WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #343 - Culture, Monsters and Co.: horrific figures, popular culture and resistance (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

On the occasion of Halloween, we see costumes of vampires, witches,
devils, zombies, etc. parading through our streets. In all cultures,
horrific bestiaries, imaginary worlds and socio-historical issues
collide, sometimes becoming figures of resistance re-appropriated by
reversing the stigma. Here's a look at some of the well-known ones (and
don't forget, if you want to scare your boss this Halloween, join a
union!). ---- The figure of the devil as the absolute antagonist of God
has been overinvested by Christianity like no other spiritual movement
and in a Manichean way. Etymologically, Satan means "who opposes God"
and Lucifer "the bringer of Light" he is the archangel who rebelled
against the authority of God. No wonder it was taken over by various
rebels throughout history, starting with the anarchists.

Proudhon evokes it in On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, in
1858: "Come, Satan, come, the slandered of priests and kings, may I kiss
you". Bakunin will also repeat the figure in Federalism, Socialism,
Antitheologism, saying of the devil that he is the first rebel, the
"leader of the revolutionaries, past, present and future". He is both an
emblematic figure of freedom and negativity: "he says No to the
bourgeois, to the priests, to the owner! ".

But after the Second World War, the absolute figure of evil becoming
Nazism, it was to him that he would be assimilated: "in the modern
world, the Devil - the fruit of our resignations and cowardice - is
everywhere. His contemporary incarnation is Hitler: Tempter, Accuser and
Liar.[1]

Different in Judaism and Islam, the figure of the devil is invested
differently: not very central in Judaism, he is the accusing angel of
man who pushes him to sin. In Islam, Iblis (or Sheïtan) is the angel who
refused to bow before Adam and Eve, refusing equality with man, he could
therefore be invested to designate the oppressor. He becomes the one who
leads down the slope of temptation and sin, a representation common to
the three monotheisms.

The figure of the devil will be invested by rock in the 1960s, notably
by the Rolling Stones with the song Sympathy for the Devil, an
investment which continues with black metal. In the cinema, we will
remember the interpretation of Al Pacino in The Devil's Partner in 1995
where the devil takes the figure of a multinational capitalist of law,
the film denouncing greed, cupidity and the cult of ego that market
society provokes.

The Witches' Sabbath - Francisco Goya 1798
Figure of the witch and feminism
Following the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (Witches' Hammer)
in 1486, supported by the papacy, fifty to one hundred thousand women
were burned at the stake. The summoning of the image of the witch, for
example, accompanied the policy of enclosures in Great Britain which
broke down collective ownership of land, women having been the first
opponents of these.

This qualification is also perpetuated in many places around the world.
Witches evoke capable and powerful women (magicians, scholars and
caregivers), living without men. Hunted in tales as in life, victims of
popular vindictiveness, the witch trials refer to lynchings and pogroms,
where we recognize historical connections between the stigmata
associated with witches and Jews (accusation of poisoning well, to
kidnap children, and the witches' sabbath comes etymologically from the
Shabbat of the Jews).

Invested numerous times by popular culture during the 20th century, her
representation evolves from evil "old skin" to emancipated and
independent heroine. The series My Beloved Witch in the 1960s presented
a positive figure of the witch but on the condition that she did not do
magic: "yet it is her part as a witch which brings female emancipation
in the series"[2]what the authors of new generations have understood,
having now anchored the emancipatory and positive figure.

The figure of the witch has continued to be invoked by feminists in
recent years, particularly in the disguises of demonstrations. Several
books to their glory have been released, such as in 2004, Caliban and
the Witch by Silvia Federici, which represents a turning point in both
the historical and symbolic rereading of these figures. Recently it is
Sorcières, the unconquered power of women by Mona Chollet, which
explores the three figures, widowed and single women, women without
children, and elderly women, in short, the witch is the one who scares.
.. to men!

Vampires and Capital
During the Enlightenment period, the myth of the blood-drinking,
soulless and living dead vampire was widely shared, particularly in
Eastern Europe in the midst of upheaval, designating non-and bad
Christians, all likely to become vampires after death... Taken
seriously, Don Calmet will write a Treatise on the apparitions of
spirits and on vampires which Voltaire will mock, explaining that the
only bloodsuckers are the nobles and the stockbrokers...

 From the 19th century, an important vampire literature appeared, while
mythological belief declined. He then takes on a more aristocratic
figure: the books The Vampire and Dracula are inspired by the characters
of rich, evil, seductive and depraved aristocrats. German filmmaker
Werner Herzog uses this allusion in his film Nosferatu, with the
character of the young bourgeois becoming a vampire, replacing the
social parasitism of the nobleman.

Since then, the figure of the vampire has evolved, hideous until the
beginning of the 20th century, it becomes sexy at the end. A symbol of
ultimate transgression and seduction, he is reappropriated as a figure
of rebellion and invested by the Gothic movement, with a fascination for
eternal youth and nightlife.

Marx, who draws extensively on literary traditions to illustrate these
developments, will cheerfully use the figure of the vampire in the third
section of Book I of Capital, "The Working Day". What the blood of its
victims is to the vampire, living labor, labor power is to capital, a
substance that capital sucks, pumps and absorbs, with all the more
avidity because it is this water of youth which alone allows it to exist
and persist in existence. "Capital is dead labor, which only comes to
life by sucking living labor like a vampire, and which is all the more
alive the more it sucks."

By vampirizing them, capital tends to transform workers into zombies by
shaping them in its image[...]into "machines for producing surplus
value"[3]. Finally, we will also remember the formula of Malcolm X "show
me the capitalist, I will show you the vampire".

Excerpt from The Devil's Partner
Non-Western creatures and legends
If the Western horrifying bestiary is known to everyone, that of
non-Western cultures, much less Manichaean, is often either unknown or
the result of cultural appropriation and distorted: for example the
Djinns, neither good nor bad spirits of Islamic culture , who have
become wish-granting "genies" in the West. This inequality of references
is a shame because they are rich, and it also reflects the
contradictions in social relationships.

In China too we have its vampires and zombies: "the Jiantsi, a hopping
living dead reanimated by a Taoist priest, wearing traditional dress of
the bureaucrats of the Qing dynasty, going out at night to drain men of
their vital essence".

In West Africa, Ashanti culture evokes the Asanbosam, a kind of vampire
living perched high in the trees. One of these variants, the Obayifo
would be controlled by a witch and would destroy the crops.[4]

Anti-patriarchal figures are legion: - The Pontaniak, a creature from
Malaysian and Indonesian folklore, is the spirit of women who died in
childbirth who returns to take revenge, attacking and emasculating men.
In Arab culture, ghouls are Jinn, often taking the form of a woman or
hyena, hanging around cemeteries and devouring travelers like mermaids.
Aishia Kandisha, in Morocco, is the female spirit who only attacks
single men and virgins at night, inspired by a Moroccan woman who fought
against the Portuguese by seducing them in order to kill them. The
Portuguese then spread rumors of the supernatural to discredit it.

The slave trade produced a number of African legends reinvested
culturally as figures of resistance, such as the Orichas, goddesses of
water and the sea, who the Afro-descendant Brazilian diaspora celebrates
in Salvador de Bahia. They appear in American Gods, a series adapted
from a novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman where popular deities
confront the idolatry of capitalist society.

The Anansi, prankster god and spider-man, brings contradiction, debts
and death. In America he became a figure of resistance to slave
oppression through trickery and sabotage in everyday actions, inspiring
Maroon communities during attacks on plantations. The Tupi Indians in
Brazil have the Curupira, a divinity with fiery hair and an inverted
foot, protector of the forest, invested by the people to resist
poaching. The god Ushu in Yoruba culture, or Papa Legba in Caribbean
voodoo, is a cunning and prankster spirit, spirit of communication and
human constructions. He was associated with the devil by the colonists
and by syncretism, evil. Because of this association with the devil by
the colonists, he was invested as a figure of resistance. It appears in
Césaire's work, Une Tempête.

Finally in Reunion, Granmèr Kal, an old woman of advanced age who haunts
Ravine des Cabris in the southwest of the island, is a witch figure used
to frighten children. Directly associated with the time of slavery, she
is, according to interpretations, Kalla a brown slave, a particularly
cruel plantation owner, associated in this case with Madame Desbassayns,
an owner praised by the slave elite but a hated slave figure in Creole
folklore. Granmèr Kal is accused of capturing children who wander around
the island after dark, hence parents warning their children: "Don't let
Granmèr Kal catch you!" ".

Nico Pasadena (UCL Montreuil)

To validate

[1]Denis de Rougemont, The Devil's Part, Brentano's, New York, 1942.

[2]Benjamin Patinaud aka Bolchegeek, The Magneto syndrome, Au Diable
Vauvert, 2023.

[3]Alain Bihr, "The Vampirism of Capital", L'Anticapitaliste, May 4, 2021.

[4]TheFrenchieBlackGirl YouTube channel, "Halloween Special: The Myths
and Legends of West Africa", October 31, 2022.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Monstres-et-Cie-figures-horrifiques-culture-populaire-et-resistances
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