17 April 2005
commie superman
Whilst 'fallen to the Communists' is my favourite euphemism for that deeply unfortunate bloody affliction that monthly plagues our no-tail comrades (women: 'the-subject-not-supposed-to-know-that-she-is-the-irony-of-the-community' if you amalgamate Lacan and Hegel), there's something perennially intriguing about imagining alternative endings to now impossible histories - Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle as the Nazi victory over the Allies in WWII. There's possibly something even more interesting about imagining fictional characters out of their usual contexts and placed in 'real' historical situations, which are then subsequently altered solely because of their presence....
So 'Superman: Red Son', a DC 'Elseworlds' story - the alien Kal-El lands as a baby, not in the US but on a collective farm in the Ukraine, grows up under Stalin's protection as a thoroughly dedicated Communist, and eventually takes over when the old man dies. The whole world glows red whilst the US, an isolated and unstable capitalist country, falls into destitution and ruin. Genius chess-playing president Lex Luthor manages to turn it round and, with the help of Batman (now an anarchist whose dissenting parents were killed by one of Stalin's henchmen) and the Green Lantern (a GI, imprisoned by communists in some imagined Malaysian war in the 1980s, who spends his lengthy captivity imagining building a prison camp for his red captors, in real time: 'it took three days to build the foundations...') they attempt to take Superman on...
Lots of great dialogue - 'I'm just another alien bullying a less developed species and it's morally unjustifiable' - more heat deaths of the universe, Soviet iconography (Superman's 'S' becomes a hammer and sickle as you can see above). The political elements are perhaps a little underdeveloped, but, er, they may well have gotten in the way of a good story, as per usual.
So, it was that and Agamben's State of Exception this weekend. Using a somewhat idiosyncratic presentation device, each section is divided into points (chapter 1 is 1.1 to 1.11) with Hebrew alephs denoting reflective paragraphs just below each of the main points. What I don't quite understand is the logic at work in the separation of points - they don't seem axiomatic enough to be numbered in this way, and of what significance is the א? If anyone has any idea, I would be interested to know.
Back to the CDR tomorrow. I'm guessing you all know what that means by now....
