Having Been Born: Karla Kelsey Reviews Killing Plato and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard

Málaga-based poet and philosopher Chantal Maillard’s 2004 book of poetry, Matar a Platón, was translated by Yvette Siegert into English and published in 2019 as a New Directions Pamphlet titled Killing Plato. It opens with a violent event:

A man gets run over.

At this very moment.

Right now.

A man gets run over.

There is flesh burst open, there are guts—

liquids oozing from truck and body (6)

Prism-like, the sequence of twenty-eight poems that manifest from this moment of violence investigates the event from multiple angles, asking what it entails to fully engage, as witness, such a trauma. Meanwhile, along the bottom of each page in Courier typeface a parallel narrative describes an encounter between the narrator and an “old friend,” an unnamed poet who reveals he has just completed a book titled Killing Plato. By the end of the sequence we learn that this unnamed poet is the man who will be killed in the book’s opening accident. The prism shifts and bevels.

As one would expect from the book’s title, Killing Plato applies poetry to philosophy and concerns itself with representation’s relationship to reality. But Maillard’s most acute challenge to Plato comes in the following lines, which scroll across the bottom of pages 20 and 21:

Plato banished the artists. He was afraid they would prove that the thing-that-occurs does not correlate to any ideal form, and that beings participate not in the idea of themselves, but rather in everything that they are not.

—That is to say: we participate in the accident, in the truck’s metal, in the flesh of the man, in the witnesses who gather, in the book of poetry written and translated, in the small girl who accompanies the unnamed poet, mentioned at the bottom of page 31—the man’s daughter? And what will become of her? No, we are not the man and the book is only a fiction (is it only a fiction? what is a fiction?), but what if I am, in the end, essentially interconnected, essentially part of all of this instead of separate. What if this realization of foundational interconnection is what Plato was afraid of?

—That is to say: what if we’ve gotten not only representation, but the foundation of everything wrong.

Yes, what if.

Chantal Maillard’s pamphlet, The Semblable, translated from Spanish into English by Whitney DeVos, inhabits this what if, investigating the foundational way we (or at least many of us raised in the West) have been getting what it is to be human wrong, and the connection of this error to unnecessary violence. One of twenty pamphlets in Ugly Duckling Presses’ 2020 Pamphlet Series, The Semblable was adapted by Maillard from a larger philosophical work, her 2018 ¿Es posible un mundo sin violencia? [Is a World Without Violence Possible?]. Maillard, who holds a PhD in philosophy and taught aesthetics at the University of Málaga, studied extensively in India and effortlessly draws on a variety of Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions—Derrida, for example, as well as Gandhi. At the same time, her text knots, flies, jostles, and fragments, resisting philosophy’s tradition of taming chaos and smoothing edges. If philosophy might be idealized as a perfect glass sphere, The Semblable understands that sphere to have long ago shattered, finding more in the sharding than ever had been in that orb.

While the pamphlet will interest philosophers, ethicists, environmentalists, students of Western and Eastern thought, and other curious minds who are wondering where do we go from here, the pamphlet is also of interest to the field of poetics. In addressing the question, “Is a world without violence possible?” Maillard’s pamphlet suggests a poetics of thinking and being that might mitigate gratuitous violence by expanding “what is of our concern”— semblable, same, fellow, neighbor—to include not only strangers (a man in an accident, a person from a country you might not be able to find on a map) but also nonhumans who share our place and time (37). Yes, a poetics—which is not to say that the pamphlet theorizes the genre of poetry. It doesn’t. Rather, it proposes a poetics in a broader sense. Through the how of its language The Semblable enacts an ethics and aesthetics Maillard brings to bear on the foundational act of relating to others. Such relationality holds the seed not only of poetry, but of poetry’s utopian potential: individual and social transformation.

—So, does this mean that a world without violence is possible?

Just as boldly as she begins Killing Plato with a fatal accident, Maillard states the unbearable truth in the first paragraph: “The world we live in is governed by the law of hunger and the life contract we sign is embroiled in violence” (1). This life contract, signed at birth, states that all living things suffer and die. And so, at a primary level, no, a world without violence is not possible. Furthermore, we also wield another secondary, gratuitous, form of violence, unique to the human species, “one that characterizes us as a species: wielded not out of necessity, but pleasure, greed, or more simply, inertia and indifference” (1). The pamphlet places a special focus on bland indifference, showing human violence to be deeply entwined in the way we’ve come to relate, not only to each other but to living things that fall outside of the circle of “others” inscribed by the golden rule, the “ancient formula of reciprocity, ‘Do not do to others what you do not want done unto you’” (15).

If the ethics of reciprocity proposes to expand the care taken for oneself to family, friends, neighbors, countrymen, global citizens, and the human species it leaves all other non-human living things outside of its circumference. Doing so is a fundamental way we go about getting everything wrong. In addition, Maillard points out the aspirational quality of the ethics of reciprocity, noting that humans not only fail to apply this ethic to the non-human but also have a history of failing to treat other humans as ourselves. This failure happens in proportion to the unequal distribution of wealth and power and was used (for one example) by European nations to justify “the genocide of the Amerindian populations …. the enslavement of Africans …the subjugation of women” (9). Lest any of us think these examples merely historical, or applicable only to the one percent, Maillard reminds us that, “We all know or are aware that banks have our accounts at their disposal as a means to finance the arms industry” (6). Not only are we culpable, we know we are culpable, and, furthermore, any dismay or regret the average person may feel about such situations dramatically under-performs the outrage due according to the ethics of reciprocity: “We don’t go out into the streets to protest the fact that our companies displace entire populations who resist the establishment of factories and the stealing of their land, nor because agribusiness corporations relentlessly torture millions of animals in farms and slaughterhouses” (7).

How might this be different, Maillard asks, if the act of considering others worthy of reciprocity was not based on a judgment of who was similar enough to ourselves to qualify for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but, instead, on the fact that all living beings desire happiness, and all living beings suffer and die, as the Buddha proposed:

Having been born, having appeared, having fallen into time, for a time, from the abyss of non-life, deserves, given the suffering all this in fact implies, the respect of “morituri te salutant.”

Notice, here, Maillard’s syntax, which gives the subject-position in the sentence not to a person, but to “having been born.” “Having been born” deserves. The event deserves. This innovative language-use enacts the foundational shift for which the sentence advocates—it is in virtue of having been born, Maillard proposes, not in virtue of identity or personhood, that we owe the respect of reciprocity. Maillard continues:

And the additional suffering that, in human beings, derives from the ability to anticipate irremediable decline, aware of its befalling, the fall itself, and their rejection of it, doesn’t make us more worthy of respect than any other being: it must make us more wretched” (16).

And so it might be the case that we can learn to forego this human-created secondary violence, but so doing requires respecting both every living thing’s primary state of violence as well as the precondition for the existence of any individual or species: interconnectedness. (Or, as the narrator of Killing Plato phrases it: “beings participate not in the idea of themselves, but rather in everything that they are not.”) Thinking otherwise is “like seeing wildfire growing closer and focusing on the fortification of one’s own lair” (12). Until we reckon with both of these realities we remain wrapped-up in a false idea of ourselves. Until we reckon we consign ourselves to narrow circles of concern, protecting and tending only those who are like us in secondary ways, overlooking the primary and more essential ways in which radical others—spiders, rhinos, fungi, atoms, etc—are, irrevocably, fellows. The consequence of this, the consequence of continuing to get everything of foundational importance wrong is, “we’ll do nothing more than slap a patch on a raft that, sooner or later, is bound to sink” (12).

Eschewing smooth transitions and neat arguments, The Semblable returns again and again to the theme of suffering, refusing to hide the pain of its thinking. This is particularly poignant in Maillard’s presentation of her concept of “aesthetic reason,” a shining “instrument” of thought that she devised over two decades ago, hoping it might return “logos to its place” and recover “what had been forgotten: channels of perception obstructed by judgment” (35). Maillard reveals that the concept came into being during a different time—a time of “optimism stemming from having a body still in tact,” an “optimism that comes with childbearing age, when the body is still willing to cooperate in perpetuating the survival of its species—and of itself.” In writing The Semblable, Maillard is no longer in that time (and, frankly, we are no longer in that time), and the concept no longer holds the answer. As such, Maillard creates a subtle argument for diversity of idea-makers (different life-contexts give rise to different forms of ideas, different tools) and gives space to the life-cycle of ideas themselves. I found myself thinking about concepts as living, time-based beings that also might suffer and are, perhaps, worthy of compassion. Applied to critique, compassion creates a very different gesture from the debunking and dismissal often applied to modes of thought or being, or art-making. Furthermore, compassion leaves the door open for recycling cultural concepts and images, for repurposing them after they have been defamiliarized by the process of time, which might call to mind plastic water bottles becoming plastic fiber becoming sweatshirts or might be another way of thinking about resurrection or, perhaps, karma.

The Semblable movingly begins and ends with such an image, a very famous image, from philosophy, “Friedrich Nietzsche, in Turin, weeping, throwing himself upon the neck of an exhausted horse that, on the verge of collapse, was barely withstanding the coachman’s lashes” (1). At the beginning of the pamphlet Maillard reminds us that biographers considered “this episode to be symptomatic of the philosopher’s madness,” and an occasion to ridicule the philosopher. Maillard finds, “That a movement of compassion toward a non-human being is considered a symptom of insanity is a clear indication of a sick society.” She ends the pamphlet with the same image, but seen from the point of view of a future where we’ve gotten things a little less wrong:

May we remember Friedrich Nietzsche in Turin, clinging to the neck of a horse, crying out for forgiveness for humanity; and, in that way reversing, with a universally compassionate gesture, the hierarchical order which places human being at the top of a pyramid manufactured ex professo. May the day soon come when that episode is considered of the highest order. (39)