“Mon sort difficile est que je suis trop philosophe pour les littérateurs et trop littéraire pour les philosophes.” (“My difficult fate is that I am too philosophical for the literary types and too literary for the philosophers.”)

Blanchot, in a letter to his family

Wherever men associate, they produce hell. Its circles and trenches are all around us, and we recognize, as in Goya’s caprichos, the monsters and devils that govern them.

What can we do in this hell? Not so much, or not only, as Italo said, to safeguard small pieces of what is good, of that which, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno.1 Because it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part — in any case, no te escaparas. Rather, stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right moment, speak, shatter the curtain of lies on which hell rests. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that blocks the passage to non-hell, to a happy, simple, anarchic existence. To the non-state [mai stato] that hell always covers over with its state, as if there were no other possibility apart from the trenches and circles in which you have always necessarily been inscribed. Be the point, the threshold where the state ceases to exist, where the possible, the only true reality, springs forth. The idea is not to realize the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but to make the real possible, to find a way out of the inevitability of the facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in every sphere — first and foremost in politics. While in the infernal clamor around you everyone is trying to realize the possible diabolically, technically, and at any cost, for you every state, every thing, every blade of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, becomes once again, silently, lucidly possible.

Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Hell’

[Following the publication of Death on Credit.] Céline felt particularly aggrieved at André Rousseaux’s remark in Le Figaro that his ‘prodigious verbal genius’ was in danger of becoming ‘prisoner of its own artifices’ through his excessive use of argot. Céline countered in his published response that argot was necessary to inject ‘spoken emotion’ into the written word, that ‘the only mode of expression possible for emotion’ is to ‘render the spoken in writing’. His new style seeks to break with the traditional academic prose of the novel: ‘I don’t want to narrate, I want to evoke feeling. It is impossible to do this with the usual academic language – the beautiful style’. The problem with this langage classique (classical language) is that ‘emotive rendering is not there’; it is, therefore, a ‘dead’ language, in the emotive sense, as illegible as Latin. Argot, by contrast, gives language, if only temporarily, a new lease of life, owing to its critical superiority over so-called pure language, very French, refined, always dead, dead from the beginning, dead since Voltaire, a corpse, dead as a door nail. Everybody feels it, nobody says it, or dares to say it. A language is like everything else, it is always dying, it is destined to die.

Céline further vented his spleen in a letter to Daudet, a few weeks after the novel’s publication, hoping for his support. He defends his ‘spoken emotion’ as the manifestation of his northern, rather than southern, background and temperament. Thus, if his style is not ‘Latin, classic, southern’, this is because ‘I am not from the south. I am Parisian. Of Breton and Flemish descent. I write as I feel.’ If people accuse him of being ‘foul-mouthed, talking slang’, then the same thing must surely apply to other canonical writers and artists such as Rabelais, Villon and Bruegel.

Damian Catani’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journeys to the Extreme

The autobiographical moment that obtrudes into [Kafka’s Beckett’s and Blanchot’s] texts does so in a way that, in its extremity and ungraspability, demands fiction, that finds itself forced and torqued into scenes and figures, despite the impossibility of such a narrative localization. Blanchot’s own use of the phrase “a primal scene” in The Writing of the Disaster is perhaps the best indication of this […] a use that is hedged with parentheses and a question mark (he writes: “(A primal scene?)”), but that nonetheless compulsively turns and tropes through the contours of a scene cast simultaneously as an eternal and irresistible autobiographical return and as mere fictive “supposition”. Fictive figuration, then, as a necessary compromise formation, under duress of extreme strangeness and radical depersonalization.

[…] If this resembles a traumatic structure, it is not because there is a barred or repressed narrative, but because the breach or fault to which telling returns, eternally and again, continually defies the figural compulsion that commands it. As such, it is a mere disappearing point, and a necessarily empty one—but this is the very structure of the imperative in its defaulting force.

The situation can thus be summarized in the following terms: the only story that can be told is one that has been invented, but every invented story—and the more radically invented, the more abyssally will this be demonstrated—betrays the contingency, the temporal, topographical and idiomatic embeddedness, of its imperative’s imprint, the initial impact of its unaccountable preinscription. (Such an imprint could also be considered in terms of style—another term for autobiography as displaced remnant.)

[…] fiction in extremis is intimately bound up with an autobiographical dimension of writing that pursues the writer into the far reaches of radical depersonalization: writing’s curved trajectory leads back, eternally and again, to the obtrusive stuff  of a life that, in the logic of these leavings, really ought to have been left behind. Faute de quoi—failing this—and in default of such a permanent and absolute leave-taking, what is left is in fact a dense residue that bears witness to a compulsion arising from the breach that writing opens in a life, which it leaves there.

Jeff Fort, The Imperative To Write

Beckett’s work poses […] the question of a troubling limit between literary language, as a cultural and ethical value, and a kind of speech that in its compulsive brutality crosses into an experience that must in some sense be considered “nonliterary.” “When one listens to oneself,” said Beckett in an interview, “it’s not literature that one hears.” The “vocation” of writing thus verges toward a harassing “vocalization” that bears its compulsions openly, risking an exposure that might exceed—that is, fall far short of— the categories that would dress it in more redemptive terms. There is more than a hint of shame to be read in some of Beckett’s hilarities and melancholies, and the residues of so much elimination and stripping away have affective tonalities, even […] an unexpected sentimentality, that it will be important to register in the bare but intensely charged figures that Beckett obsessively stages.

Jeff Fort, The Imperative To Write

He seemed to be divided between a need to be happy and a feeling that he would be deserting his duty if he let himself be. What prevented him from feeling happy was the book in which he was trying to say something he felt deeply [. . .] From time to time I used to open the door to bring him some cookies: Aren’t you getting hungry? Would you like to have coffee with me? I haven’t seen you in hours. He would look at me as if he hardly recognized me, then smiled graciously: I’ll be out a little later! Hunched over his papers, he looked like an old man, his face looked old, everything about him looked old. It made me wonder; Is that Louis?

[…] He’d go in his study and come out an entirely different person, staring with a desperate look on his face that would make you want to cry. He’d look at me as if to say: ‘Well, you don’t understand anything, you just don’t understand how tragic life is!’

Sometimes he’d come out all excited: ‘I’m going to read this to you, this is good! I’m going to read it in French.’ I’d catch a few words here and there, but most of it escaped me. He’d translate the words, interpret the idiomatic expressions and explain the slang. He’d read it again in French, warned me that it won’t be as good in English, translate it once more, then ask me:

– What do you think?

– I don’t know enough about the characters you’re developing, who they are, what caused them to feel and act that way. They seem to me rather brutal.

– Well, they are brutal.

– Not everybody is brutal.

– Oh yes they are! Inside they all are!

Elizabeth Craig, remembering Louis-Ferdinand Céline (cited.)

More and more, the essential feature in Kafka seems to me is humour. He himself was not a humourist, of course. Rather, he was a man whose fate it was to keep stumbling upon people who made humour their profession: clowns. Amerika in particular is one large clown act. And concerning the friendship with Brod, I think I am on the track of the truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his Hardy – and that was Brod. However that may be, I think the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology. Has there been such a man? Or would you be man enough to be that man?

Walter Benjamin to Gerhard Scholem, February 4th, 1939

'Stupidity and Messianism': Ubaldo León Barreto reviews Spurious (in Spanish) in Rialta. Most insightful review of them all? A candidate, and not just because it's flattering. Here's a machine translation:

Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, writes: "Be that as it may, I imagine that whoever succeeds in discovering the comic aspects of Jewish theology would have in his possession the key to Kafka. Has this man ever existed? Would you dare to be skilled enough to be that man?" The strange, profoundly enigmatic intuition[1] of the great German literary critic, thinker and crypto-Kabbalist has obsessed countless first-rate intellects for decades: What exactly does it mean?: Kafka as a humorist?; Is the existence of comic elements in the almost infinite theological corpus of rabbinic Judaism even conceivable? Such perplexity is understandable: they are not exactly (at least at first glance) ideas that we can associate with the Czech narrator's grim parables, let alone with the great Talmudic tradition of dour, painstaking, insanely complex commentaries on the Torah. However, the difficulty of the fragment has not managed to dissuade (on the contrary, quite the opposite) dozens – perhaps hundreds – of accomplished exegetes who continue their hermeneutical work with admirable stubbornness… and derisory results: no philosopher or theorist has succeeded, I believe, in offering a more or less satisfactory explanation of Benjamin's apophthegm. Is it so abstruse that it defies any gloss? I do not think so: I suspect rather that the approach deployed by literary theory, philosophy, and even theology is probably not the most appropriate in this instance: only literature itself can, perhaps, respond effectively to such a challenge, provided that the author recalls the capital distinction established by Henry James[2] between saying and showing. [3] No one has done it better than Lars Iyer in his eccentric, masterful narrative Espurious.

It is a comic novel – or, if you prefer, satirical – inscribed in the great tradition of Thomas Bernhard, the last Céline (From One Castle to Another, North, Rigodon) and, above all, Samuel Beckett:[4] that is, not the superficial humour of a certain English narrative[5] but the joyless, corrosive, nihilistic and absolutely desperate laughter that informs almost all the texts of those illustrious misanthropes. Indeed, Iyer's book is dominated by two of the most original, pessimistic and hilarious characters in contemporary European literature: at one extreme is W, a tormented university professor obsessed with Kafka, the Jewish messianic tradition,[6] failure, Kierkegaard and the cinema of Béla Tarr; in the other is Lars:[7] narrator of the novel, Hindu, aspiring philosopher, chronically unemployed, fat, affable, and author of a book that his friend incessantly criticizes: both poor, alcoholics, scholars, anguished, and eccentric: two intellectuals entrenched in their dark, damp, barely habitable apartments[8] in the north of England with a single thought that they have developed to their last, Unbreathable conclusions: Europe – and perhaps the whole of so-called Western civilization – is about to sink into the deepest of abysses: they have no idea what exactly that means and they recognize it, but, of course, a small detail like that is not going to prevent them from speculating endlessly on the matter. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that almost the entire novel is composed exclusively of the dense, hilarious dialogues between the two great failures… with special emphasis on Jewish messianism[9], the life of Kafka and the incessant derision that W – incomparable master of the art of insulting – deploys against his best (read: only) friend: "When did you know that you would not amount to anything Lars?; When did you realize that you would never be more than an idiot, an ape that pretends to think?… And at first you seemed so smart, but then we read your work: how can anyone be so stupid? Kafka was incapable of writing a sentence that was not perfect. Wittgenstein suffered for thought. But you, Lars, you are the anti-Kafka, the anti-Wittgenstein, the greatest philosophical fraud in English history, a fat stutterer who annihilates thought!, says W: my obesity impresses him, so does my gluttony… but above all my stupidity." [10]

Well, I suspect that was not what Cicero[11] had in mind when he composed his On Friendship: What's Going On Here? Is W a sadist who torments his friend for entertainment? Not at all, for he admires many of Lars's traits and reserves his greatest contempt for himself:[12] he is a quintessential misfortune (in the sense Bernhard gave to the term) and, without the slightest doubt, Kafka was his Glenn Gould. [13] It is clear that, along with Jewish messianism, the other great theme is stupidity…, but not the kind that can be found anywhere, but a very special variety: the Bétisse[14] that obsessed Flaubert in his correspondence to the paradoxical extreme of acquiring an unexpected metaphysical dimension: in this sense, it would not be inaccurate to consider Espurious (among other things) as a rewriting of Bouvard and Pécuchet for the twenty-first century: in the Frenchman's text, two championship imbeciles who do not know they are so, aspire to master all existing knowledge and, overwhelmed by the vastness of the enterprise, end up – what a surprise! – reduced to copyists of all the printed material they can find; [15] In Iyer's novel, by contrast, W and Lars have the keenest imaginable awareness of their limits and incessantly proclaim: "Our idiocy possesses a very uncommon purity, on that we agree. We are idiots, so idiotic that we cannot even conceive the depth of our stupidity. We are mystics of idiocy, there is something cosmic and almost majestic in our ignorance." Now, it is precisely at this point that the strange link between the two great themes of the novel is articulated:[16]: stupidity and Jewish messianism: in fact, for the protagonists it is not enough to recognize their own idiocy but also that of the whole of the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and even the Universe itself[17] (why should they limit themselves, after all, to the third planet in the solar system?).
And, as so often happens when one wants to see a meaning against all evidence, theology emerges triumphantly to justify the unbridled tenor of his thought: "And you still ask why I read Rosenzweig: the guy understood everything, Lars… look at those nauseating Germans gorging themselves on beer and sausages!, look at the apes passing for academics in England!, Look in a mirror, Lars!: the world has been molded in your image and likeness: England and Europe, Europe and England: fat idiots choking on beer and sausages, publishing nonsense they call philosophy You yourself are a sign of the end times, Lars!: the Messiah is coming, only he can save us. But you're an atheist, W, I tell him. That does not invalidate my thinking!, exclaims W. It does not matter what I believe or do not believe: moreover, that I do not believe in God can be a magnificent argument in favor of his existence." A remarkable phrase that recalls the abyssal paradoxes of Flannery O'Connor[18] and marks the beginning of the most delirious monologues pronounced by W, supreme and virtuous garrulore of failure: until that moment his interests were relatively broad (that is to say); now his obsession with eschatological signs and the arrival of the Messiah proliferates and reaches a manic intensity that is very reminiscent of the absolute prose of László Krasznahorkai: W gets drunk in Germany, predicts the arrival of the Messiah "when no one needs him anymore" and vomits copiously while continuing to utter insults against all the German philosophers who have ever existed, exist and will exist; W reads dozens of books in German about God and advanced mathematics without understanding ninety percent of what he scrutinizes (his German is poor, his mathematical knowledge non-existent) and proclaims, despite everything, that he has made great discoveries; W mocks Lars for the umpteenth time and suspects that perhaps his friend is responsible for the Messiah's delay. [19] It is useless to continue this enumeration: the essential thing is how, through the meticulous deployment of certain procedures,[20] Jewish theology becomes absolutely derisory in this extraordinary story, perhaps the best imaginable continuation of the grandiose comic-philosophical program initiated by the Austrian atrabiliary who wrote Old Masters.
[1] Just one of the many surprising observations that flood his splendid correspondence with Scholem.

[2] "The great master of research on the formal possibilities of narrative fiction" (Frank Kermode).

[3] Which refers, of course, to the use of narrative procedures and has nothing to do with certain considerations of Wittgenstein in the final pages of the Tractatus.

[4] Plays, of course, but also stories such as Watt or Mercier and Camier.

[5] The much-celebrated—and vastly overrated—wit of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, the insufferable, abysmally banal P. G. Woodhouse, and so many others.

[6] In particular the highly influential, almost mythical, theological-philosophical treatise The Star of Redemption, written by the ill-fated – he died at the age of 43 – elusive and fascinating Franz Rosenzweig: a kind of Jewish Max Stirner who deeply impressed Gershom Scholem.

[7] Yes, it's named after the author of the novel, but that doesn't mean anything: at most it's just another instance of the so-called British self-deprecating humour: the guy makes fun of himself.

[8] Lars' is infested with rats and is not without leaks.

[9] W hardly thinks about anything else and tries – with predictable results – to learn advanced mathematics to determine when the Messiah will arrive: "It has nothing to do with mysticism!

[10] These are merely some of the more "charitable insults" devised by W.

[11] Otherwise, W does not take the Roman philosophers seriously: "All impostors, imitators without talent, Lars: You must read the Greeks! Read them in the original!, says W. But you don't really know classical Greek, I reply. It's not true!, W exalts: I can read Plato with a good dictionary!"

[12] When you read what he thinks about his own stupidity and lack of talent, everything said about Lars seems almost harmless: in the difficult art of self-destruction (verbal, although physically he doesn't fare much better) W has reached real heights.

[13] "Kafka ruined me, Lars: when I was young and still thought I would become something I was unlucky enough to read The Castle: how can someone write like that? For a long time I wanted to be Kafka, but now I understand that I have only become Max Brod."

[14] An essentially untranslatable French term: in one of his letters the great novelist goes so far as to maintain that "masterpieces are stupid; they have a calm aspect, like the very productions of nature, like large animals and mountains": words whose meaning eludes me but which certainly confer on the concept – at least in Flaubert's poetics – a complexity far superior to translations such as "idiocy" or "imbecility".

[15] "What shall we do with all this? There's nothing to think about! Let's copy!"

[16] That W claims to have discovered: "That's the key to everything, Lars… and only a failure like me could understand it!: it is the only original thought I have ever had in my life".

[17] Only a few writers, philosophers and artists escape: Kafka –naturally–, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Blanchot, Lévinas, Béla Tarr.

[18] I am thinking, first of all, of the great story The Lame Shall Enter First.

[19] "Your stupidity prevents his coming… You are the antimesias, Lars, a fat stupid and drunkard, a proud failure!"

[20] Obsessive repetition of phrases, witty insults, endless invectives and, above all, the grotesque splendor of the monologue delivered by an idiot, "full of sound and fury, which means nothing".

I have a slight problem with Beckett. I think some of it is fantastic. I always remember there was a French magazine that asked writers, why do you write? And Anthony Burgess wrote three pages. Beckett said, Good only for that. And I thought that was very funny and very true and quite essentially Beckett. It’s even better in French: Bon qu’a ça. But sometimes I feel, however much he tries to get rid of the rhetoric because he associates it with ‘Irishness’ and so on, nevertheless, he can’t avoid it. And it remains a performance. I think in the late plays, which I love, and the late fiction, that sort of disappears really. I think in a lot of the earlier things, there’s this wonderful, enjoyable sense of performance, but in the end, that keeps me at bay. So I have a slightly more ambivalent attitude to it. But his letters are wonderful and always so interesting, and what I treasure in all art, I think, is a complete genuineness. He’s not going to be beholden to anyone.

Maybe I’m either more optimistic or more sentimental than him, I don’t know. But when looking at late Stevens and late Beckett, who have a lot in common – I explore that a bit in that book Forgetting – in the end, Stevens is willing to recognize a sense of joy at moments in his life. Whereas Beckett feels any sign of that is false, and wants to crush it as soon as he becomes aware of it. And I suppose I feel more at ease with Proust and Stevens on that. I feel, in my life, that is something I want to leave a space for. Beckett, for whatever reason, I think was always suspicious of it. He can’t take it. He doesn’t want it. And even in some of those late pieces of fiction where he goes back to his childhood, he then has to knock it down. As he did in Krapp’s Last Tape. So it’s always been a thing with him. Can’t allow it. Can’t allow it. That’s false.

Gabriel Josipovici, interviewed

Thus, Canetti’s hatred of injustice is intrinsically braided with his hatred of death. For death is the ultimate injustice; it violates the right to life, which is the right not to die. Mortality, Canetti reminds us, was the first punishment, doled out by God (“the founder and guardian of death”) in the garden, a punishment whose term can never be served, imposed by a power that can never be disestablished. If one cannot overcome death, then one can at least rebuke it, despise it. “For me it is not about abolishing [death], which is not possible,” Canetti writes in an entry from 1980, “It’s about condemning it.” In The Book Against Death, the author assumes the role of a Roman orator, marshalling words against death the way one would a tyrant, as if one could banish it with speech, ridicule it out of existence.

Canetti approaches his subjects of attack as if they will eventually yield by virtue of sheer insistence (as Sontag points out, for Canetti, “to think is to insist”). He is always thinking against the grain of his subject, butting up against its unjust actualities. “One should not think away the wall that we smash our head against,” he wrote in 1972. He is always in defiance against seemingly eternal forces: power, society, religion, God, death. And it is not enough simply to think about something––all thoughts are enlisted in the conquest of their subject. Canetti’s pensée amounts to an act of protest, a great refutation, culminating in the ultimate refutation of death.

Source unknown

A few years later, in what seems to be his last appearance on the record in print, again in Fangoria, St. John says of his process: You can’t think about that while you’re writing it; you must remain true to what’s in front of you. You have to build a world and inhabit it with the people that you need to do it with, and you must keep it true to itself…. We take characters to their emotional and logical extremes. We push them to the edge, and that’s what you need to do. That’s what I think our films do — we really get out there with them, put them in a situation and turn the screws on them… I don’t want to talk for Abel, but I firmly believe that the films we’ve done together take place in a moral universe, and I think he does too… I don’t think fashionable amorality is going to get us anywhere. It’s a disaster, and I hope we can catch ourselves before it does real damage.

To this day Nicholas St. John gives no interviews on his career, one of the most consistent and distinguished of genre screenwriters. There is no comment on what made him run away from such promise, which encounters with dishonesty motivated him to flee even the fringes of the industry. In this light, that Dangerous Game is his last script written specifically for Abel — both The Addiction and The Funeral, filmed later, were from scripts completed around the same time as King of New York — speaks volumes above any such personal insights. 

On Nicholas St John, Abel Ferrara's screenwriter, source unknown

In a rejoinder to the Hegelian notion that philosophy only has the task of painting the gray of the world in gray, Adorno once explained: “Consciousness could not even despair over what is grey if we did not possess the concept of a different color, whose scattered trace is not absent in the negative whole.”

For Adorno, this learning process commits him to a secularizing gesture that can learn from theology even while it leaves no sacred concepts immune. He summarized this view in a remark in a radio discussion (later published as “Revelation or Autonomous Reason”) from the late 1950s: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the secular, the profane.”

Adorno was far too skeptical about the technological optimism that seems to be built into orthodox Marxism, and like many of his generation, he had also lost his confidence in the proletariat as the singular and unified collective agent of history. Nor did he accept the strong element of economism that lurks in some versions of historical materialism. He worried that economism reflects an ideology of unfreedom: Rather than restoring to humanity our self-conception as agents who have the capacity to shape our own destiny, it eternalizes the experience of ourselves as mere objects who are locked in a deterministic mechanism. Vulgar Marxism, you might say, is not a solution to our unfreedom; it is merely its symptom.

What he admires in an artwork is not its illusory transcendence but its capacity to transcribe in its very form the suffering and imperfection of the surrounding world. This is why he was especially drawn to the later works by Beethoven, in which the breaks and fissures seem to express the subject’s limitations and the promises of non-identity. 

Invoking a famous idea from Stendhal and Baudelaire, he said that all genuine art also serves as a “promise of happiness.” Incidentally, this is where I found the title of my book. Adorno once said of modern music that it contains as much “precarious happiness” as it does despair. To me, this line conveys his broader understanding of art as an unresolved dialectic.

Source unknown

What is comical, as we saw, is a personality who makes his own actions contradictory and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self assured in the process. Therefore comedy has for its starting-point what tragedy may end with, namely an absolutely reconciled and cheerful heart. . . . The comical therefore plays its part more often in people with lower views, tied to the real world and the present, i.e. among men who are what they are once and for all, who cannot be or will anything different, and, though incapable of any genuine ‘pathos,’ have not the least doubt about what they are or what they are doing. But at the same time they reveal themselves as having something higher in them because they are not seriously tied to the finite world with which they are engaged but are raised above it and remain firm in themselves and secure in the face of failure and loss. It is to this absolute freedom of spirit which is utterly consoled in advance in every human undertaking, to this world of private serenity that Aristophanes conducts us. If you have not read him, you can scarcely realize how men can take things so easily.

Hegel, Lectures on the Fine Arts

Domenico is an old man. He shuffles through the streets and through the vacant building where he resides. Domenico was a scholar until he locked his family in their house for seven years to protect them from the end of the world; an end which never came. The police freed them and Domenico spent time in a mental institution. When it was shut down, he was left to shuffle through the world with his dog, Zoe. “You know I’m scared of being alone,” he whispers to her.

Domenico is infamous in the village for having locked his family away for seven years in order to protect them from the outside world. He is a fascinating subject for Andrei and the audience because he represents nostalgia taken to its extreme—a nostalgia which, in order to protect its object, elects to drown it in amber. Having rendered his family dead to society by cutting them off from the outside world, Domenico lights himself on fire to the tune of Beethoven’s "Symphony No. 9—Ode to Joy" in the film's haunting penultimate scene. His self-immolation recalls his first interaction with Eugenia, whom he asks, “I don’t smoke, but could I have a cigarette?” She replies, naturally enough, “Of course, seeing as you don’t smoke,” and lights it for him. For Tarkovsky, cinema was never about the rush of the drag. Rather, he desired nothing more, nor less, than desire itself.

On Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Source unknown

What ancestor speaks in me? I can't live simultaneously in my head and in my body. That's why I can't be just one person. I can feel within myself countless things at once. There are no great masters left. That's the real evil of our time. The heart's path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless in brains full of long sewage pipes of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers. The buzzing of insects must enter. We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we'll build the pyramids. It doesn't matter if we don't. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet. If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands. We must mix the so-called healthy with the so-called sick. You healthy ones! What does your health mean? The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging. Freedom is useless if you don't have the courage to look us in the eye, to eat, drink and sleep with us! It's the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the verge of ruin. Man, listen! In you water, fire and then ashes, and the bones in the ashes. The bones and the ashes! Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination? Here's my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end. Small things endure. Society must become united again instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you'll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where we took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves! O Mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh.

Domenico's speech from Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders the historical quarter of a European city in which he is a stranger, and stops at a shabby café. A clock chimes on the wall of that café, and it reminds him reminds him of a totally different clock in a totally different café in a totally different part of a different city. He recalls that in the other city, he had been neighbors with a man whose father was a professional clockmaker. This neighbor was not himself a professional clockmaker, but he had an amateur passion for horology and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the clock-making industry back to the 15th century. The narrator recalls the apartment in which he spent hours drinking lukewarm coffee with this neighbor and talking, talking, talking about the mechanics and history of clocks. Then the narrator recalls, vividly, perhaps for the first time in many years, that one day this neighbor, the clockmaker’s son, disappeared, packed off for another city without saying goodbye. And then the narrator remembers the first meal he had after the neighbor’s disappearance, a tuna sandwich very much like the one he is eating right now, in this very café, where this clock is still chiming, chiming, chiming.

The above is not a scene one can find in any actual Sebald text, but that’s the point. The working of memory—the narrator’s own, that of others, both of particular others (the neighbor) and of whole groups (the clockmakers of Europe)—is simultaneously the content and form of the novel, and the method of its composition. Anyone who’s ever struggled to produce pages on a deadline can see the appeal of this écriture that is seemingly as contingent and abundant as life itself. If Sartre famously admired Husserlian phenomenology because it was a system of thought with which one “philosophize about an ashtray,” Sebald developed an aesthetic program that could in theory produce a whole novel or a whole series of novels about a spoon, or a particular variety of fig.

Wittgenstein says that “a language is a form-of-life.” Cards on the table: I think that the visceral appeal of the Sebaldian mode lies not in the method of composition nor in the style of his novels, but in the form-of-life of which that style is a concrete expression. That form-of-life need not and perhaps could not have been Sebald’s own, biographically, but is rather that of an ideal and idealized Sebaldian subject. In short, the Sebaldian narrator models a mode of being-in-the-world, a way of relating to one’s own life and to the (inevitably tragic) fact of one’s historicity, a mode that is particularly attractive to a certain class of writers today.

Melancholy sounds pretty damn unpleasant, but it occupies a privileged epistemological and ethical place in Sebald’s work. The melancholic knows something, and persists in that knowledge. He might suffer for what he knows, but at least he is not duped. This, I think, is how I and my contemporaries encounter Sebald—if not as a great pessimist, then at least as an honest skeptic, a writer who simply cannot accept the infantile compensations of narrative. And so his narrators move through these old European cities in a curiously disembodied way: they are described as hungry and thirsty, feverish and panicked, frantically paranoid or near-catatonic, but they never completely shedding their dignity even in the gutter, never retreat into the arms of a comforting illusion. There is a stillness deep inside each of them, what Virginia Woolf once called a “wedge shaped core of darkness” at the bottom of each self that is untouched by the world, that is the self, that is thereby somehow the condition of possibility for the extraordinary negative capability that these selves exhibit in their self-dissolving journeys through the winding gyre of Memory with a capital M.

Sebald’s narrators are haunted by something, and critics have long identified this “something” with the Holocaust: a historical event that remains absolutely unrepresentable, unassimilable to any coherent historical narrative, even as it demands the practice of a kind of aesthetic negative theology, the constant attempt at representation that always fails and encodes its own failure within itself, of which the latest celebrated attempt is of course the astounding film Zone of Interest. According to this logic, still hegemonic nearly 80 years after Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, the Holocaust becomes for the late-modernists the dialectical inverse of that other impossible object—History itself, conceived as a total dynamic process without Origin or Telos.

And so the world of the Sebaldian novel, shattered by the Great Trauma, appears as a massive open set of fragments without a whole (lost or otherwise), connected purely by coincidence and adjacency, by a Deleuzean logic of pure conjunction, of the “and.” The narrator is the agent of these connections, which come into their foggy pseudo-being only through his heroic memory, and his unflagging attention to the tiny details of urban European life are cast as a contemporary version of Tiresias drinking the blood and calling up the shades from Hades to say their lines and disappear again. An ontology of coincidence, and an ethics of bracketing, of bracketing the self and refusing to stake out any point of certainty about the Whole, to persist absolutely in melancholy.

What Sebald’s melancholic encounters among these fragments is not History, nor any particular properly historical situation, but mere historicity. He does not live in this time, this place, this life, this moment in medias res, but always in “a” time, “a” place, “a” life, “a” moment, as purely abstract singularities. The details recounted ultimately indicate nothing but the fact of their being “mere” details, reminders to always and exclusively speak of oneself and one’s own with the indefinite article—in effect, self-cancellations.

Finitude, singularity, limitation-as-such are the index of all the Sebaldian subject’s encounters, however infinitely precise his sensory apparatus and however infinitely obscure the facts are that these sensations dredge up in his memory. It was Sebald’s genius to develop from this ontology of finitude the infinite variety of this spiraling and self-reflexive text. The price he paid for that infinity was History itself, which he could only bear after having reduced it to a cabinet of curiosities, stinking of formaldehyde, inert and unredeemed.

Source unknow.

Who Is the Sender?’s penultimate song, "World of Life", is buoyed by strings and a fanfare of horns. Fay delivers the opening verse like he’s toasting an heir. He’s hardly singing as he turns his gaze outward: "This can’t be all there is," he says, and there he is saying that at his age with a sense of wonder that will just about liquify you. Fay’s brothers and sisters—and make no bones about it, they are his brothers and sisters—in the Jesus music movement longed for transcendence, for the chance to escape even momentarily from this world. But it’s transformation that Fay longs for. "May gates be thrown open wide to receive you," go the last lines of the song, "into the world of life." It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a redemption song.

On Bill Fay. Source unknown.

In the 1945 broadcast, to take just one example, the sense of relief is almost physical:

After so many years when good and evil changed place and one had begun to get used to it, after the years of Wagnerism, of Nietzscheanism, of Gobinism, which had penetrated even ourselves, the return to the truth of these six years, sight confirmed by world events, that took the breath away, that took you by the throat. Good became good again, evil, evil. The lugubrious masquerade was over.

The liberation from the obligation to confront Nazism at the level of philosophy brought with it the new obligation to introduce positive aspects of the experience of captivity into philosophy and politics.

Emmanuel Levinas. Source unknown.

AAJ: What are the biggest obstacles facing jazz musicians today, and are they different from the obstacles facing musicians when you started out at impulse in the 1960s?

CT: Not to the same degree. Now, that is a tough question. From an educational standpoint, musicians today are far more sophisticated, of course, than they were twenty-five, fifty, years ago. With all of the universities and Berklee being there, anybody with any talent drifts into a university and comes out a totally well-schooled, disciplined person.

I don't think the social condition exists today that existed when Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Kai Winding, all those guys would get together in Gil's apartment just off midtown Broadway and rehearse and rehearse and not think about where the money was coming from because they all looked out for each other.

But nowadays, and this doesn't just pertain to jazz, but the arts in general don't have the same homegrown person to person contact that existed then, experimental groups without—it's a sociological thing and I don't think it has to do with jazz per se. But it certainly…how can I say it?

AAJ: It's fair to say that society seems to grow more fragmented.

CT: That's it exactly, and with communication being so easy, with the fragmentation you're talking about thanks to the computer and all the electronic devices—plus they're confounding the issue with all the available "canned music," you know.

AAJ: The sense of community is lost in a lot of things, it seems.

CT: Here's an example of what I'm talking about: When I was at Duke, I guess I was a sophomore, Claude Thornhill's band came through. I was absolutely mesmerized listening to that band —which had, by the way, two French horns, Lee Konitz, Tony Scott on lead clarinet, Gil Evans arrangements—in the gymnasium on campus, and when the band was finished the gig, we all went out to this joint somewhere between Chapel Hill and Durham, some nightclub, and jammed until daylight. Nobody was getting paid, of course. But those jam sessions and the musician to musician contact made all the difference in the world, because the communication was just different then.

That brings to mind, I gotta tell you this: There was a bar called Charlie's Tavern smack in the middle of the city, a half block from Birdland, and there was an alley way leading from the musicians' back entrance into Charlie's Tavern. Charlie Parker used to come in and hang out, Zoot Sims, Kai Winding, Gene Krupa, you name it, and Bethlehem Records was right across the street from Charlie's Tavern and Birdland.

I would go down late in the afternoon and I could get a band together inside of fifteen minutes—you know, three horn players, a rhythm section, whatever—and talk about, "Why don't we do this thing (like Bud Powell's whatever he happened to be doing at that time)? Let's just go out to Rudy Van Gelder's and see what happens." If they didn't have transportation I'd get transportation, they'd come out, and sometimes they would get paid and sometimes they wouldn't get paid, I don't know, but the main thing was to get together. I could always get a group of players to come together and record. You think about the available recording facilities then, it was just a ball if they could get with a group to record. This was before there was any financial significance attached to the record business, really.

Creed Taylor, interviewed

In Sátántangó, the problems were not because I wanted a faithful rendering. It was not an adaptation, because we don’t do adaptations. I tried to make something that Béla could feel he could do what he really liked with, and that was the script, the novel was a sort of inspiration. Almost everything was decided in the time of shooting, and everything depended on the state of the characters because that was a very long shooting. Everyone was almost always drunk.

MJC: The actors?

LK: Not only the actors, but the people behind the camera, the lights people, everyone.

MJC: And that bar scene, the one we were talking about earlier, the one with my favorite Hungarian word, babtetu, which is repeated over and over…

LK: The one who repeats that word, for example, he’s not an actor. He was a wonderful cameraman who photographed small things, fantastic pictures of surfaces. And some of the other actors were painters, musicians, an actress from Yugoslavia, Béla could handle these characters very well. Sometimes cruel and sometimes very friendly.

MJC: And in that long bar scene, was that choreographed quite a bit or were they just drunk?

LK: Everybody was actually drunk. In real time, when the camera was shooting, Béla or I or Agnes would give them directions, go left, and they would go, “Ah? What?” “Left, left!” “What?!”

MJC: There’s an interview in which you talk about a beautiful moment that happens to you and Béla Tarr when that same actor, the cameraman, in that same bar scene, starts singing, “Tango, Tango…”

LK: That was the turning point for Béla and for me. Until then we were absolutely unsure why we were doing this shit. But this man, this cameraman, began to sing, and that was absolutely an improvisation, we had an idea that if he can sing, or if he can remember something, because he was drunk all day… He’d brought a harmonica, suddenly he tried to play this song and sing, “Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Do you know this? Oh the tango!” And so Béla and Agnes were, “Please, shoot it, shoot it!” That was outside the story, actually, and that was so heartbreaking, that I felt Béla holding my leg, because we were sitting next to each other, and Béla’s hand was so strong, that after the minutes I had a big bloody fleck here on the leg and Béla wept. Béla is not a sentimental figure. But that was so heartbreaking, him singing for us. And after that we understood, okay, we got the film. Because of this.

[…]

LK: Yes, these are the very important figures who allow us to be in the world, this kind of people who are sacrificed, who are victims of this world, in the sense of the Russian literature, in the sense of Dostoyevsky, in the sense of Tarkovsky. They are the prize for us so that we can live with compromises in this world. They are the prize which we pay for the possibility to live with compromises in this world. There are of course similarities between these figures, but they are not absolutely similar. Estika is the purest, simplest victim, because she believes everything that’s promised to her from whom she loves. But she’s absolutely defenseless. And this kind of people I love very much. In a big crowd I immediately recognize this type of person. And they perceive each other in the world. This is a secret community between these kinds of people. But they are always alone. They cannot help each other. They have only one fate: to lose himself or herself. Because him or her, they are really victims. This is their only one task, one very cruel task in this world. Without these figures, the whole machinery of the world doesn’t work. Sátántangó is the best example of this fact. The whole machinery of Sátántangó, this whole story, the state of the men and women there, couldn’t exist without a victim, without a sacrifice. These people there, these characters there in this novel Sátántangó couldn’t make their fate without Estika’s victimization. Valuska’s a little bit of a different case. Valuska is like a small animal, Valuska is made of belief, because Valuska has a secret contact with the whole creation, and the whole creation is wonderful, and Valuska sees only this fact. And for Valuska the world is absolutely the same like the created world and humans are only a very, very small part of this big huge creation, and this is not so interesting for him, a very small mistake, or failure in the creation because the whole creation is really wonderful. Actually, you and I are sitting now very close to nature [gestures toward a view of the Pacific Ocean], and if you find a place where you can see only the nature without human beings, this is actually the paradise, but in the next moment the human being walks into this picture and we are immediately and suddenly in the first chapter of the old testament. And we’ve lost it.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

Heiner Müller:

THE LUCKLESS ANGEL Behind him swims the past, shaking thunder from wing and shoulder, with a noise like buried drums, while before him the future stagnates, penetrating his eyes, his pupils explode like stars, the word wound up into a vibrating mouth-gag, strangling him with his breath. For an instant one can still see his wings beating, in the roaring one hears the hail of stones fall above behind in front of him, the vain movement more loud than violent, sporadic, gradually slower. Then the moment closes in on him: standing, in that quickly filled place, the melancholic angel rests, waiting for history in the petrifaction of flight view breath. Until the renewed noise of mighty wing-beats reproduces itself in waves through the stones and announces his flight.

The Luckless Angel, 1958

I am the angel of despair. With my hands I provide rapture, confusion, oblivion, pleasure and pain of the body. My speech is silence, my song is the cry. In the shadow of my wings terror dwells. My hope is the last breath. I am the knife with which the dead man opens his coffin. I am he who will become. My wings are the revolt, my heaven is the abyss of tomorrow.

Der Auftrag

Angels always appear when it is no longer possible to imagine the realization of hopes. These figures then become necessary; with Benjamin this is true also. Angels are figures that go beyond hope and despair.’

Interview, 1991

Mayor: We indeed want to build, here on earth, the kingdom of heaven.
The mayor’s son: No paradise without hell. No heaven without hell. And capitalism is the purgatory in which
money is recycled.
Schumanngerhard: In blood.

Germania 3

In the UK, the business school academic generally lacks cultural capital, largely because the economic utilitarianism of business has always sat uneasily with the pretensions to cultural reproduction which are held in other parts of the university. Knowledge about business might claim to be really useful knowledge, but it is unlikely to help the Professor of Management have tea with the Professor of History. But this is not a stable state of affairs. As the business school becomes a central part of the university, and the university becomes more like the business school, it becomes possible to absorb disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with management. It is hence quite possible that a wider sense of culture and history might become the next fashionable turn that would begin to provide the cultural capital that is widely lacking within the business school. Just as corporations gain some reflected status by sponsoring The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger plays Ned Kelly, and Keith Richards becomes Jack Sparrow’s dad in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, so could management academics sponsor themselves by claiming to understand cultural resistance. The business school has managed to ingest everything else that it has been faced with so far, and there seems to be no good reason why the economic outlaws and their alternative businesses might not become both a topic and a resource, too, inlawed whether they like it or not.

Martin Barker, Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture

Ethan Taubes: […] Although a decade earlier, I once did confront my father about the book after it had come out. It was one of those charged conversations between fathers and sons. So, I asked him, “What do you think of Divorcing?”

Rachel Pafe: What did he say?

Ethan Taubes: He looked at me—gave me this kind of Mephistophelean smile—and said, “Well, I was taken down in flames and put on the operating table.” But he added with a kind of wicked, nefarious, cunning look, “But let’s not forget that she did sign the book ‘Susan Taubes,’ not with her maiden name.” For my father, it was always better to revel in notoriety than receive no recognition at all. He was always very clever at finding the silver lining in disasters.

Conversation on an Afterlife

Hard to Be a God is such a singular anomaly that it’s tempting to suspend any value judgment. I felt as much overwhelmed, oppressed, exhausted by it as bewitched, and I wonder how many viewers its genuinely hermetic brilliance will connect with. But to consider it a failed experiment, or a quixotic folly, would be meaningless because the film works on terms that are entirely its own: if it resembles anything at all, it’s the uncategorizable, uncanny extraterrestrial artifacts left behind on Earth by the alien visitors in the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic. Or I’d compare it to the later “novels” (if such they are) of Céline, unstemmable cascades of malediction and polemic that set their own terms of engagement with such belligerent force that it makes no sense at all to compare them to the novel in any of its known incarnations. As much as any film can just be, German’s film just is, and has to be marveled at—or rejected—on its own terms. Boil it down, though, and it can be seen to carry one simple message: it may be hard to be a god, but it’s hell to be human.

Jonathan Romney on German's Hard to be a God

The late Rembrandt self-portraits contain or embody a paradox: they are clearly about old age, yet they address the future. They assume something coming towards them apart from Death.

John Berger

Unlike modernity, with its narratives of the future and progress – its longing for another form of life – late modernity does not have a revolutionary pathos of the new or of fresh beginnings. It lacks the spirit of departure. It is therefore declining into a mode of ‘on and on’, of absent alternatives. It loses narrative courage, the courage to create a world-changing narrative. Storytelling is now mainly a matter of commercialism and consumption. As storyselling, it does not contain the power to bring about social change. This exhausted late modernity does not know the ‘sense of beginning’, the passion of ‘beginning from the start’. We no longer commit ourselves to anything. We constantly take the trouble to do something. We succumb to convenience or to likes, which need no narrative. Late modernity knows no longing, no vision, no distance. It therefore lacks aura, that is, lacks a future.

[…] Hannah Arendt prefaces the chapter on action in The Human Condition with an unusual line from Isak Dinesen: ‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’3 Narrative phantasy is healing. By placing our sorrows under the narrative light, it takes away their oppressive facticity. They are absorbed by narrative rhythms and melodies. A story raises them above mere facticity. Instead of solidifying into a mental block, they liquefy in the narrative flow.

Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narrative

[A]lthough Gershom Scholem felt no sympathy for Rosenzweig’s project, it was nonetheless him who spotted the crucial role of the Rosenzweigian concept of the Law as a defensive mechanism – a sort of stopping device designed to interrupt, arrest and attenuate the apocalyptic fire, to prevent both the subject and the world from instantaneous annihilation. To explain the functioning of this defence, Scholem introduced two useful metaphors. One, the traditional metaphor of lightning, symbolizes the vertiginous moment of revelation as an antagonistic flash of the transcendent in the immanent: an infectious fire that, when unstopped, burns down the soul to cinders (which is precisely what happens in Lévinas for whom the traumatism of revelation necessarily leads to the sacrificial death in the act of substitution). The second metaphor, of his own making, is that of a ‘lightning rod’: the device that both uses and tames the divine energy, by directing it towards the ground of the creaturely condition, and thus makes it separate, ‘no longer in heaven’ (lo beshamaiim). Between revelation itself and the religious ethics of the Law, which, in fact, is nothing else but the other name of the ‘lightning rod’, there appears a moment of non-identity – a very Derridean différance indeed, in terms both of ‘difference’ and ‘deferrment’: Here, in a mode of thought deeply concerned for order, it (the anarchic element) underwent metamorphosis. The power of redemption seems to be built into the clockwork of life lived in the light of revelation, though more as restlessness than as potential destructiveness. For a thinker of Rosenzweig’s rank could never remain oblivious to the truth that redemption possesses not only a liberating but also a destructive force – a truth which only too many Jewish theologians are loath to consider and which a whole literature takes pains to avoid. Rosenzweig sought at least to neutralize it in a higher order of truth. If it be true that the lightning of redemption directs the universe of Judaism, then in Rosenzweig’s work the life of the Jew must be seen as the lightning rod whose task it is to render harmless its destructive power.

Scholem himself, personally more prone to apocalyptic solutions, feels somewhat ambiguous toward Rosenzweig’s wary and considerate ways; he praises Rosenzweig for noticing at all the apocalyptic breeze that ‘provides some fresh air in the house of Judaism’, yet criticizes him for his general intention to appease ‘the anarchic element.’ This assessment, as I have tried to demonstrate here, is neither completely true nor fair: the lightning rod of rituals and halachic orders does not serve to render the destructive power of apocalypse-revelation ‘harmless,’ but to make it operative and effective; it is not to manifest itself in futile ‘restlessness,’ but in concrete mitzvot, aiming at the ‘singularization’ of all possible ‘neighbours’ – eventually, everything that exists. 

[…] Revelation is no longer the strong light that destroys but an energy harnessed to the redemptive works, in which the subject passes this energy from one neighbouring thing to another, thus aiming at the redemptive/singularizing transformation of the whole world. This careful channelling, which does not allow the catastrophic repetition of the ‘breaking of the vessels’, is absolutely necessary if the hand of the world-clock is to move from the stage of passive revelation to the stage of active redemption: ‘The love for God is to express itself in love for one’s neighbour’. The vessel of the Law keeps a steady flame of an ‘effective’ neighbourly love, constantly fuelled by the apocalyptic lightning. 

[…]

I have tried to facilitate this problematic access and show that, by inventing the defensive mechanism of the ‘lightning rod’, Rosenzweig makes the Law function within the antinomian logic of redemption – as a mediator or an ‘endurable portion’ of the original, violent ‘flame of love’, given with revelation. The Law emerges here as a delayed destruction of the world, where it is not beings but being as such, not creaturely things but their immanentist ‘ontologism’, that becomes the proper target of the transforming work. And it is precisely this delay and partial neutralization that allows the apocalyptic energy, contained within the Law, to be more precise in the act of targeting its enemy; instead of exploding the whole of creaturely reality, deemed to be fallen in its entirety and unworthy of any ‘spiritual investment’, it provides a more subtle missile which destroys only those aspects of ‘beingness’ or‘ontologism’ that directly oppose the redemptive progress. Rosenzweig, therefore, manages to achieve a more wary, truly man-made form of messianism that does not pretend to imitate or follow God directly, but adds a characteristically human, covenantal contribution to the process of redemption.

Positing itself between two lordly powers – creation and destruction – it offers modest ‘works of the Slave’ that do what nonetheless only humans can do: meticulously mend, fix and repair, and thus constantly lift the world from the lowest realms of creaturely condition. Such an approach complicates the simplistic opposition of ‘retainer’ and ‘apocalypticist’ that has been bequeathed to us by Taubes. The Rosenzweigian ‘lightning rod’ works neither as a simple Aufhalter, who treats apocalypse as his adversary – nor as a ‘hastener’, pushing towards the eschatological state of exception. 

The Rosenzweigian ‘lightning rod’ works neither as a simple Aufhalter, who treats apocalypse as his adversary – nor as a ‘hastener’, pushing towards the eschatological state of exception. The Law itself, when seen through this metaphor, becomes a form of messianic energy (a structure that brings down the lightning to the ground) – and more than that: it becomes the only form this originally anarchic and anomic energy can acquire to become effective in the world of creation and manifest itself in concrete works. And as a form – i.e., never a direct negation – of the apocalyptic fire, the Law is also in its own dialectical way antinomian, that is, antithetical to the rules of creaturely life which it slowly transforms, patiently anticipating the advent of the messianic ‘otherwise than being’. In his Jewish clinamen from Hegel’s dialectics, Rosenzweig offers thus one of the more convincing solutions to the problem which could not be resolved either by Taubes or Lévinas: the problem of operative antinomianism.

Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity