Obscurity (loop and deliverance) is our home: Notes on "The Last King of Scotland."

Léopold Senghor, african poet-politician (a bad poet and a bad first president of Senegal), said that reason is hellenic as emotion is african. Dialogism is racist by default. The master-slave dialectic is based on an assumption of master-slave. Is this a metaphysical question or a political one? Aimé Césaire (black poet-politician) understood better - what makes him a poet in the strictest sense of the word - that this is not a statement but a question.

Why do we fuck and leave? why, like Oedipus or Orpheus, are we condemned to fuck and leave fuck and leave fuck and leave? "None of it is human flesh!" screams the man on his balcony. It is about flesh, the suspension of flesh, that cruelty.

For a historical (logical) understanding of "The Last King of Scotland":

The Last King of Scotland
Apocalypse Now
Hitler (an artist remember?)
The Theater of Cruelty
Heart of Darkness
A Season in Hell
Faust
The Marquis de Sade
Paradise Lost
Hamlet, Macbeth
The Divine Comedy
Jesus (and the writings of the apostles)
Socrates
The "Hebrew" Bible
Africa

"The trick by which this world of things is mastered - it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method - consists in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past. 'Open, graves, you, the dead of the picture galleries, corpses behind screens, in palaces, castles, and monasteries, here stands the fabulous keeper of keys holding a bunch of the keys to all times, who knows where to press the most artful lock and invites you to step into the midst of the world of today, to mingle with the bearers of burdens, the mechanics whom money ennobles, to make yourself at home in their automobiles, which are beautiful as armor from the age of chivalry, to take your places in the international sleeping cars, and to weld yourself to all the people who today are still proud of their privileges. But civilization will give them short shrift' (Apollinaire)."

- Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism." The relationship of much of "african" or "black" art to surrealism is itself manifest.

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Thesis on the confessional mode (the contemporary mode par excellence): the roads to hell are the same as the roads to heaven; the trajectories of hell are the same as the trajectories of heaven.