen into fist, the poor devil clenches his fist in his pocket.
Upon close scrutiny, the utter inadequacy of Leporello’s registration method appears in numerous defects. He puts photographs in sequence without ever making an attempt to shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions into a homogeneous continuity; what is missing is the mental thread, the presentation of development. We don’t get any sense of demonstrated causal connections, of the mental, climatic, economic, and sociological conditions of individual actions, nothing relating to an aesthetic observation about the ascending or descending bell curve of Don Juan’s evolving taste. Similarly, the register has nothing to say about the specific historical interest in the uniqueness of each individual procedure or in each individual personality. Leporello’s disinterest is utterly incomprehensible; he does not even communicate any dismay when he is daily witness to his master’s ingenious sexuality—how it is aimlessly scattered to the winds instead of being rationally disseminated into purposive population growth. Still less evident is his willingness to provide reliable research data on details: nowhere does Leporello inquire into the deeper motivations of individual seductions, nowhere do we find sociologically useful data on the standing, origin, age, and so on of Don Juan’s victims, as well as their pre-seduction lives—at most, we are left with the summary conclusion (which is probably not sufficient for a more serious scientific investigation) that they came from “every station, every form, and every age.” We also don’t hear anything about whether the victims later organized themselves into a larger, communal mass initiative and provided mutual economic support—which no doubt would have been the only right thing to do, given their numbers. Naturally, what is also missing is any statistical breakdown within the respective categories, which would have recommended itself in light of the high number of 1,003; even more, what is missing is any indication as to how the dumped girls had been taken care of by the welfare system, which in many cases had become necessary. Naturally as well, there is no inkling that, in light of the brutal exploitation of male social superiority in relation to defenseless women, the introduction of female suffrage is a most urgent and legitimate demand. It would be in vain to ask for the larger precepts that underlie the development of the collective soul, the subjectivism of the time, the degree of its excitation. In a word, inadequacy here is turned into reality. Leporello is oblivious to the welter of the most urgent scientific questions—much to his own disadvantage, because he has to submit his obliviousness to the judgment of history. Oblivious to pressing questions, he did not engage in as much as one investigation that the most immature student of the humanities today would have pounced upon, and hence missed the opportunity of evolving the consciousness necessary to recognize the significance of his own identity. The dead matter has not been conquered by the intellectual labor of its workman, and the flyers on the advertisement pillars continue to announce: Don Juan, the chastised debauchee, and not: Leporello’s tales…
Not until Ferker did the diary become an ethical-historical possibility; the primogeniture in the realm of Buribunkdom is his. Be your own history! Live, so that each second of your life can be entered into your diary and be accessible to your biographer! Coming out of Ferker’s mouth, these were big and strong words that humanity had not yet heard. They owe their distribution into the nooks and crannies of even the most remote villages to a worldwide organization aimed at disseminating his ideas, an organization well managed and having the support of an intelligent press. No village is so small that it is without a blacksmith, as the old song went; today, we can say with not a little pride that no village is so small that it is not imbued with at least a touch of Buribunkic spirit. The great man[2], who presided like the chief of a general staff over his thousands of underlings, who guided his enormous business with a sure hand, who channeled the attention of the troops of researchers to hot spots, and who with unheard-of strategic skill focused attention on difficult research problems by directing pioneering dissertations-this impressive personality experienced a truly sensational rise. Born of humble origins and educated without Latin in the middle school of his small town, he successively became a dentist, a bookmaker, an editor, the owner of a construction company in Tiflis, the secretary of the headquarters of the international association to boost tourism on the Adriatic coast, the owner of a movie theater in Berlin, a marketing director in San Francisco, and, eventually, Professor of Marketing and Upward Mobility at the Institute of Commerce in Alexandria. This is also where he was cremated and, in the most grandiose style, his ashes processed into printer’s ink, as he had specified in detail in his will and which was sent in small portions to printing presses all over the world. Then, with the aid of flyers and billboards, the whole civilized world was informed of this procedure and was furthermore admonished to keep in mind that each of the billions of letters hitting the eye over the years would contain a fragment of the immortal man’s ashes. For eons, the memorial of his earthly days will never disappear; the man-who even in death is a genius of factuality-through an ingenious, I would say antimetaphysical-positivist gesture, secured himself a continued existence in the memory of humanity, a memory, moreover, that is even more safely guaranteed through the library of diaries that he released in part during his lifetime, in part after his death. For at each moment of his momentous life he is one with historiography and the press; in the midst of agitating events he coolly shoots film images into his diary in order to incorporate them into history. Thanks to this foresight, and thanks as well to his concomitant selfless research, we are informed about almost every second of the hero’s life …
Now we are finally in a position to define historically the crucial contribution of this ingenious man: not only has he made the radically transformative idea of the modern corporation feasible for human ingenuity without leaving the ground of the ethical ideal; not only has he demonstrated through his life that one can build a career of purposive ambition and still be an ethically complete being, bound under the sublation of the irreconcilable duality of matter and mind in a way that invalidates the constructions of theologizing metaphysics, which were inimical to the intellectual climate of the twentieth century, through a victorious new idealism; he has, and this is the crux, found a new, contemporary form of religion by strictly adhering to an exclusionary positivism and an unshakable belief in nothing-but-matter-of-factness. And the mental region in which these numerous and contradictory elements, this bundle of negated negations, are synthesized-the unexplainable, absolute, essential that is part of every religion-that is nothing but the Buribunkological.
No Buribunkologist who is also a genuine Buribunk will utter the name of this man without the utmost reverence. That we must emphasize up front. For when we disagree with the critical appraisal of our hero by noted Ferker scholars in the following discussion, we do so not without emphatic protest against the misunderstanding that we fail to recognize Ferker’s tremendous impulses and the full stature of the man. Nobody can be more informed by and imbued with his work than we are. Nevertheless, he is not the hero of Buribunkdom but only its Moses, who was permitted to see the promised land but never to set foot on it. Ferker’s truly noble blood is still tinged with too many unassimilated, alien elements; atavistic reminiscences still cast their shadow over long periods of his life and dim the pure image of self-sufficient, blue-blooded Buribunkdom. Otherwise, it would be inexplicable that the noble man, doubting his inner sense of self, shortly before his death was willing not only to enter into a bourgeois-religious marriage but also to marry his own housekeeper—a woman who we know was completely uneducated, downright illiterate, and who eventually (aside from inhibiting the free exfoliation of his personality) sought to prevent, for reasons of devout bigotry, his cremation … To have surpassed these inconsistencies and to have made Buribunkdom, in its crystal-clear purity, into a historical fact is the work of Schnekke.
As a fully matured fruit of the most noble Buribunkdom, this genius fell from the tree of his own personality. In Schnekke we find not the least visible trace of hesitation, not the slightest deviation from the distinguished line of the Ur-buribunkological. He is nothing more than a diary keeper, he lives for his diary, he lives in and through his diary, even when he enters into his diary that he no longer knows what to write in his diary. On a level where the I, which has been projecting itself into a reified, you-world constellation, flows with forceful rhythm back into a world-I constellation, the absolute sacrifice of all energies for the benefit of the inner self and its identity has achieved the fullest harmony. Because ideal and reality have here been fused in unsurpassable perfection; what is missing is any particular singularity, which shaped Ferker’s life in such a sensational way but which, for any discussion focusing on the essential, must be understood as a compliment rather than a critique. Schnekke is, in a much more refined sense than Ferker, a personality, and precisely because of that has he disappeared behind the most inconspicuous sociability. His distinct idiosyncrasy, an I determined solely by the most extreme rules of its own, is located within a spectrum of indiscriminate generality, in a steady colorlessness that is the result of the most sacrificial will to power. Here we have reached the absolute zenith of Buribunkdom; we need not be afraid of any relapse, as with Ferker[3] The empire of Buribunkdom has been founded. For in the midst of his continuous diaries, Schnekke (with his strong sense of generality and his universal instinct) saw the opportunity to detach the diary from its restrictive bond with the individual and to convert it into a collective organism. The generous organization of the obligatory collective diary is his achievement. Through that, he defined and secured the framing conditions of a buribunkological interiority; he elevated the chaotic white noise of disconnected and single Buribunkdom into the perfect orchestration of a Buribunkie cosmos. Let us retrace the broad lines of development of this sociological architecture.
Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are handed over on a daily basis and collated by district. A screening is done according to both a subject and a personal index. Then, while rigidly enforcing copyright for each individual entry, all entries of an erotic, demonic, satiric, political, and so on nature are subsumed accordingly, and writers are catalogued by district. Thanks to a precise system, the organization of these entries in a card catalogue allows for immediate identification of relevant persons and their circumstances. If, for example, a psychopathologist were to be interested in the pubescent dreams of a certain social class of Buribunks, the material relevant for this research could easily be assimilated from the card catalogues. In turn, the work of the psychopathologist would be registered immediately, so that, say, a historian of psychopathology could within a matter of hours obtain reliable information as to the type of psychopathological research conducted so far; simultaneously—and this is the most significant advantage of this double registration—he could also find information about the psychopathological motivations that underlie these psychopathological studies. Thus screened and ordered, the diaries are presented in monthly reports to the chief of the Buribunk Department, who can in this manner continuously supervise the psychological evolution of his province and report to a central agency. This agency, in turn, keeps a record of the complete register (and publishes that register in Esperanto) and is hence in a position to exercise buribunkological control over all of Buribunkdom. A series of relevant practices—such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film presentations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new journals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artist—ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buribunk world will ever come to an end.
Nevertheless, here too we see a rebellious spirit in evidence, albeit rarely. And yet it needs to be said that in the Buribunk world, there exists an unlimited and infinitely understanding tolerance, as well as the highest respect for a person’s individual liberty. Buribunks are allowed to write their diary entries free from any coercion whatsoever. Not only is one allowed to say that he lacks the mental energy for further entries and that it is only the grief felt for his failing energies that gives him the energy necessary for further entries; that is, in fact, one of the most beloved types of entry, which is widely acknowledged and appreciated. He can also put down, without fearing the least pressure, that he considers the diary one of the most senseless and bothersome practices, an annoying chicanery, a ridiculous old hat-in brief, he is not prevented from using the strongest language. For the Buribunks well know that they would violate the nerve center of their being were they to mess with the principle of unconditional freedom of speech. There even exists a reputable organization that sets itself the task of buribunkically recording Anti-Buribunkdom, just as there is an agency created for the purpose of fostering, in impressive entries, the ability to articulate disgust and loathing for the agency and even protest against the obligatory diary entry. Periodically, when diary entries threaten to glide into a certain uniformity, leaders of the Buribunks organize a successful movement aimed at raising individual-personal self-esteem[4]. The high point of this liberality, however, redes in the fact that no Buribunk is forbidden from writing in his diary that he refuses to keep a diary.
Naturally, such freedom does not reach the point of anarchic chaos. Every entry about refusing to keep a diary must be amply supported and developed. Whosoever, instead of writing about one’s resistance toward writing, really omits writing altogether violates the general intellectual openness and will be eliminated on grounds of antisocial behavior. The path of evolution silently passes over the silent ones; they are outside of all discourse and as a result can no longer draw attention to themselves. Finally, sinking step by step until hitting the bottom of the social hierarchy, they are forced to manufacture the external conditions for the possibility of noble Buribunkdom, for example, high-quality, handmade paper, upon which are printed the most distinguished diaries … That is a rigorous but completely natural selection of the fittest, for whosoever cannot compete in the intellectual struggle of diaries will soon degenerate and disappear in the mass of those equipped only to produce the external conditions just mentioned. As a result of this physical labor and other menial services, such people also are no longer in a position to exploit, in Buribunk fashion, each moment of their lives, and they thus yield to an inexorable fate. Since they don’t write anymore, they cannot respond to possible inconsistencies in their personal file; they no longer stay current, they disappear from the monthly reports and become nonentities. As if swallowed by the earth, nobody knows them anymore, nobody mentions them in their diaries, they are neither seen nor heard. Regardless of the intensity of their lament, even if it were to drive them to the edge of insanity, the honorable law does not spare anyone who has dishonorably excluded him- or herself, just as the laws of natural selection themselves know no exception.
And so, through tireless and engaged activity, the Buribunks seek to achieve such a perfection of their organization that, even if only over the span of hundreds of generations, an unprecedented progression is ensured. Daunting calculations—may progress not render them utopian!—have suggested that culture will eventually reach such a level that, thanks to unhindered evolution, the ability for diary writing will gradually become inborn in the Buribunk fetus. If so, fetuses could, with the help of appropriate, yet-to-be-developed media, communicate with one another about their cardinal perceptions and hence (by demystifying the remaining secrets of sex research) provide the necessary, factual basis for a refined sexual ethics. All that, of course, is far in the distance. It is, however, a historical fact that already today there exists a grand and densely organized mass of Buribunkdom—and hence a speaking, writing, bustling Buribunkdom compelled to enjoy each person’s essential personality—that forges ahead into the sunrise of historicity.
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak, therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish, therefore I am. This contains no contradiction, but rather the progressive sequence of identities, each of which, following the laws of logic, transcends its own limitations. For Buribunks, thinking is nothing but silent speech; speech is nothing but writing without script; writing is nothing but anticipated publication; and publication is, hence, identical with writing to such a degree that the differences between the two are so small as to be negligible. I write, therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write ? I write myself. Who writes me ? I myself write myself. What do I write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent circle of egohood? History!
I am thus a letter on the typewriter of history. I am a letter that writes itself. Strictly speaking, however, I write not that I write myself but only the letter that I am. But in writing, the world spirit apprehends itself through me, so that I, in turn, by apprehending myself, simultaneously apprehend the world spirit. I apprehend both it and myself not in thinking fashion, but-as the deed precedes the thought-in the act of writing. Meaning: I am not only the reader of world history but also its writer.
At each second of world history, the letters of the typewriter keyboard leap, impelled by the nimble fingers of the world—I, onto the white paper and continue the historical narrative. Only at the moment that the single letter, singled out from the meaningless and senseless indifference of the keyboard, hits the animated fullness of the white paper, is a historical reality created; only at that moment does life begin. That is to say, the beginning of the past, since the present is nothing but the midwife that delivers the lived, historical past out of the dark womb of the future. As long as it is not reached, the future is as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of the typewriter, a dark rat hole from which one second after the other, just like one rat after the other, emerges into the light of the past.
Ethically speaking, what does the Buribunk do who keeps a diary each and every second of his life ? He wrests each second off of the future in order to integrate it into history. Let us imagine this procedure in all its magnificence: second by second, the blinking young rat of the present moment crawls out of the dark rat hole of the future—out of the nothing that not yet is—in order to merge (eyes glowing with fiery anticipation) the next second with the reality of history. Whereas with the unintellectual human being, millions and billions of rats rush without plan or goal out into the infinite expanse of the past only to lose themselves in it, the diary—keeping Buribunk can catch each of those seconds, one at a time, and-once aligned in an orderly battalion—allow them to demonstrate the parade of world history. This way, he secures for both himself and humanity the maximum amount of historical facticity and cognizance. This way, the nervous anticipation of the future is defused, for no matter what happens, one thing is for sure: no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the typewriter key will miss the page.
The death of an individual is also nothing but such a rat second, which has no content in itself—whether one of happiness or grief—but only in its historical registration. Of course, in the rat second of my death, I can no longer hold pen and diary, and I am ostensibly no longer actively involved in this historical registration; the crux of diary keeping, the will to power over history, disappears and clears the field for somebody else’s desire. If we disregard the pedagogical aspects of this situation, that is, its application not to waste a second in order to impose our will to power onto historiography in the making, we must confess that the termination of our will to history goes very much against our will, for the will to power in the first instance always refers to the will to one’s own power, not to that of a certain historian of future generations. Such concerns, however, lend themselves to serious confusion, and we have already seen how even in the case of the great Ferker, the fear of death had a downright catastrophic influence on his historical reputation. Today, however, thanks to the evolving consciousness whose sunlight kills the bacteria of the fear of death, there is little danger of any confusion among the Buribunks.
We see through the illusion of uniqueness. We are the letters produced by the writing hand of the world spirit and surrender ourselves consciously to this writing power. In that we recognize true freedom. In that we also see the means of putting ourselves into the position of the world spirit. The individual letters and words are only the tools of the ruses of world history. More than one recalcitrant “no” that has been thrown into the text of history feels proud of its opposition and thinks of itself as a revolutionary, even though it may only negate revolution itself. But by consciously merging with the writing of world history we comprehend its spirit, we become equal to it, and-without ceasing to be written-we yet understand ourselves as writing subjects. That is how we outruse the ruse of world history—namely, by writing it while it writes us.
[1] Hence, one could say that Don Juan is not one who ruminates upon lived experience, if one were to charge the buribunkological keeping of a diary with being a kind of intellectual rumination. That such a claim is untenable is easy to prove, for the diary-keeping Buribunk does not experience anything prior to his entries; rather, the experience consists precisely in the making of an entry and its subsequent publication. To speak of rumination is thus simply nonsense, because there is no initial act of chewing and swallowing.
[2] On this issue, all relevant documents show a rare unanimity. In his diary, Maximilian Sperling calls him “a smart fellow” (Sperling’s Diaries, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Bumkotzki [Breslau, 1909], p. 816). Theo Timm, in a letter of August 21 to Kurt Stange, describes him as “a fabulous guy” (Timm’s Letters, vol. 21, ed. Erich Veit [Leipzig, 1919], p. 498 ). In her diary, Mariechen Schmirrwitz says, “I find him splendid” (vol. 4, ed. Wolfgang Huebner [Weimar, 1920], p. 43 5 ). Following his first meeting with the man himself, Oskar Limburger exclaims, “He is enormous, watch out for him” (Memories of my Life, ed. Katharina Siebenhaar [Stuttgart, 1903], p. 87). Prosper Loeb describes him as of a “demonic nature” (Konigsberg, 1899, p. 108 ) . He is a “heck of a guy,” says Knut vom Heu in his letters to his bride (edited by their son Flip; Frankfurt a.M., 1918, p. 71), and so on.
[3] What a difference there is between Ferker’s and Schnekke’s attitudes toward women! Never is there any thought in Schnekke about getting married in church; with instinctive surefootedness he recognizes it as a ball and chain on the leg of his ingenuity, and he manages—despite a series of rather fully developed erotic relationships—to escape from marriage with the surety of a sleepwalker. He always remains cognizant of the needs surrounding the free development of his uniqueness, and he rightfully invokes Ekkehard in his diary when he says that marriage would inhibit his essential I-ness. At the same time, we should not overlook the impressive progress evident from Ferker to Schnekke when it comes to women. There is no illiterate woman in Schnekke’s life, no one who with petit-bourgeois ridiculousness would claim to restrain genius’s needs for unrestrained activity; no one who would not have been proud to have served Schnekke as the impetus for his artistic achievements and thus to have enjoyed the most gratifying reward of her femaleness.
[4] In this context, certain undaunted neo-Buribunkic initiatives deserve an honorable mention. They have led to the establishment of a prize-winning question that is raised periodically, “What real progress have the Buribunks made since the days of Ferker? ” and to decided efforts in that direction.
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