"History, as its clearsighted practitioners are obliged to admit, can never completely divest itself of myth.
[. . .] The individuals who are 'cooked' are those deeply involved in a physiological process." — Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked

On "Sweet" History

History is as sweet as the quantity of sugar that has been eaten to produce it. We have in mind that triangular trade in slaves and sugarcane, which is needing the douceur of sweetness as its condition of possibility, and which it's always finding, miraculously, as the byproduct of its own production. Prior to this, we were subsisting on sugarbeet, which was sufficient to produce the douceur of Wolf Logic in Aesop's Fables. (The wolf, having captured a lamb, is searching for a pretext so as to make it appear as if he were distributing a justified punishment, but he is refuted. Enfin, he declares, "well anyhow, I'm not going without my dinner," but it was sweet of him to try.) These days, we are downright saccharine (abundance of HFCS) and can go much further. The Wolf's dinner is sweetened when the fable is re-written featuring Niezsche's donkey (wise because it always says "Yea") who goes willingly to the sacrifice. Roberto Calasso reminds us, "A sacrificial act is any act where the person acting contemplates himself as he acts. The victim, the offering, is the one who acts. The sacrificer is the eye that contemplates him. For this reason, any act can be a sacrifice" (Ruin of Kasch, 144). In the age of douceur, we no longer need the donkey to reflexively lower his head, which was once accepted as the animal's consent to be sacrificed. Rather, we perceive that he is contemplating himself as he acts in the exchange, perhaps after accounting that he'll be receiving full market value for services rendered.

­­We sometimes get the wrong idea that reactionaries are screaming meemies all the time, whereas we are "perceiving as [uproar] what is actually [perfect stillness]" wrapped up in its own douceur, listening to Wagner. Greene's 48 Laws is remarkable for what appears to be a deep recognition of this quality in its _target demographic lying in tension with the liberal project of the historical revue. For this reason, we are finding an amusing juxtaposition between revolting moments in which the historical factoid is served up with nauseating sweetness, and the imagined outcome, in which we find the reactionary quoting fairy tales, the Yiddish joke, or Walter Benjamin (!) as justification for his Wolf Logic. (These are Greene's actual sources.) In this capacity, Greene is perhaps more successful in his liberal project than most reviewers realize, "Talleyrand felt a justified horror at the sudden flounderings of History, at its paroxysms. And so he sought to put a few drops of oil into the workings. [...] continued all the same: glissez, glissez, in the end something will remain. A gesture, at least" (Ruin of Kasch, 16). (I'm most struck by Greene's anecdote, deriving from Stendhal's Memoirs, of the episode in which Talleyrand embarrasses a young Napoleon "hunting boar" on the Bois de Boulogne. A similar episode is quoted nearly verbatim in Calasso's Ruin of Kasch) Talleyrand (glissant from Louis XVI, through the Terror, and past the time when the Corsican Comet is extinguished at St. Helena) has slightly less on his plate than Robert Greene, who has to put quite of bit of sugar in the tank (mixed metaphor?), to get the reactionary to read a bit of history, who now, in addition to tik tok, has access to The Joe Rogan Experience. All the more remarkable that he has succeeded. For that reason we perceive that History is erotic, because it anticipates the premature ________ bank deposit. We are recalling the other meaning of douceur as the institutional bribe, which one earns by getting things to run smoothly.

"But no historian has managed to show that Talleyrand actually conducted any important negotiation because of the douceurs he was about to receive. He obtained money, a lot of money, for things he would have done anyway" (Kasch, 346). Having paid Greene's douceur for making things sweet, one wonders who precisely is benefiting from such work. Boys who already know the source of sweetness are already using power/erotics as a practical technics in continuity with a physiological process.

Break my face in / It was the kindest touch you / Ever gave
Wigging out /Before the unfamiliar flesh / Of my broken neck
Cremate me / After you cum on my lips / Honey boy
Place my ashes in a vase / Beneath your workout bench
Fabulous Muscles —Xiu Xiu

This is the opposite of Greene's sweetened history, which is the mediated/deferred promise of a steady paycheck for those who don't already know the ropes. We are reminded of Calasso's recurrent invocation of the birds from the Upaniṣads that contemplate themselves as they act and therefore perform the sacrifice. The reactionary reader who is reading 48 Laws for "practical knowledge" in Wolf Logic is already doing this, yet such sacrifices recall the ridiculous ventures of Wagner's demonic Alberich (demonic in the Kierkegaardian sense), who forfeits, in the first swoon, the love he would hope to win from power.

For first your men shall bow to my might,
then your winsome women,
who my wooing despised,
shall yield to Alberich's force,
though love be his foe!
—Wagner, Rheingold

Very few are capable of this demonic movement (incels aside, and they aren't so diligent). In this sense, the proliferation of laws to twice as much as the number of hours in a day — laws which are often doubling back to contradict each other — is functioning as panegyric against seeking such power. This is one of the few ways one can still get away with writing the simple encomium. (On this subject, I remember renting the film How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012), which begins with celebrity-feature college-humor and ends with "YOU WILL GO TO JAIL" — a slightly less subtle take on the same subject.) Given that those who are already using 48 Laws don't need it, and those who try it can't do it, we are thinking of the other audience for Greene's text, who are reading the book out of general interest and for whom it's functioning as a kind of sensitizing agent, a sweet signal against people of the first category. This would be to read 48 Laws of Power along the same lines that Rousseau was reading The Prince in his lifetime: "It is natural that rulers should always give preference to the maxim which is of most immediate use to them. It was demonstrated with the utmost clarity by Machiavelli, who, while he pretended to give instruction to kings, gave valuable lessons to their peoples" (The Social Contract, 106). One ought to recognize that such people are "cooked." ( )