The Handke Question: "You can stick your corpses up your arse."

I 've got very little to say on this. My instinctive reaction was: "I don't give a fig about his politics". I think that was rash.

So, the defence goes: since you haven't read any of his books can you comment? Fair point: I cannot comment about the books or what they say about his worldview/politics..what if the books consistently (or not) demonstrate views that would make a mockery of the claim that he's a particular kind of nasty nationalist or the kind of person who would support that kind of nationalism?

Defence no. 2 Even his private or public views are abhorrent -which remains to be shown since all you've got are newspaper snippets and hearsay- his work itself stands out, is admirable, exceptional etc. and he/it should be judged on those grounds alone: play the ball, not the man.

Again, I'm torn here. I'd love to read Repetition. It sounds like just the kind of book I'd like. On the other hand, isn't there something to the notion of what Frithjof Schuon calls 'integral intelligence'? Someone can be hugely intelligent or even profound in some senses and a complete idiot in another sense? Isn't that just the fragmentation of the self in modernity and something that is actually conducive to liberalism's battle against totalitarianism or a narrow determination of human possibilities? 

So, for a moment let's take for granted that his political views are, to say the least, weird. So what? I dunno. Can one look at Freud's paintings in the same way once you've read that he (allegedly) said that a woman has only truly submitted once she's been sodomized? And then there's the slippery slope argument: how far do you go? What if a writer/artist/musician has been racist/misogynist etc.? Can art ever be "pure" or, to put it another way, is there a danger of politicizing everything? And then: whose politics?

Over the last few days there's been a lot of vitriolic reaction to Handke being awarded the Nobel. On the other hand, there seems to have been a lot of intellectual somersaulting trying to make sense of his statements..did he really say the Bosnians were "staging"  atrocities? And what exactly did he mean when he said he stands with Milosevic. What did he mean, if he said it, that "all sides" do wrong? "You can stick your corpses.." Really? Is that linguistic integrity?

I don't know if there's a coming down on one side or the other. One would hope that one could still recognize someone's work as being profound or even brilliant but at the same time be deeply uneasy about their political views. 

I'm suspicious of people who are not suspicious. 

Does that mean that those people who don't express any kind of  unease are naive? Or is there something darker to it?