MARX: THE VIDEO (A POLITICS OF REVOLTING BODIES) by LAURA KIPNIS University of Wisconsin, Madison Copyright (c) 1990 by Laura Kipnis, all rights reserved. _Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990). ------------------------------------------------------- A note on the mise-en-scene: There are large projections --stills, film clips, etc.--behind the action (referred to in the text as KEYS) in many scenes. There is also a Greek chorus of DRAG QUEENS (or DQs) who pop in and out of the action (or are KEYED over the action) in other scenes. ------------------------------------------------------- FADE UP ON: 1. MARX'S ROOM, he is lying in bed, carbuncular, in pain. ROLLING TEXT OVER: Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818, and died in London in 1883, having been deported from numerous European countries for revolutionary activity. Throughout his life he suffered from chronic and painful outbreaks of carbuncles--agonizing skin eruptions--particularly during the years he was at work on his magnum opus, _Capital_. His 30-year correspondence with Frederick Engels, his friend and collaborator, deals regularly and in great detail with the state of his own body. DISSOLVE TO: 2. CLIP _La Marseillaise_ King: What is it? SUPER TITLE: 1789 Minister: Sire, the Parisians have taken the Bastille. King: So, is it a revolt? Minister: No sire, it is revolution. FREEZE on king V/O: Once power resided in the person of the King. The people's task was clear. Get rid of the king. 3. CLIP: Berlin wall V/O: Once power resided going down. in repressive state bureaucracies. The people's task was clear. SUPER TITLE: 1989 Smash the state. 4. STILL dead Ceausescu V/O: At certain moments in history power is centralized and visible, the sites of repression are clear and identifiable; resistance movements arise out of those relations of subordination and antagonism. 5. STILL Postmodern V/O: At other moments the urban landscapes task is less clear. Power is entrenched, but dispersed. Where does power reside? Who are the agents of change? TRANSITION EFFECT going back in time 6. STILLS: 1848 V/O: In 1848, Toqueville uprising warned: "We are sleeping on a volcano. A wind of TITLE: 1848 revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." That year Marx and Engels completed The Communist Manifesto. Jean Martin Charcot, who would later devote himself to the study of hysteria, enters medical school. The same year, revolution swept Europe. Students and workers united, but three years later the revolution was toppled. Time passing TRANSITION 7. STILLS Paris, May 68 V/O: France, May '68. Students and workers united in a three week general strike, demanding radical democratic reforms. Momentarily, revolution seemed possible, but once again that possibility was soon dispelled. In the decades following '68, like the aftermath of 1848--the defeat of forces of change left traces, absences, an unfilled place where something is wanting. Where is the repository of those absences--where are they buried, embodied, misrecognized? TITLE: MARX: THE VIDEO A Politics of Erupting Bodies 1848-1990 ------------------------------------------------------- 8. SUPER: 1863 V/O BIOGRAPHER: Looking over first image of back, fifteen years later, MARX; he lies in bed to the failed revolution. MARX: Dear Engels: One thing is sure, the era of revolution is now once more fairly opened in Europe. And the general state of things is good. But the comfortable delusions and the almost childish enthusiasms with which we greeted the era of revolution before SUPER: Trotsky waving February 1848 are gone to from a train the devil. Old comrades are gone, others have fallen away or decayed, and a new generation is not yet in sight. In looming supers of addition, we now know what Stalin, Lenin role stupidity plays in revolutions and how they are exploited by Stalin looms over body scoundrels...Let us hope that this time the lava Mao looms over body pours from East to West and not vice versa. V/O BIOGRAPHER: He writes with nostalgia and longing for something thwarted, for something that didn't happen. ------------------------------------------------------- 9. DOCTOR KEYED over DOCTOR: His body just examining room STILL. erupted...It became Addresses camera like a battleground. The only cure at the time was arsenic. Terribly painful, like a body trying to turn itself into another body. I think it started shortly after his mother died. It continued throughout his life. ------------------------------------------------------- 10. STILLS, 19c. V/O NARRATOR: Marx took up industrialization the task of exhaustively superimposed on analyzing the historical Marx's body moment in which he found himself: the rise of industrialization and the inception of the working class movement. He stripped the facade off Poster International capital to reveal what was workingmens assoc. concealed: the labor in STILL the commodity, the alienation of the worker, naked exploitation by the capitalist. He looked to the material foundations zoom on worker body of the moment, he looked worker injury photo to the body. His analysis of capital relies on a language of the body: "production" "consumption" "reproduction" and "circulation." For Marx, the collective wealth of the state is the body--the labor--of the workers. worker injuries Capital amputates the worker from his own body; he has phantom pain for his missing limbs. But for Marx, which bodies were absent, unspoken, unacknowledged? ------------------------------------------------------- 11. DRAG QUEEN 1: What's a real body, a natural body? It doesn't exist, there's only a social body, the body as theater, the body that speaks, unbidden. But in whose language? ------------------------------------------------------- 12. MARX'S ROOM MARX: Dear Frederick: Two Fade up on MARX, in hours ago I received a foreground, writing. telegram that my mother is In suit, suitcase at dead. Fate claimed one of feet my family. I must go to Trier to settle my inheritance. I myself stood with one foot in the grave... DRAG QUEEN CHORUS supered over MARX, DQ CHORUS: His body just all dressed as nurses erupted. ------------------------------------------------------- 13. DQ2: What a problem the body is. Keeping it confined to its boundaries (like the lower classes). Concealing anything that BACKGROUND: comes out of it, or CLIPS porn, slo-mo protrudes from it. Certainly not speaking of such things. The creation of a meek, submissive hygienic public body. DQ2: His body just erupted. ------------------------------------------------------- 14. Hygiene products, V/O NARRATOR: Capital douche, dolls, float produces a disgusting through blue sky body, so it can create new regimes, new products, to police it and make it acceptable. Capital has achieved historical advances in the threshold of delicacy, it produces new varieties of bourgeois disgust, then markets a new and improved body without byproducts, without smells, to exist in a public sphere that is increasingly phobic about the collective body, the lower class body--the mob--a body that might not mind its manners. ------------------------------------------------------- 15. MARX'S ROOM, he MARX: Dear Fred: It is writes in bed. clear that on the whole I Dolly in know more about the carbuncle disease than most doctors...Here and there I have the beginnings of new carbuncles, which keep on disappearing, but they force me to keep my working hours within limits...I consider it my vocation to remain in Europe to complete the work in which I have been engaged for so many years but I cannot work productively more than a very few hours daily without feeling the effect physically...I think this work I am doing is much more important for the working class than anything I could do personally at a Congress of any kind...I would consider myself impractical if I had dropped dead without having finished my book, at least in manuscript. Cut to second angle V/O BIOGRAPHER: Writing on MARX with smoking Capital, his narrative of factory, keyed in the conditions of the background English proletariat, his body broke out with "a proletarian disease." Marx was desperate to finish his work, but unable to. Instead of writing, he was being written. The revolution he anticipated, the thwarted revolution, was displaced onto his own skin. ------------------------------------------------------- 16. MARX'S ROOM: high MARX: Dear Frederick: You angle down on bed see I am still here and I will tell you more, I am incapable of moving about. This is a perfidious Christian illness. In the meantime, I can neither walk, nor stand, nor sit, and even lying down is damned hard. You see how the wisdom of nature has afflicted me. Would it not have been more sensible if instead of me it had been consigned to try the patience of a good Christian? Like a true Lazarus, I am scourged on all sides. DRAG QUEEN 3: His body became sarcastic, taunting the tasteful, discreet body, the one that stays politely behind the scenes, the one that knows its place like the servant serving the master, like the subject serving the state. This wasn't a body you could take into the drawing room. This was an ill-mannered body. ------------------------------------------------------- 17. MARX writing Dear Kugelmann: Cut, at desk, bandaged lanced, etc, in REAR SCREEN CLIPS short treated in every Russian Revolution respect. In spite of this the thing is continually breaking out anew...I hope it will end this week, but who can guarantee me against another eruption? DRAG QUEEN CHORUS V/O: Marx, writing POPS ON Capital, imagining Capital's overthrow. His body living out his split identifications-- DQ1: (the bourgeois who champions the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) DQ3...the body begins to embody another kind of psyche, another sociality. It desired transformation. DQ2: He swathed his carbuncles behind bandages and focused his attention on the working class. CU Marx at BIOG V/O: As he nears desk, bandaged completion of the first volume, his carbuncles, mobile, sardonic, and insistent, break out in ever new vicinities. Seizing the flesh, sculpting it into a body bulging, protuberant, not closed and finished, not refined. MARX: You have too low an opinion of the English doctors if you think that they cannot diagnose carbuncles, particularly here in England--the land of carbuncles, which is actually a proletarian illness. It is only in the last few years that I have been persecuted by the thing. Before that, it was entirely unknown to me. ------------------------------------------------------- 18. CLIP riot footage V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx--who KEYED onto his body would disavow the high overhead onto opposition between the body lying in bed social and the psychic as mere bourgeois psychology --was possessed of a body whose symptoms mocked the social order; it had become grotesque: open, protruding, extended, secreting: in process, taking on new forms, shapes; his body the figure of the new society that had failed to emerge. He was producing more and more body--too much body for a social order dedicated to its concealment. ------------------------------------------------------- 19. MARX'S ROOM Dear Engels: It was good he writes on couch you did not come on Saturday. My story--now fourteen days old--had reached the crisis point. I could talk a little, and it hurt even to laugh on account of the big abscess between nose and mouth, which this morning has been reduced at least to reasonable proportions. Also the violently swollen lips are becoming reduced closer to their previous dimensions. May the head of the devil go through such fourteen days. All this stops being a joke. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: ELIMINATING THE BODY. 20. TEENAGE GIRL'S ROOM, I hate my body, god, it's a number of TEENAGE so gross, look at these GIRLS gabbing, shot thighs...It's disgusting, documentary style I'm so fat... ------------------------------------------------------- 21. DISSOLVE TO: BATHROOM, high shot toilet, GIRL retching ------------------------------------------------------- SUPER TITLE: THE AGE OF CONSUMPTION ------------------------------------------------------- 22. Map of the U.S. V/O: Anorexia, bulimia little inserts of --epidemic in abundant girls retching into western societies, post toilets keyed over 1968. 10 to 20 percent U.S. capitals of American women now have eating disorders. A symptomatic eruption of the body. Let's wrest this out of secrecy, out of the private sphere and view it for a moment as the social collective act that it is. TITLE: THINKING THROUGH THE BODY ------------------------------------------------------- 23. DRAG QUEEN 3: Like a body trying to turn itself into another body, like a body trying to invent another kind of social existence. DRAG QUEEN 2: Women's bodies as tablets of social meaning, as sites of regulation... ------------------------------------------------------- 24. Pills, laxatives, V/O: With our increasingly diet products float phobic relation to the through blue sky collective body, the working class body, with our creation of an ideal public body without fat, without snot or BO, with a yearning for refinement, we will the disappearance of the body, the containment of the mass, the body politic, the threat. ------------------------------------------------------- 25. Worker STILLS BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx, dissolve to writing history from MARX body/ below: a history of wealth dissolve to as labor, a history of the riots body, a history of the mass, his own body acting out... V/O: Stories told by the SUPER: body--after the failed STILLS hysterics revolutions of 1848 this comes to be known as "hysteria" and sweeps Europe. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: THE HYSTERIC IS SUBJECT TO MULTIPLE IDENTIFICATIONS ------------------------------------------------------- 26. MARX ROOM, he is Dear Frederick: I would writing at desk. REAR have written you sooner, SCREEN workers but for approximately the last twelve days all reading writing and smoking have been strictly forbidden. I had a sort of eye inflammation tied up with very unpleasant effects on the nervous system. The thing is now so far under control that I can again dare to write. In the meantime I had all kinds of psychological reveries, like a person going blind or crazy. ------------------------------------------------------- 27. STILL: V/O: Marx's symptoms make "Lecon clinique their appearance around de Charcot" the time that Freud's future teacher, Charcot, is beginning to recognize and treat a new disease, "traumatic hysteria." Before hysteria was relegated to a female disorder, it afflicted many men as well: Charcot began to recognize that what is novel about traumatic hysteria is that in these cases what lay behind the symptoms were not physical disorders, and not just nerves, but ideas. ------------------------------------------------------- 28. CHARCOT speaks "Male hysteria is not all that rare, and just among us, gentlemen, if I can judge from what I see each day, these cases are often unrecognized even by distinguished doctors. One will concede that a young and effeminate man might develop hysterical findings after experiencing significant stress, sorrow or deep emotions. But that a strong and vital worker, for instance, a railway engineer never prone to emotional instability before, should become hysteric--just as a woman might--this seems to us beyond imagination. And yet it is a fact--one which we must get used to." DRAG QUEEN 1: Hysteria which entraps and speaks the patient. ------------------------------------------------------- 29. FILM: BRITISH Dear Fred: I wanted to MUSEUM LOCATION write you yesterday from Marx, ill, stumbling, the British Museum, but drops a book, camera I suddenly became so zoom in on copy of unwell that I had to close "Vindication of the the very interesting book Rights of Women" that I held in my hand. A dark veil fell over my eyes. Then a frightful headache and a pain in the chest. I strolled home. Air and light helped and when I got home I slept for some time. My condition is such that I really should give up all working and thinking for some time to come; but that would be difficult, even if I could afford it. -------------------------------------------------------- 30. STILL, male V/O: Freud recounted how hysterics disturbed Charcot became when the German school of neurology resisted the idea of male hysteria and suggested pejoratively that if it occurred in males, it occurred only in French males. -------------------------------------------------------- 31. MARX'S ROOM, he Dear Frederick: In recent paces in the set weeks it has been positively impossible for me to write even two hours a day. Apart from pressure from without, there are the household headaches which always affect my liver. I have become sleepless again, and have had the pleasure of seeing two carbuncles bloom near the penis. Fortunately they faded away. My illness always comes from the head. ------------------------------------------------------- 32. STILL another V/O: Charcot related male male hysteric hysteria to trauma. As the industrial era progressed, the number of unexplained work related illnesses increased enormously; Charcot worked to demonstrate how these could be understood as hysterical. ------------------------------------------------------- 33. DRAG QUEEN 2: There were many who thought that the commotion of the French DRAG QUEEN CHORUS Revolution may have supered over affected the nervous system Delacroix's "Libertie of Frenchmen and Europeans Leading the Masses" adversely. DRAG QUEEN 1: It was an infection by ideas, the spread of violent influences displaced from social and class upheaval, fearful ideas about progress, new technologies, social transformations. ------------------------------------------------------- 34. REARSCREEN: Capital Dear Frederick: The dr. is MARX at desk, single quite right: the excessive lamp burning, fullscreen nightwork was the main behind of "workday" text, cause of the relapse. The violently moving camera most disgusting thing for me was the interruption of my work. But I have drudged on, lying down, even if only at short intervals during the day. I could not proceed with the purely theoretical part, the brain was too weak for that. Hence I have enlarged the historical part on the workday, which lay outside the original plan. ------------------------------------------------------- 35. Keyed over Marx DRAG QUEEN 3 (as Nurse) Like other symptomatics of the day, he took the cure. MARX in wheelchair, spa backdrop BIOGRAPHER V/O: The medical world had devised various techniques for palliating an irritated and erupting human nervous system. Popular techniques included warm milk and bed rest, hydrotherapy and sojourns at peaceful pastoral spas. Doctors intuitively offered patients physical and psychological means to flee psycho-cultural stress--sending patients to the country, the sea, the mountains. Marx tried all of these. On doctor's orders, he fled his work. ------------------------------------------------------- 36. MARX writing from Dear Frederick: So far I lounge chair, spa have had two sulfur baths, background, rushing tomorrow the third. water noise From the bath one steps on a raised board, in the altogether; the bath In bathing costume attendant uses the hose (the size of a firehose) the way a virtuoso does his instrument; he commands the movement of the body and alternately bombards all parts of the corpus except the head for three minutes, first strongly, then weakly, up to the legs and feet, an always advancing crescendo. You can see how little desire a man has to write here. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 2 (as nurse): as nurse Removing himself from his work brought some relief. ------------------------------------------------------- 37. MARX at the spa Dear Frederick: From the walking around, in delayed appearance of this suit, cane letter you can see how professionally I use my time here. I read nothing, write nothing. Because of the arsenic three times daily, one has time only for meals and strolling along the coast and the neighboring hills, there is no time left for other things. Evenings one is too tired to do anything but sleep. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: His symptoms began to speak him. ------------------------------------------------------- 38. MARX, spa My dear daughter: I run walking about the greatest part of the day, airing myself, going to bed at ten, reading nothing, writing less, and altogether working up my mind to that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss...I am afflicted with an inflammation of the eye, not that there is much to be seen of it...the eye has taken to the vicious habit of shedding tears on its own account, without the least regard to the feelings of his master. ------------------------------------------------------- 39. MARX'S ROOM; he V/O BIOGRAPHER: The writhes in bed carbuncles continued to erupt, stalling the writing of Capital, inscribing themselves into the text. Marx focused doggedly on the laboring body (while his own body exploded into new and ever changing configurations) Pan to STILL of as if fearful of the "Libertie Leading the effect of introducing the Masses" over desk unregimented body into the realm of the political. DRAG QUEEN 2: But then, dressed as Marianne, this brings other bodies one "breast" bare into the picture--the desiring body, the woman's body, the undisciplined body. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: WOMEN'S BODIES ------------------------------------------------------- 40. HELENE V/O: For the 19th century bourgeois male, the servant provokes social anxiety: she is the conduit through which the working class infiltrates the middle class home. Introducing the maid and her sexuality into the bourgeois household is threatening in a period in which both were linked in the bourgeois imagination to the discontent of a dissatisfied working class. But then what is excluded socially is desired, eroticized--the maid becomes a figure of transgressive desire for the bourgeois male, a desire produced by the very categories that rule the bourgeois body. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto mocks the bourgeois male, with an array of women at his disposal, not only proletarian wives and daughters but prostitutes to pick up the slack. This was written two years before he conceived a son with the family maid. ------------------------------------------------------- 41. 19c porn STILLS of V/O: Women in the public maids sphere were tantamount to prostitutes: they bring the filth and corruption of the market, of wage labor, into the middle class home. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: HELENE ------------------------------------------------------- 42. MARX'S ROOM, he V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx, even writes, HELENE enters, in the most dire poverty, serves tea did what he could to maintain a bourgeois household. It was Helene Demuth, the servant, who marked his own separation from the working class. She, more than Marx, straddles two worlds, belonging to both the bourgeois family and the working class: she was the certainly the member of that world that Marx knew best. "pregnant" DRAG QUEEN DRAG QUEEN 3: The hysteric KEYED OVER is subject to multiple identifications. ------------------------------------------------------- 43. MARX'S ROOM, writing. Dear Laura, Some recent PROJECTION from October, Russian publications, on rearscreen as HELENE printed in Holy Russia, serves tea not abroad, show the great run of my theories in that country. Nowhere is my success more delightful to me, it gives me the satisfaction that I damage a power, which besides England, is the true bulwark of the old society. ------------------------------------------------------- 44. Looking down on tile HELENE V/O: She was ten floor, HELENE scrubbing, years younger than Marx's as MARX walks across wife Jenny. Lenchen, as frame she was called, ran the Marx household. Often Marx was too poor to pay her but she cast her lot with the Marx family. She did the cooking, housecleaning, laundering, dressmaking, nursing, and everything else, including taking the bedsheets to the pawn shop when eviction was threatened. In 1851, at age 28, she gave birth to Marx's son, secretly. ------------------------------------------------------- 45. HELENE appears very BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx wrote pregnant, serving tea to Engels of a "very tangled family situation," hinting at a "mystery," a "tragicomic" mystery, in which he, Engels, also played a role. Marx traveled to Manchester, to see Engels, where the two negotiated Lenchen's fate. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: As men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------- 46. CLIP: beauty HELENE V/O: Did contest introducing a woman into their collaborative association disrupt it? This triangle--did it trouble a theory that saw the role of women strictly in economic terms? What bodies aren't acknowledged? clip: Stalin kissing BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx woman; footage keyed persuaded Engels to accept onto Helene's pregnant paternity for Lenchen's stomach child, who was named Frederick, after him, in the custom of patrilineage. Engels accepted responsibility for the child, binding the two men together over Helene's mute body, over the body of the working class woman. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 3: Jenny, the wife, was easily persuaded that Engels was the father as she never really approved of his morals. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: THE SECRET ------------------------------------------------------- 47. HELENE speaks I never betrayed the directly to camera secret; I let my baby be brought up by a working class family. Engels occasionally sent money. Marx never acknowledged Freddy as his son. He chose not to acknowledge paternity. After Marx's death, I moved into Engel's home as his housekeeper. My son Freddy visited regularly once a week: however, as an ordinary working- man, he entered through the kitchen. He was Marx's only living son. He had grown up to be a poorly educated proletarian, his wife had left him and run away with his few possessions. His life was one of trouble, worry and hardship. ------------------------------------------------------- 48. V/O BIOGRAPHER: "We should, none of us, want to meet our pasts in flesh and blood," wrote Marx's daughter after his death, after discovering that Freddy Demuth was her father's son. These strategies of concealment are central to bourgeois identity, which wishes most of all to conceal the crucial place of the woman in its network of exploitation, which wishes most of all to conceal the symptomatic and erupting body and the tales it tells. ------------------------------------------------------- 49. DRAG QUEEN CHORUS DQ 1: The pregnant body, the unruly female body, swollen, grotesque, must be regulated, particularly its appearances in the public sphere. DQ 3: As men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------- 50. COURTROOM LOCATION NEWSCASTER: "COURT REJECTS PLEA FOR ABORTION BEFORE JAIL" Oct 26, 1989 A Florida county judge has refused a woman's request to postpone her 60 day jail sentence so she can have an abortion first. You want a continuance so you can murder your baby, is that it?" Judge Rasmussen of Pasco County Court asked the 26 year old defendant before sending her to jail. While the prosecutor agreed that Ms. Forney whose third month of pregnancy began today, could postpone her sentence by 10 days before serving her term for violating probation for driving under the influence of alcohol. The violation was that she paid only $100 of the $500 fine assessed against her. Ms. Forney, a part time bartender who is not married, asked for the additional time because, she said, she was afraid it might be to late for a safe abortion when she got out of jail. She pleaded that she was financially unable to care for a baby. Judge Rasmussen suggested that she carry the baby to full term and then give it up for adoption. In a jail interview Tuesday Ms. Forney said: I thought it was my choice. He's telling me I don't have a choice. It's not right that he can choose for me." ------------------------------------------------------ SCENES 51-60 QUICK MONTAGE: 51. HELENE addresses He simply chose not to camera acknowledge paternity. I hadn't that choice. 52. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my FOOTAGE body. Get your laws off my body." 53. Background: DRAG QUEEN 1: Get your Bondage STILLS laws off my body. 54. COURTROOM JUDGE: I can't define it but I know it when I see it. 55. Background: DRAG QUEEN 2: They want to Bondage STILLS ban pornography because it tells the truth. 56. TITLE: THE LINKING OF WHAT IS POLITICALLY DANGEROUS TO FEELINGS OF SEXUAL HORROR AND FASCINATION. 57. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my FOOTAGE body..." 58. WOMAN bent over DQ3: Desiring a body that toilet, bathroom doesn't speak, desiring a body that has the right DRAG QUEEN keyed over desires, desiring a different social being, a different social body... 59. WOMAN bent over WOMAN: How can I live in toilet my body? Where could I live in my body? ------------------------------------------------------- 60. MARX'S ROOM, Marx How can I live in my body? in bed, writhing (FIRST Where can I live in my SYNC SOUND ON MARX) body? ------------------------------------------------------- 61. KEY text of Capital Dear Engels: I had decided over MARX body so not to write you until I that one seems to be could announce the emerging from the other completion of the book which is now the case. Also I did not want to bore you with the reasons for the frequent delays, namely carbuncles on my posterior and in the vicinity of the penis, the remains of which are now fading and which permit me to assume a sitting (that is, writing) position only at great pain. I do not take arsenic, because it makes me too stupid and at least for the little time that I have when writing is possible, I want to have a clear head. V/O BIOGRAPHER: Finishing the book left his body racked and scarred. He was subject to increasing outbursts with each new translation of the book. He continued to search for a cure. ------------------------------------------------------- 62. MARX writing, My dear Jenny: I am HELENE cleaning sending you today the proofs of the French translation of Das Kapital. Today is the first day that I have been able to do anything at all. Until now despite baths, walking, splendid air, careful diet, etc. my condition has been worse than in London. That is also the reason why I am postponing my return, because it is absolutely necessary to return in a condition for work. BIOGRAPHER V/O: The eruptions of his body weren't matched by the social eruptions he anticipated. ------------------------------------------------------- 63. MARX'S ROOM Dear Sorge: How did it REARSCREEN civil happen that in the US rights riots where relatively that is, compared to civilized Europe, land was accessible to the great masses of the people and to a certain degree (again relatively) still is, the capitalist economy and the Text emerging corresponding enslavement from carbuncles of the working class have developed more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any country? DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DQ 2: His body continued its parody. Marx came to regard the carbuncles as having a life of their own, his affliction had a theory and a practice. ------------------------------------------------------- 64. MARX'S ROOM, bed. Dear Kugelmann: After my Riot FOOTAGE KEYED onto return, a carbuncle broke bandages out on my right cheek which had to be operated on, then it had several smaller successors, and I think that at the present moment I am suffering from the last of them. For the rest don't worry at all about newspaper gossip; still less answer it. I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time, without giving a sign of life. DRAG QUEEEN KEYED OVER DQ 3: Like the revolutionary, the erupting, symptomatic body displays monstrous and unreadable forms to a horrified society. ------------------------------------------------------- 65. HELENE clears the Dear Frederick: The doctor table as MARX writes has opened up the pleasant in bed prospect that I will have to deal with this loathsome disease until late in January. Still this second Frankenstein on my hump is by far not so fierce as was the first in London. You can see this from the fact that I am able to write. If one wants to vomit politics out of nausea, one must take it daily in the form of telegraphic pills, such as are delivered by the newspapers. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: IF ONE WANTS TO VOMIT POLITICS OUT OF NAUSEA... ------------------------------------------------------- 66. STUDIO high shot WOMAN: How can I live in toilet, WOMAN bending my body? where can I live over in black space in my body? Pan to drag queen DQ1: Where is the history riot FOOTAGE of the body written? In KEYED behind toilet your politeness, in your deodorant and douche, behind the bathroom door, in your shame and revulsion. Pan to next drag queen DQ2: In your symptoms. ------------------------------------------------------- 67. MARX'S ROOM Dear Frederick: I hope in bed. Zoom into that with this, I will bandaged carbuncle have paid my debt to nature. In my state of ill health, I can do little writing, and then only by revolutions fits and starts. At any emerging out of rate, I hope the carbuncles bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives. Zoom into, then CREDITS