(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
During a dinner in 1979 after the premiere of the film Orchestra rehearsal (The orchestra rehearsal) I asked Federico Fellini if he had read that Laing, in It split itself (The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, 1960), holds the portrayal of the young woman Gelsomina in his film La Strada em> # (The country road, 1954) as an archetypal image of schizophrenic paralysis of action – together with Idioten to Dostoevsky.
Fellini answered without hesitation about the case itself, yes, before continuing: "In Rimini we had a pig-neuter who put children on a backward woman. The baby girl who was born was also backward and was called the 'devil kid'. The heartless abuse of the two women grew over the years into a guilt I could not live with. The guilt consciousness turned into anxiety. An anxiety I could not get over until this movie was over. It was traumatic, I broke down. Today I know that anxiety is the driving force in all true art. Kafka is a good example. "
Cosmic anxiety
Anxiety was also the driving force in Jens Bjørneboe's writing. Cosmic anxiety he called it, since he could not explain where it came from. This anxiety chased him throughout his life, and eventually out of it as well.
Bjørneboe also has in common with Fellini that he broke with realismn. Both were allowed to go through with it, but became, as ideologies broke down, living legends, since their ability to identify with the victims became more true than the political jugging that would save them.
Like Fellini, Bjørneboe was not academically educated. He developed his understanding from the sources outside the system, and it gave him the freedom he needed to be able to analyze history and the present in his own way, and in light of that lift the lies forward to then give us the real story.
This was the time of revolutionary Marxism in Europe. The rush of the proletariat towards the sky was imminent.
The image of the enemy, the sacred murder and the conquered territory are the truth of this freedom
nature, not human liberation and equality.
But from his place on the outside, Bjørneboe saw that the violence prescribed by the ideologies only recreated the power and oppression the revolutions were a rebellion against. Marxismin other words, it was just a secularized version of Old Testament Christianity. The sacrificial offering joined the revolutionaries as Santa Claus on the moving load – with the carnage that came with the faith.
For this, Bjørneboe was accused of being a reactionary. Today, when the same ideologies are dead, we see that it was he who was revolutionary, and his critics who were reactionary.
A crippled concept of freedom
What was it that made both his life and his writing so different?
Bjørneboe goes directly into the barbarism and makes himself a catalyst for maliceone in the world. By simply looking inward to define the moral credibility of each and every one of us, Bjørneboe firm that in front of the victim we are all equal: A kick in the crotch is a kick in the crotch for the one it goes over. It can be neither ideologically nor morally legitimized. The realization was in itself revolutionary. Because the moment you put the victim at the center, our very concept of freedom appears to be false.
A concept of freedom that is no longer created for consensus as we believe, but for conflict and confrontation. #Enemy image#t, the sacred murder and the conquered territory is the true nature of this freedom, not the liberation and equality of man. A concept of freedom which, through a subtle betrayal in the moral language, ensures that the really evil changes nature and becomes the good, while the really good becomes the evil we must eradicate in order for the world to become a better place.
This new moral perspective enabled him to show us that the images of enemies that legitimize barbarism are not just the product of a crippled frihetconcept, it launders the criminals with the consequence that our crimes appear as a process of purification: We must kill, and we must kill many, and all the time, for the world to get better. Only in this way can we survive. It is mass murder, but we call it liberation.
The problem of evil for Bjørneboe is thus freedom's own paradox
The problem of evil for Bjørneboe is thus the own paradox of freedom: a heartless society where the moral man who fights the good fight becomes the victim of morality because the tyrants show no consideration.
Thus, by pursuing our crimes in the seams – instead of useless moral philosophy – Bjørneboe shows us that God even is the problem of evil. The false myth remains Jesus, as to serve his Father in heaven, allows himself to be tortured and crucified voluntarily to atone for the sins of his murderers so that evil will prevail on earth.
There is no worse knee-jerk reaction to barbarism.
But this is how it is: In the name of God we can label honest people as criminals because their honesty threatens us.
It's that simple.
The death struggle
Truth is not an argument for the right believer. Prejudice paves the way for the kingdom of heaven. And since all corrupt ideologues, Christians and secular, give the believer the right to take action at the expense of other people, the world of reality and the bulwark we have created against barbarism, after all, collapses – under what Bjørneboe describes as our common death struggle. A death struggle that never ends.
This death struggle is much more real now than when he described it in the late 1960s. And if the world goes to hell for God's will to once again haunt the unbelievers, well, according to the presidency of The Land of the Free, it's the fault of the Chinese, since in fifty years they have lifted a billion people out of poverty. While we, the chosen God, have set to rule the globe, we have deprived the Arab world of the right to evolve by bombing it back to the Stone Age.
Bjørneboe spent his life revealing the divine comedy we keep alive for evil to rule the world. Of course, he complained loudly because the ideologies trumped his work to expose their falsehood. Now we see that he opened the doors to a whole new understanding of the nature of evil. Today we celebrate him for this – but do we take him seriously?
Also read: Jens Bjørneboe: We who loved America
