Abstract
This chapter surveys Pinter’s political speeches and activism. The analysis indicates how Pinter’s truth claims and framing of issues in terms of moral interest are moments within a broader discourse which relies upon affect. The force of the discourse is observed to work at destabilizing political and social consensus and complicating the conceptual frames that enable one to resort to common sense understandings of politics, language which abstracts affect and sinks the mind into the world of opinion and thereby prevents thinking. This style can, moreover, be framed in aesthetic terms, the argument being that as a citizen Pinter is informed by his sensibility as an artist and in that he aestheticizes politics as a means of critique.
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Notes
- 1.
Among others, Michael Billington and Yael Zarhy-Levo have respectively observed this. The former understands that ‘Pinter’s political anger is driven by something more than moral disgust with the rhetoric of power. Behind the anger lies a belief in the validity of every single human life.’ (Billington 2007, 396); and the latter obverses that ‘[f]ollowing A Kind of Alaska [1982] Pinter is presented as a rather engaged playwright who offers human concern.’ (Zarhy-Levo 2001, 219).
- 2.
One potential contradiction presents itself in the single promotional reference to socialism Pinter makes in ‘Caribbean Cold War’ (Pinter 2009g, 231–232). Curiously, however, this is not a trend in his activism and cannot, I contend, be considered central to his discourse and overall project.
- 3.
Cf. Pinter’s ‘Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry,’ which states: ‘We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East”. But as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers.’ (Pinter 2009za, 267–268) While this version contains the striking image of the flowers, note how the Nobel version contains the subtle yet powerful insertion of the word ‘death’ at the end of the long and bristling chain of equivalence Pinter produces.
- 4.
All three were published in the French newspaper Libération and in the Guardian between January and March 1991. ‘The Gulf War will not take place’ was published in Libération on 4 January 1991. ‘The Gulf War is not really taking place’ was published in Libération on 6 February 1991. ‘The Gulf War did not take place’ was published in Libération on 29 March 1991.
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Chiasson, B. (2017). A ‘Citizen of the World’: Aestheticizing Politics. In: The Late Harold Pinter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50816-4_5
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