The Three Stations of the Cross in Michael Jackson's Calvary
First station of the cross: things. The holy horror of things. An entire apparatus of masks, breastplates, umbrellas, nomadic objects, an entire bubble at once suffocating and over-oxygenated, cloistered and overexposed, operating like a greenhouse and preserving him from the great contamination of things. Not only, as has been said, was it viruses, germs, and bacteria. But life itself as a germ. The living as a bacterium. Matter, objects, and the very air he breathed as soon as he ventured beyond his dear Neverland became a source of infection, pestilence, a macabre obsession -- a school for cadavers. The dandies were like that. I mean the great dandies. The founders of the tradition. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Beau Brummel. Wilde and his Dorian Gray. Red heels to dance on top of a world of vapors and humors. Makeup and artifices to escape the De Profudis of a definitively parasitic abyss. Not to mention Baudelaire who based the principle of his aesthetic, his ethics, and his politics on his disgust with nature and its monstrous proliferations. Michael Jackson was their heir. Michael Jackson, with his vinyl, latex, his mausoleum of a house, his prophylactic terrors and also of course his entrechats of a dance genius, besieged by light on every side, was the last of these great dandies. Add the morbid care that he apparently gave to his body. The hyperbaric chamber where he tirelessly prepared himself for some kind of funereal ritual. He didn't die from a drug overdose; he died because of his desire not only to invent a vaccine against life, but also to want to inoculate himself with it.
Second station: others. Others, truly. No longer things, but humans. Their contact. Their malignant and repugnant proximity. The very presence of others, of their odor, their instantly searching gaze, experienced as an offense, a threat, the source and cause of all violence -- and from which he was only protected by the smoked lenses of his glasses. Hell? Yes, hell. A Sartrean Jackson this time. Or even a Cathar. A Jackson not the least of whose paradoxes was the moment he wrote "We Are the World," the moment where, in other words, he popularizes what must be called the contemporary humanitarian while viewing humanity as a fiasco, men as cankers and their company as a necessary evil, an obligatory compromise, a degrading accommodation that an artist can only begrudgingly make. This reincarnation of Peter Pan sincerely thought, for example, that children were made without anyone touching. This incomplete adult feeds the mad dream -- and, in a certain way, fulfilled it -- of having his own sons without contact, and almost without a mother. This misanthrope, this mutant, was one of the last modern humans to believe -- and to live -- the ancient theorems of the inconvenience of being born. Generation, corruption... Desire without concupiscence... Which, at the very least, shows the absurdity of the witch trials conducted against him the last ten years of his life which were like an endless persecution. Michael Jackson did not want to be a child; he wanted to be a saint. Or an angel. And angels, as we know, don't have a sex. Or only have one in the imagination of the perverted who project onto them their own fantasies.
And finally: himself. His own body and his own face, seen as even greater threats, sites of every danger, the intimate yet merciless enemy that would take a lifetime to subdue or annihilate. There again the singular adventure of Michael Jackson is misread; the mad metamorphosis that he impressed on his face and the repeated plastic surgeries that he inflicted on himself over the course of his life are utterly misunderstood if reduced to a matter of pigmentology -- race, anti-race, self-hate, malaise, unease in his own skin, this reason or that. Look at his photos. Look at this epidermis essentially becoming whiter and whiter, almost like living limestone. Notice this nose reduced to almost nothing, these lips eaten away from the inside, these narrowed cheekbones like those of a Jivaro mask or a Giacometti rendering. Look closely at these dwindled features, this shrinking skin, these eyes that only seem to sit in his skull like a ring on a skeleton's finger. Consider this reduction -- a philosopher would say this epochè -- of a face reduced to its simplest inexpression, having become its own double. Isn't the face the very signature of the human? Its truth? The way that it exhibits and expresses itself? The sign of everyone's singularity, of their priceless uniqueness? Of course. It is always that, a face. And that's why this third chapter, this way of torturing, mortifying, profaning, and ultimately of erasing his own face should be read as the last station of a long and terrible Calvary. Because, having reached that stage, when you have decided to escape the reign of things, and to leave the ranks of humans, and then to become a human without a face, you don't really have too many choices left. Either you reinvent what is considered human, become truly trans-human, and create a genetically modified organism, a GMO. Or you die.
Translated from French by Sara Phenix.
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PART II
Through this salacious prostitution and abuse, Michael Jackson became the most obvious as one who could bring to Joseph the highest return on this investment. Michael, along with many of his siblings lost value as human beings as the adulation and compensation took on stratospheric proportions. They were as capital: to be used and bartered, exchanged and sold as desired and coveted by Joseph the Architect. Michael was the most developed and sophisticated product in his cage, the most lucrative.
The overhead cost to Michael in this Babylonian-esque persuit was that of his childhood, which was compromised immediately for the sake of the senior Jackson to quickly satisfy his lust without question nor conceit: Just business. As all the world was idolizing Michael and 'loving' him, Joseph begrudgingly had to release Michael from the rat cage where he had incubated and be released upon a world which he never interacted beyond his capacity as a 'product.'
Well done.
I don't think any of us will ever understand MJ's life. Why do you pretend to? Does labeling yourself a philospher qualify you to take potshots at the celebrity dead? Or is it that you are just feeling superior, and the whole three stations of the cross makes no sense whatsoever. Was it the only concept with three you could think of?
GardenerNorCal:
I don't really understand his life, either. I think this article borders more on the abstract philosophical than on concrete substance. It's meant to be an objective assessment.
thank you.
PART I
As always , an excellent philosophical assessment of the carnivorous atrium that is the bubble of hyper-celebrity. There is, however, a fourth point: one that is missed in this extremely well-written epilogue of Michael that bears mention, and was the acting catalyst in his dynamic peak-and-valley: The ne'er-do-well quasi-Svengali who through his own pugilistic vitriol and substantial mediocrity could only hope to climb the Pyrenees of such monumental fame and fortune...
'Prostitution' is not only of a sexual context as it pertains to those who would and will abuse their own brood for their lust of such covenant. Joseph Jackson is the centerpiece of this cross you describe. The realization of Joseph's own failure to conquer the mainstream with his own forgettable music lead to 'ascension by descension': to attain a seat in the house of Baylon where he could feed his need for solipsist desires which rivaled even Nero's, he needed to enslave and belabor his own brood: housing his songbirds in a cage fit for rats, with himself as master,benefactor, and architect.
Like it. Could also be done after the manner of Agamben or Zizek, picking up on BHL's refrences to Catharism and gnosticism. Demands a conference panel and edited issue.
Intelligent delineation of a significant pop icon. Even the obvious contradictions couldn't keep the proletariat from adoring his musical genius. But the author does come across as somewhat pedantic.
"A Sartrean Jackson this time. Or even a Cathar."
Reference to Jean-Paul Satre, French philosopher: very basis of his thought: there was no god.
He drew his conclusions from that idea. Apt quotations, "Man is a useless passion." Also wrote "everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident."
The second reference: best explained by this quotation from The Philosophical Encyclopedia:
"Cathar: The dualist theology was the most prominent, however, and was based upon the complete incompatibility of love and power. As matter was seen as a manifestation of power, it was also incompatible with love. They did not believe in one all-encompassing god, but in two, both equal and comparable in status. They held that the physical world was evil and created by Rex Mundi (translated from Latin as 'king of the world'), who encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful; the second god, the one whom they worshiped, was entirely disincarnate: a being or principle of pure spirit and completely unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the god of love, order and peace.”
I think you miss the point. His use of the Cathar had more to do with their beliefs about the human condition. That it is corrupt and obscures the divine within. And Sartre was also concerned with the human condition, the Thing-in-itself.
Nothing at all to do with any gods.
I am curious why you see that there.
No trace of human kindness in the posting--not even a RIP.
How about deconstruc
Or Sarah Palin would be interesting.
Why bother? There isn't much to deconstruct where Madoff or Palin are concerned. They both lack the depth and the pathos. Mr. Jackson, on the other hand, seemed to be his own demon lover. He truly was a lost soul.
Interesting piece...an
Finally, a masterpiece from Bernard-Henri LEVY...tha
Touche, from an AA woman. Bravo. Well done. Hope you feel...SUP
Be interesting to see you deconstruct those who enslave others with the same virtuosity.
No one transformed Michael Jackson and no one pushed him to get one hideous plastic surgery after another nor bleach his skin as white as a corpse. What low self-esteem you must have to not recognize that.
Steamboater's right. No one but Michael decided he hated his Black skin and chose to look White.
Has it been established that he bleached his skin? I have never heard of a medical procedure that would do this. Just curious.
You are both wrong - read it again. He is saying, and I agree, that Michael was trying to remove his humanity. He didn't want to be human, let alone black. It wasn't a racial thing.
Ask yourselves why your assume he hated being black? Whenever he talked about his race it was with reverence and respect - but I belive that he clung to the idea disconected from being human. He saw himself as a sepreate magical being trapped in a mundane body, and surrounded by a mass of people that he loved and hated.
I didn't really read a race thing in the article, just an assessment of a human being.
Race was at the core of Michael's life trauma and drama. He, at least, would be honest enough to say so - and has. Denial of that pertinent fact is understandable, because nobody circa 2009 would like to think our culture contributed to his demise - after he gave us so much. Nevertheless, Michael's career arc included performing during Segregation - in the American South.
Of course, this is above Mr. Levy's pay grade to understand even intellectually, from the perspective of a very small AA child working in dives and strip joints for dimes. What he may have seen...bee
Too much armchair philosophy.
This is just a more detailed version of what everyone else has been saying about MJ... but the truth of it all is that, this condition is not unique to him. Ultimately this dilemma is at the core of the current human experience as we move into an age of (if I may) hyper self-entitlement. His was merely magnified by the unique circumstance of not having established a sense of self even while he procured everything else that our modern society had to offer.
Michael made an interesting comment about Caucasians who sun themselves into SKIN CANCER and premature aging - to be brown, and the fact that NOBODY seems to comment. The same can be said for women like Pamela Anderson who have new implants bi-annually, not to mention facial, lip and other plastic surgeries - and, of course, the obligatory TAN.
Interesting psychobabble that Mr. Levy conveniently doesn't apply to his own kind...eve
*sigh* Look. Historically European nobility tried to make themselves as pasty white as possible, even applying flour to their faces. Why? Because the serfs who spent all their time outdoors laboring were tanned brown because of this. So being pasty showed you were rich and "superior.
And just because Pam Anderson or whomever chooses to have entirely elective cosmetic surgery, that's THEIR decision. Just because I think it's sad doesn't have a thing to do with the person's race. W.T.F??
This is really beautifully written. I always believed MJ was asexual. But this perspective delves deeper and gets to the heart of Mj's neurosis.
Excellent piece and the comparison with Dorian Grey is apt, a man lusted after by others who could never really have him, who wore a mask of perpetual youth while inside he was one of loathing, great vanity and wretchedness.
Excellent text! Bravo!
I really feel so sorry for Michael...
I AM sure he is at PEACE finally. Now people should watch what they say.......
I never bought a record of his, but I defend him now, because seeing his past life on TV and how in 1984 he burnt his hair in a Pepsi AD and that triggered a lot of his ODD plastic surgery,,,
May he rest in PEACE.
Excellent text! It's very refreshing to read something so intelligent about Michael Jackson amidst the yellow journalism we are buried under.
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