Addicted slot-machine players are caught in ludic loops, condemned to repetition, sustained by the promise of rewards that arrive without warning.

*

Heiner Müller on Seneca: his plays were conceived for staged readings. The Elizabethan Renaissance did not know this. From that fertile misunderstanding, Shakespeare was born. This is Heiner at his most sovereign — the braiding of world history with poetry. Müller was the Muhammad Ali of dramatists. The Müller shuffle splices Seneca with Shakespeare. In its next turn, the plague rises as the engine of modernity, seeping out of the poison industries of the sewer, a problem first of sanitation, then of civilization. The director of excruciatingly long theatrical evenings confesses: “I grow bored quickly in the theater.”

*

“The superfluous man” is a figure from Russian literature — a creature of surplus existence, prone to elegy and self-annihilation. A typical case: a provincial schoolteacher cursed by circumstance. On stage, the superfluous man rips open his shirt after driving family and farm into catastrophe. Now he must learn to want. He must will belief into himself.

Ilija Trojanow weighs entire continents on the scale of his reflections on the “superfluous man.” Above them hovers a sentence attributed to Stalin: “No person, no problem.”

He drills down into the marrow of late modernity. Property confers full citizenship. Without property comes exclusion — and disposal. At the same time, “the number of secure jobs is shrinking.”

Trojanow is a sovereign of debate. When he was once denied entry to the United States, he hinted at the curiosity of intelligence services. The clandestine might have been unsettled by Attack on Freedom, the book he published with Juli Zeh in 2009. He also cited his signature beneath an open letter to the German chancellor concerning the NSA as a possible cause.

In his polemic The Superfluous Man, under the heading “Departure into the Past,” he recounts how CNN founder Ted “Buffalo” Turner and Bill Gates seek to master “the problem of overpopulation.” Turner, who buys bison herds and releases them into “the wild” — land he himself owns — would prefer to distribute food only to his own kind and their subordinates. According to Trojanow, Turner’s calculations classify 107 states and five billion people as superfluous.

Trojanow asks: Who decides who is superfluous? Inevitably, it is always the others. He shifts his grip. The theme now lies stabilized, almost clinically positioned. The urban subject absorbs two to three thousand advertising messages a day — “a gauntlet of consumption.” The compulsion to consume pushes social solidarity down into society’s basement. In the struggle to maintain “one’s capacity to consume,” the self-optimizer mutates into a transitional being, speaking of blood panels when speaking of “inner values.”

Trojanow traces the kinship between human beings and waste. In southern Bulgaria he observed Roma living on a garbage dump: what they consume is the refuse of others.

He points to the explosively growing network of German food banks. They feed roughly 1.5 million people with products whose expiration dates have been crossed with the dramatic finality of a latitude line.

Then India: small farmers committing suicide in waves as an answer to destitution. The IT industry could not save them. Trojanow calls for more empathy, less economization — while outside, the music of a bottle-deposit scavenger drifts through the air. Swan Lake sounds different here. When the day is done, the old poor appear, shining lights into trash cans. Perhaps they like Prenzlauer Berg. The young, the strong, and the gangs claim territories in the lower districts. This neighborhood is safe. That is worth something.

Ilija Trojanow: The Superfluous Man, Residenz Verlag

Shaded Maneuvers

The secondary stimulus as the primary source of pleasure — true enjoyment unfolds only in relation to an equal partner. Ned’s intuitive brilliance marks him as such. The outline of an ideal coexistence emerges. Nana is aroused by the insight that Ned would like to govern her through intellectual pressure, subtle as a rider’s thigh. The thought excites her. She enjoys exerting control, yet also welcomes the invitations of a superior sovereignty.

She relishes Ned’s stratagems. His delusion-swollen will to dominate she reads as intensity of interest.

In the Vacuum

“Erasmus has no homeland, no true parental home — he is born … into a vacuum.” — Stefan Zweig

He places his baptismal name between two chosen ones. He rejects the language of his Dutch ancestors in favor of Latin. In Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Zweig speaks of a deliberate shadowing of Erasmus’ illegitimate — socially delegitimizing — birth. It was, Erasmus supposedly felt, “annoying” to have been conceived by a priest. Zweig attributes to him the primal wound of the unwanted child. Erasmus counters fate by renaming himself Desiderius — the Desired One.

In 1487 he enters the Augustinian order; a year later he takes his vows. Without fervent piety, he cultivates his artistic inclinations. The “free-thinking, unprejudiced writer” remains a priest, though one who carves out worldly spaces of freedom. He secures dispensations wherever the clerical shoe pinches. Zweig diagnoses an “inner compulsion toward independence.”

Nana reflects on her own origins — more on that elsewhere. In Erasmus she recognizes a consummate tactician. Epoch-making figures avoid crude conflict and revolutionary brutality. They avoid “useless resistance.” They prefer to slip into independence rather than fight for it. Nana, too, dislikes bursting through doors headfirst. She values shaded maneuvers and rewards those capable of recognizing her subtlety. At times she almost falls into an unexpectedly tender smile, while allowing it to seem incidental that a man might drown in the sight of her lace-framed breasts.

Japanese Haute Couture

Her friend Lale Schlosser stages Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine on the student stage. For the occasion, Nana wears an asymmetrically cut dress with a slanted button placket from Yohji Yamamoto’s austere-elegant summer collection — at least, that is what the advertisement calls it. Japanese haute couture in an androgynous, deconstructive idiom.

She catalogues details. A Feininger ghost house. Water dripping from pipes like in a Tarkovsky film. Ruined pomp. A shattered quadriga. Painted airplanes smeared like Gerhard Richter canvases. Then, spoken as an aside, the “second communist spring.” Ophelia rolls onto the stage in a wheelchair. Hamlet says: “What you have killed, you must also love.”

The Hamletmachine sweeps the stage:

“I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke to the surf — BLABLA — behind me the ruins of Europe. The bells tolled for the state funeral.”

The rule of Elsinore passes to Fortinbras. Awaiting him: sewer projects, decrees concerning whores and beggars. Of Hamlet he will say:

“You believed in crystal concepts, not in human clay.”