Reading Irigaray's SPECULUM and THIS SEX WHICH IS NOT ONE through LeCarre's LOOKING GLASS WAR

This is the most readable and accessible one.

WORDS WRITTEN IN BLOOD ARE NOT TO BE READ BUT LEARNT BY HEART. -NIETZSCHE

This is difficult and deconstructs Freud's Oedipus Complex for little girls.

Some Examples of What Irigaray Says

All page numbers are from the Octopus Edition of 5 novels.

They never talked about Sarah. It was as if they shared a single relationship to Avery's wife, like children who are able to share a toy they no longer care for. Leclerc said, "Well, she's got that son of yours to keep her company......Leclerc was proud of knowing it was a son and not a a daughter. 

(p. 398)

She left the room, Woodford watching her. He took his pipe from his mouth and grinned. Avery knew he was going to say something about sleeping with Carol and suddenly he'd had enough.

Did your wife make that cup, Bruce? he asked quickly. I hear she's quite a potter.

Made the saucer as well, he said. He began talking about the classes she went to, the amusing way it had caught on in Wimbledon, how his wife was tickled to death. (p. 411)

It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe. It is their battlefield still; if there is love, they find it here in one another, shyly like adolescents, thinking all the time of other people. (p.445)

Avery was already familiar, during his short association with the department, with the phenomenon of organic motivation; with operations which had no discernible genesis and no conclusion, which formed part of an unending pattern of activity until they ceased to have any further identity; with that progress of fruitless courtships which, in the aggregate, passed for an active love life. (479)

He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed - it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more - -that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy....

Avery came to know Leiser's face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. (Here we have the MALE GAZE Lacan discusses)He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upwards rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar. (p. 493)

I wouldn't mind a bit of what Fred's having, Johnson said with a snigger. He played a shot; a white ball dropped dutifully into its hold. Poles are dead randy. Go up anything, a Pole will. Specially Fred, he's a real terror. He's got the walk.

Are you that way, Jack?

When I'm in the mood. I wouldn't mind a little bit now, as a matter of fact.

They played a couple of shots, each lost in an alcoholic euphoria of erotic fancy. 

...Here's to Fred, Avery said.

To Fred. On the nest. And bloody good luck to him....

I dont know how he'll manage the B2, Johnson murmured. He's got a long way to go....

Fred. He's a lovely boy. Here: do you know this bloke Woodford, the one who picked me up?

Of course. He'll be coming down next week.

Met his wife at all, Babs? She was a girl, she was; give it to anyone.....

They drank ; that joke went astray. 

She used to go with the amin bloke, Jimmy Gorton..... (p. 499)

Is he getting frisky? Sometimes they want a girl about now. (p. 506)

A certain hilarity infected the briefing that morning. Johnson made a joke about not photographing the Oxford Constabulary by mistake; Leiser laughed richly and even Haldane allowed himself a wan smile. It was the end of of term; the boys were going home.
The exercise was a success. Johnson was pleased; Avery enthusiastic; Leiser manifestly delighted. They had made two faultless transmissions, ....at eight o'clock they assembled for dinner wearing their best suits. a special menu had been arranged. Haldane had presented the rest of his burgundy; toasts were made; there was talk of an annual reunion in years to come.  Leiser looked very smart in a dark blue suit and a pale tie of watered silk. (p. 507)

Too many sweets on the plane, that's your trouble, that's your trouble. Johnson winked at Avery. I saw you giving that air hostess a look. You shouldn't do it, Fred, you know, you'll break her heart.  He frowned round the table in mock disapproval. He really looked her over, you know. a proper tip-to-toe job. (p. 518)

Leiser smiled. It was the best ever, that week, John. It's funny, isn't it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it's the men that matter; just the men.

You're one of us, Fred. You always were; all the time your card was there, you were one of us. We dont forget. (p. 530) 

When we met him he was a man without love. Do you know what love is? I'll tel you; it is whatever you can still betray. We ourselves live without it in our profession. We dont force people to do things for us. We let them discover love. And, of course leiser did, didn't he? He married us for money, so to speak, and left us for love.
Avery said quickly, What do you mean for money? 
I mean whatever we gave to him, Love is what he gave to us.

When he saw those letters, drawn out in Jack's neat, post-office hand, tears of gratitude started to his eyes. He never told me, he thought, he never told me he'd done it. Jack was all right, after all. Jack, the captain and young John; what a team to work for, he thought; a man could go through life and never meet a set of blokes like that. (p.546)

That Budapest thing, Leclerc continued, raising his voice, partly in enthusiasm and partly to dispel the atmosphere of intimacy which suddenly threatened them... (p. 558)

Avery spoke for the first time. You cant leave him out there all alone.His voice was flat. (p. 562)

Love. Yes, love! Not yours, Haldane, mine. Smiley's right! You made me do it for you, made me love him! It wasn't in you anymore! I brought him to you, I kept him in your house, made him dance to the music of your bloody war! i piped for him, but there's no breath in me now. He's Peter Pan's last victim, Haldane, the last one, the last love; the last music gone.

Avery had buried his face in his hands.(p. 563)

Avery was sobbing like a child. No one heeded him. (p.564)


_______________________________________________________________________________
ZIZEK tells us that the future is already here. It comes in fragments and we can embrace that which we want to preserve or ignore at our peril what we do not wish to come about. The LGW was published in 1963 soon after LeCarre wrote The Spy Who Came In From the Cold gave Carre the financial success he needed to quit M15 or whatever it was called then. He himself was vulnerable at this time, an alcoholic and a marriage tottering. He was writing in words of blood. 

Irigaray tells this to us. That male homosexual erotic power rules the world. Why the fact that gay men cannot be tolerated to upset this applecart of world rule. And heterosexual sex is the MASK that conceals it. Gay men are hated because they have broken the rule and have become commodities up for sexual exchange. Just like women. Men unconscious of their homosexuality are masking it with macho behavior and heterosexual sexual preferences. In this case they denigrate women when they are together talking about women. This is misogyny that we recognize without understanding it. Women are excluded but now have been invited in on the periphery of the limit, but they will never really be part of the good ol' boys clubs. It is clear that Carre knows very well what is going on among them erotically, but tells us very subtly. He is implying. When I get to Bolano the subtle telling disappears.

Irigaray also is writing in BLOOD. With the 1974 publication of SPECULUM the Lacanians kicked her out of psychoanalytic practice, expelled her from The Freud School and banished her from her teaching at the University of Vincennes which she helped to found. Three Lacanians were on the board evaluating her proposal for classes the following semester. This is how you get MURDERED in the academic profession. Clearly she was seen as VERY DANGEROUS. They were correct by the way. She is.

Poems on Reading Le Carre's Looking Glass War and Kenner on Eliot

They sent off their lamb

Leaving it to 

Survive in wilderness.

Prey of the machine, the State

This Boy Club playing Hide and Seek for REAL.

Spies like women

Are commodities. 

Interchangeable in an unchanging exchange.

Wearing down, wearing out.

Because they breathe.

Here, have some more he said 

passing the plate.

How many years 

Did they wait for me to die?

Sharing a bedroom

With her growing larger

To take my place

And was that how come I came to grow and live?

When did they know

She also was a mistake?

That they were a mistake?

Soon we all will be mostly gone.

The last generation of Depression Babies.

A small demographic

With a childhood in war years

No lust for things

That hadn't been dreamed of yet

To turn into cheap coins

That were no longer

Beautifully engraved silver flowing images

That we carefully exchanged

Not wanting to part

With cherished loveliness

To obtain what we thought was less.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Eliot: The Cocktail Party:

..........

Two people who know that they do not understand each other

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them.

Reading Snowden As ParrhesiastesThrough Le Carre and A Delicate Truth

Edward Snowden

The latest book – A Delicate Truth – is centered in modern Britain, on a supposed threat to national security and the use of dubious means towards a justifiable end; the challenge to an individual oppressed by the power of the state. It’s a political tale, appreciated across the political spectrum

On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian cafe in London's Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability. 

His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attache case stuffed with hundred - dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider: Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibralter he knew nothing; rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass. (ADT p. 47)

This is Edward Snowden who becomes an employee of BoozAllen in order to steal secrets - the truth - from the NSA

This is not the situation Toby Bell, the reluctant whistle-blower, finds himself in by relentless circumstances. His awareness begins slowly, well, here is a quote explaining how.

In coded discussions in Whitehall's sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. ...The word enhance , once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains willfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn't know it's happening, although he knows very well?

But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them - purely academically you understand - to Giles over a cozy dinner at Oakley's club to celebrate Toby's thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo....Oakley quotes his beloved La Rochefoucauld:

'Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man. In an imperfect world, I fear it's the best we can manage.'(ADT p.53)

In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for Crispin, Toby even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid....And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. 

What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own.(ADT p. 296)


"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests." - Edward Snowden

And then they get Toby Bell:

The first blows were undoubtedly the most painful and the most surprising....But it was the hail of blows to his stomach, kidneys, groin and then his groin again that seemed never to end, and for all he knew it continued after he had lost consciousness. But not before the same unidentified voice had breathed into his ear in the same tone of command:

'Don't think this is over, son. This is for appetizers. Remember that.'

Le Carre

LINK TO COMPLETE INTERVIEW

“I do think we live in most extraordinary period of history,” he says now. “The fact that we feel becalmed is the element that is most terrifying, the second-rate quality of leadership, the third-rate quality of parliamentary behaviour.”

That sense of correctness has a broader resonance, informing, when we discussed it recently, his views about Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extraordinary scale of US surveillance of its own citizens as well as those of other countries. He tells me he is horrified: “There seems to be no limit to the violations to their hard-won liberties that Americans will put up with in the catchall name of counter terror.” But he also recognises that “no country can allow its secret servants to whistle-blow with impunity”.

He has long disabused me of the sense that his family background might have been an impediment to joining the British intelligence services. The attraction of someone with a semi-criminal background was irresistible to the spooks, he says. They were looking for recruits with a broad sense of morality, individuals who were unanchored and wayward, who hankered for discipline (“his father’s a bit bent, we could use a bit of that”).

If the secret service produced so many bad eggs, he tells me, it’s because they looked for them.

Gove probably didn’t pick up on the book’s strong attack on the secret courts for which his government voted (allowing matters of “national security” to be heard behind closed doors). Le Carré is greatly concerned about such courts, which undermine the rights of some individuals while making it easier for others to make the wrong choices. 

 He “smuggles this kind of stuff” into his best-selling stories, conscious that subliminal influence lasts longer than a news story. There is a political agenda, born of personal experience.

Who is his greatest hero? Andre Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who came  
to recognise the dangers of his own work (“He realised he’d given the bomb to a bunch of 

gangsters”).

And if you have seen Dirty Wars you will know that american Special Ops are in 75 different countries in order to destabilize them. A country in chaos is an easy takeover to exploit their resources.

And the beginning of A Delicate Truth:

Forgive me, Minister: What field would that be, exactly?'

'Private defense contractors. Where've you been? Name of the game these days. War's gone corporate, in case you haven't noticed. Standing professional armies are a bust. Top-heavy, under-equipped, one brigadier for every dozen boots on the ground and cost a mint. Try a couple of years at Defence if you don't believe me.'(ADT p. 9)

Philippe Sands is a writer and barrister who teaches international law at University College. To comment on this article email magazineletters@ft.com

What I want to emphasize here is that Snowden is a parrhesiastes not a whistle-blower. Toby Bell is dragged into it by his conscience, Snowden by a compelling sense of duty from the beginning. to practice parrhesia.