{"id":9568,"date":"2013-02-27T23:43:56","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T21:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=9568"},"modified":"2013-03-15T23:51:48","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T21:51:48","slug":"the-policeman-as-a-priest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=9568","title":{"rendered":"The Policeman as a Priest"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Daniel Sur, God\u2019s Policeman<\/i>, Ideea European\u0103, Bucharest, 2012]<\/strong>
\n(from atheism to agnosticism and back) [V]<\/span><\/p>\n

by \u015etefan Bolea
\ntranslation from Romanian by Raisa Lambru [MTTLC student]
\n 
\nclick aici<\/a> pentru versiunea rom\u00e2n\u0103<\/p>\n

\n\u201cCome on, take the money or else I\u2019m putting you behind the bars.\u201d
\nThe child replies to me: \u201cAre you a cop? Then I don\u2019t want your money. I don\u2019t take money from people who are lower than me.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0 The job as a police policeman is one of the most despised ones. When you think about \u201ccorruption\u201d, you immediately think of politicians and policemen. The violence of the state, the right-wing violence, is again the privilege of the police. When you think of \u201cabuse\u201d, you immediately picture the jaws of a policeman. To add to what Orwell said, we could say that the \u201ccop\u201d is a mix between a pig and a pit-bull!<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0 In order to write about the police, you must have right-wing, slightly fascist morals: \u201cI feel my heart is warm, proud and cruel towards the weak ones. I can\u2019t help it. I hate the peasants, the poor and the beggars.\u201d (123) Therefore, we\u2019re dealing with an anti-anarchist point of view, if I can express myself through a double negation. It can also be a neo-Nietzschean one, if we think of Herdenmoral<\/i> from On the Genealogy of Morality<\/i>. As I\u2019ve said before, there\u2019s also a bit of vernacular fascism: now we\u2019re talking about using a capital letter when writing Captain, who is probably the main character of the book, who reminds us of that \u201cfriend\u201d from Cioran\u2019s youth, Codreanu.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0\u00a0 Here are four of the reasons why we despise, par d\u00e9faut, the policemen (willpower, being argyrophilic, abuse, corruption):<\/p>\n

\u201cAll policemen dream to fearlessly beat up their clients\u2026<\/p>\n

All policemen dream to get bribes\u2026<\/p>\n

All policemen dream to get a job they don\u2019t deserve\u2026<\/p>\n

All policemen dream of betrayals and win\u2026\u201d (29)<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0\u00a0 The novel is written with a particular delicacy which reminds us of the fact that its creator started as a poet: \u201cOblivion hadn\u2019t managed to expand its delicate crust over the memory of the last events, in the same way the skin expands over boiled milk.\u201d (47) Also, we shouldn\u2019t forget that Sur got attention as a philosopher, having penned some great articles in the pages of this magazine (http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/4\/filosofie.htm#1<\/a>, http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/5\/filosofie.htm#1<\/a>). Let us reflect a bit upon this idea, which postulates hate as epistemology<\/i>: \u201cYou can\u2019t get to a man whom you don\u2019t hate. The more you hate him, the better you understand him.\u201d (91)<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The most powerful idea of the novel is by far the association between the police and priesthood: the policemen are being spiritualized, they trench upon the privileges and duties of priesthood. This parallel is (shyly) drafted from the very beginning of the novel: \u201cMy name is Gigu and I\u2019m a policeman. My mother thinks that\u2019s my destiny, to be a policeman, and that, although everything seems to be against me<\/i> (emphasis mine<\/i>), God feels compassion for me and shall help me.\u201d (7) He\u2019s a kind of \u201calone against the world (but with God by my side)\u201d person. Doesn\u2019t this approach belong to people who break away from the world, who choose solitude? \u201cNo ethical, geographical or cultural difference can annihilate the grand difference between living with the world<\/i> and living with God<\/i>\u201d (Nicolae Turcan).<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s impossible for the analogy between policemen and priests not to be blasphemous. There are characters like Dumitru Dumnezeu (God) the beggar, who shouts: \u201cI take care of you all\u2026 Even you, the policemen!\u201d Furthermore, while in a trance, the Captain seems to be able to romantically connect Nietzsche and Baudelaire, or \u201cGod died\u201d and \u201cI am Satan\u201d: \u201cI dreamed of the Captain dressed as a beggar, having not shaved in months, shouting curses and summoning spirits\u2026 \u2018God isn\u2019t the most powerful one\u2019, he shouted. \u2018He was once, a long time ago, but now he\u2019s nothing but a wreck. There were some times which were perfect for him, like when my grandparent\u2019s grandparent was a young boy. Now he lives in misery. Sooner or later, someone will take his place. Maybe that\u2019ll even be me. God isn\u2019t the most powerful one anymore.\u2019\u201d (123-124).<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To support this claim, of the link between policemen and priests, I need to mention the essential discourse of the book (which was held, of course, by the Captain), to the possible center of the novel: \u201cSo, I think that what we see in movies is nothing compared to our lives. And we\u2019ve got everything: we love, we get a divorce, we get drunk a bit, we fuck a bit, we sometimes get it in the neck, we make kids and, from time to time, we get killed. This is what happens to all the heroes in the movies. Just that we\u2019re unfairly despised<\/i>. (emphasis mine<\/i>). Just like the Jews despised Jesus. That\u2019s why the tears of a policeman are like drops of sacred blood. They\u2019re shed in order to save the world. In the end, the world will discover the truth we already know: we are His soldiers, not His popes. Just like Jesus, the policeman doesn\u2019t hide himself inside a church, but can be found where the civilian needs him. Let me go back and show you that it\u2019s wrong to say a movie with cops is an action movie, as it is a religious one!\u201d (138) Therefore, we come to understand that the policeman (according to Sur) is more than just a priest, he is also a super-human, the guardian in Plato\u2019s Republic and knight of the Order of the Assassins. The tears of a policeman are Graal\u2026 The policeman, just like Jesus, is on the road, ready to sacrifice himself\u2026 The police station is the church, and jail, hell\u2026 God\u2019s policeman is God.<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0\u00a0 At the end, let me highlight a few weak parts of the book. The book is a fake raving thriller, which (almost completely) lacks action. Gicu as a character is too solipsistic, we discover more about his inner existence than about his In-der-Welt-Sein<\/i>. Gicu is a poet who is incapable of creating a plot. It would have been a lot more interesting if the action was set on two plans, so that the Captain (a true Mephistoteles) could have been improved as a character, as he is the most interesting one. If it weren\u2019t for the Gigu-Lidia-Captain love triangle, which only takes up 20% of the book\u2019s \u201cmovie\u201d, we could say about God\u2019s Policeman<\/i> what has been said about Huysmans\u2019s work of art: that it is \u201ca novel without a plot\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Daniel Sur, God\u2019s Policeman, Ideea European\u0103, Bucharest, 2012] (from atheism to agnosticism and back) [V] by \u015etefan Bolea translation from Romanian by Raisa Lambru [MTTLC student]   click aici pentru versiunea rom\u00e2n\u0103 \u201cCome on, take the money or else I\u2019m putting you behind the bars.\u201d The child replies to me: \u201cAre you a cop? Then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[822,969,27],"tags":[16,970,1117,893,403,897,39,312],"class_list":["post-9568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ateism-agnosticism","category-egophobia37","category-filosofie","tag-daniel-sur","tag-egophobia-37","tag-filosofie","tag-from-atheism-to-agnosticism-and-back","tag-mttlc","tag-raisa-lambru","tag-stefan-bolea","tag-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-2uk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9568"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9570,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9568\/revisions\/9570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}