Imagine this: the everyday, the great expanse of life, the unlimited but also stagnant without-end whose slow corriolis force undoes everything, grew aware of itself in one of the temporary workers who serviced the companies which spread themselves across the Thames Valley. In this worker, this temp who found work here and then there, who was driven (he couldn’t drive (he still can’t)) to this company and then to that, working for a week or two days or a month before disappearing back into the everyday, to unemployment, there was a great awareness of the everyday itself. As though he bore in himself the secret that could blow the everyday apart. Was he the saviour of the everyday? Was he its destroyer? Or was he its agent?
He told himself: the everyday wants to destroy because I have caught it out, I know what it is up to. It doesn’t want to know that I know. Because it barely knows itself. Because I am a part of the everyday that has turned against the everyday. Like a cancerous cell, the tumour which will spread the great disease by multiplying itself across the everyday’s expanse. Is this salvific? Death-dealing? Am I delivering the Last Judgement?
Bataille thinks history is over ‘except for the denouement’. It is 1937. He writes to Kojeve that he is the man of unemployed negativity. That his life is an open wound, an abortion of the System. Kojeve’s reply as I imagine it: this is your problem, Bataille. History doesn’t care about you.
A recurring dream: the infinite wise child, the child who knows everything like the mysterious androgyne Ismael in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Who knows everything in advance. Isaac says: I am mad because the everyday cannot bear my sanity. Madness is the reward of the one who knows. To know is to plunge into madness. Bataille again: when Hegel completed the Phenomenology of Spirit he fell ill with depression. Madness touched him; knowledge plunged into non-knowledge, an abyss opened at his feet.
Think of Toru in Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel. He knew he was like the negative in a camera. He was the absolute opposite of the world. How old was he when Honda met him, this decaying angel? Sixteen, seventeen? Toru, the angel, decays; Mishima is merciless. In the end, Toru does not die but is blinded; he could not find his way to death and then to rebirth (the Sea of Fertility, of which this is the fourth volume, is about a series of reincarnations). Toru cannot die. Mishima took his life the day The Decay of the Angel was delivered to the publishers (the 25th of November 1970). But Toru is still alive.
Once you wrote a book called The Judgement. The judgement which came from the day itself, from the everyday, from the indifference of the world to you, from the vast servo-mechanisms of Capital, from temping agencies and telemarketing companies. The judgement which said: you are a bad machine. Then the judgement you delivered in turn: the day has gone on too long. Now it is time to call up the recruitment agencies and middle managers. To judge each and visit upon them an impersonal wrath. You are the good machine. Of course this is ludicrous: the same sleight of hand in those children’s books where the most ordinary child becomes the most extraordinary one (Cat in Charmed Life who appears to be without magic is really an Enchanter, Gair the giftless in The Power of Three has the greatest gift of all …)
Genet writes: ‘I wandered through that part of myself I called Spain’. I wandered through the everyday. Was it a part of me or I a part of it? Zhuang Zi: am I a butterfly who dreams of being Zhuang Zi? Now Zizek: ‘In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network’. Are you a ‘real’ person dreaming of becoming a capitalist? Or a capitalist dreaming of becoming a real person?
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