Writers - Images - Politics

 I offer two articles for reading.

Mannhood: When Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig Had Lunch Together (Liberties)

But writing is also, in Iris Murdoch’s words, “close dangerous play with unconscious forces,” and by viewing fascism as the evil fruit of German Romanticism, Mann incriminates himself for having eaten the fruit of the same tree. In Death in Venice, written in 1912, he had seen the “tendencies and aspirations of the time […] ideas which twenty years later were to be the property of the man in the street.” If Nazism is partly, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “the aestheticization of politics,” then it is the responsibility of the artist to defend the realm of aesthetics against Nazi appropriation. As Tobias Boes has shown in his important book Thomas Mann’s War, that’s precisely the struggle Mann engaged himself in during the years of the Second World War. 

Iconicity in Politics (Public Orthodoxy)

What implications does the world’s iconicity have for politics? In the first place, politics is a part of the very “matter” of life in the created world. Human beings are naturally communal beings, which inevitably raises the question of how to live well together. If this is indeed the case, then politics, like the rest of the created world, can become a saturated phenomenon.

This means that what we see in our political leaders and systems, while distinct from the way that they actually work, it is never separable. Put in the terms used by St. John, the “icon” of a good communal life envisioned in political systems and leaders can and should testify to the goodness of their “matter,” that is, their actual goodness; yet, we can and should honor that actual goodness in the form of an image.

Two implications follow. First, politicians and political systems cannot be reduced to the image they project. If voters give in to our cynical tendencies and embrace the lie that “image is everything,” we allow public life to devolve into a realm where falsehoods flourish, giving reign to the “father of lies” in the world for which Christ died. Iconicity demands that we not only “fact check” our leaders’ claims and call them to account for their lack of substance, but also that we support leaders for whom substance matters as much as perception.

 I connect aesthetics with icons with the distinction that iconicity is not divorced from substance.

Can we do like Thomas Mann and pierce the image to show its hollowness?

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