I hope Spurious can be enjoyed by a reader entirely unfamiliar with the names and ideas mentioned in its pages. In large measure, I think, it is the way W. and Lars enthuse about a scholarly project or a specific thinker that makes the novel entertaining (if indeed it is entertaining). On the other hand, perhaps there is something to be gained from focusing in a little more depth on some of the recurring ideas, names and objects in Spurious, since they are not entirely arbitrary. That is the aim of this A to Z.
I have underlined all words in the following entries that are covered elsewhere in the A-Z, in order to facilitate hyperlinking.
A is for …
Peter Andre, 1973-
Australian born singer and television personality, known for his huge hit ‘Mysterious Boy’ and his Reality TV assisted comeback, which saw him meet and subsequently marry Katie Price, AKA Jordan. They have since divorced.
Lars reads about the exploits of Peter Andre and Jordan in his gossip magazines.
Apocalypse
The end of times; violent, climactic events. Etymologically, the word suggests a lifting of the veil, a revelation of a hidden truth. Thus, the Biblical prophet vouchsafed an apocalyptic vision learns something of God’s plan – for example, how the wicked will be punished. As such, for the righteous the apocalypse is entwined with a sense of hope: the destruction and suffering to come may well make room for the coming of that restorative figure called the Messiah. More loosely, any event that sees the overturning of the security and predictability of life can be seen as apocalyptic – for example, climate change or the current financial crisis.
Lars, according to W., has a particularly keen sense of the apocalypse, but lacks what, for W., is the intertwined hope that he calls messianism. This might well be due to Lars’s Hinduism, W. says.
W. credits Rosenzweig with having a particular insight into the apocalypse, perhaps because of his experiences in World War I.
B is for …
Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940
German Jewish critic and philosopher. Friend of Scholem and mentioned in passing in Spurious. Benjamin is famous for combining ideas drawn from Jewish messianic thought and Marxism.
W. compares Lars’s sagging trousers to those of Benjamin, which, in what W. calls a well known photograph (I’m not sure if it’s the one above), are pulled up tight around his waist.
Brod, Max, 1884-1968
Writer friend of Kafka and famous for refusing his friend’s request that his manuscripts be burned after his death. Brod’s renown in his own lifetime – he was a prolific author across a number of genres – has been almost entirely eclipsed by those he generously supported, Kafka among them. Brod encouraged his friend in his writing, and eventually oversaw the posthumous publication of The Trial, The Castle and America and other works in contravention of Kafka’s wishes. He wrote several works on Kafka, in the form of biography and fiction, proposing a pious, almost hagiographical, interpretation of the life and work of his friend. Brod has not been forgiven for this by legions of Kafka’s admirers. In a famous essay on Kafka, Benjamin called Brod a ‘question mark in the margin of Kafka’s life’.
W. and Lars wonder which one of them is Kafka, and which Brod, before entertaining the troubling idea that they might both be Brod, and altogether lacking a Kafka.
Blanchot, Maurice, 1907-2003
Eminent French novelist, literary critic and philosopher. A concern with the significance of speech, and its relation to networks of power, is, arguably, as abiding in Blanchot’s work as his better known interest in writing. In this regard, Blanchot bears the influence of his lifelong friend Levinas. Blanchot was also part of the group of intellectuals and activists who met in Duras’s flat on the rue Saint Benoit, and he was a friend of Dionys Mascolo.
W. and Lars discuss the photograph shown here of Levinas and Blanchot, reproduced in Salomon Malka’s biography of Levinas. Levinas is at the top of the picture, with Blanchot seated to his right.
C is for …
Canada
W.’s utopia, where he spent much of his childhood and to which, through numerous job applications, he has tried and failed to return.
Cawsands
Town in southwest England, reached from Plymouth by passing through Mount Edgcumbe. W. and Lars visit a pub there.
Cohen, Hermann, 1842-1918
German-Jewish Neo-Kantian philosopher, who, in his late work, argued for the ethical significance of Judaism. His account of what he called the correlation of God and human beings, whereby, although independent, they reciprocally determine one another, was very important to Rosenzweig’s thought.
Also notable in Cohen’s work is the role of prophetic messianism, which sees the defeat of injustice in the movement towards the realisation of ideal ethical laws.
W. finds Cohen’s work particularly suggestive regarding the notion of the infinite.
Conic Sections
A conic section is any of a group of curves (circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola) formed by the intersection of a right circular cone and a plane. Originally studied by the ancient Greeks, Kepler found an important scientific application for them in the seventeenth century when discovered that planets move in ellipses.
W. reads Cohen on conic sections, and dreams he might himself become the philosopher of conic sections just as Lars might become the philosopher of the infinitesimal calculus.
D is for …
Damp
Moisture on an inner surface of a building, promoting the staining of walls by salt and mould. Leads to the loosening of wallpaper and the rotting of wood, and sees paint and plaster flaking away.
Damp has a number of causes: condensation damp comes from water vapour in areas of the building where air doesn’t circulate; penetrating damp results from precipitation entering an inner surface as a result of faulty roof flashing or missing pointing; and rising damp is caused by capillary action dragging ground moisture up a masonry wall.
The cause of damp in Lars’s flat is, however, mysterious. Although we see W. helping Lars to clear the kitchen and bathroom in the flat in preparation for the application of a damp proof course, it appears that this remedy fails. The kitchen remains damp, and there is still the sound of rushing water. We next learn that the ceiling has been taken down, and new joists installed: presumably some kind of leak has been fixed. But the sound of streaming water persists. No amount of dehumidifying and fan heating seems to make any difference to the damp, which Lars calls his apocalypse.
Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995
French philosopher mentioned in passing in Spurious. Lars justifies his inactivity by comparing it to the ‘five year hole’ in Deleuze’s career. Deleuze actually refers in an interview to an ‘eight year hole’, the gap between his monographs on Hume (1953) and Nietzsche (1961) in which he was busy teaching in the lycées and working as an assistant in the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Deleuze’s expression is borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who writes of a ‘ten year hole’ in one of his short stories.
Dundee
Scottish city on the Tay estuary, the fourth largest in the country. It seems to enjoy a microclimate that, while it is in the far north of Britain, makes it surprisingly warm and bright. This is why Lars puts on his sunglasses, which W. so despises, on their visit to the city.
E is for …
Esteem Indicators
Marks of respect from scholars and researchers in a particular academic field, including awards, fellowships of learned societies, prizes, editorial roles, conference organisation, positions in national and international strategic advisory bodies etc.
W. suggests that Lars, who lacks any of the above, fill in humiliation indicators instead.
Europe
American readers might find it surprising that the British speak of Europe as though they didn’t belong to it. But Europe, to the British, is invariably continental Europe, i.e. over there, across the channel.
W. and Lars also speak of Old Europe – a sense of culture and history very different from that in Britain. Indeed, they claim that the British no longer live in history. They feel they will never be part of that milieu from which the thinkers they admire emerged, neither speaking its languages nor having the necessary depth of scholarship and religious feeling.
F is for …
Flat, The
Lars owns a damp-ridden flat, the floors of which noticeably tilt because the flat was built above a mineshaft. The damp in the kitchen has long since prevented the electricity in there from working. Behind the flat, there’s an equally grotty yard. Sal refuses to visit Lars’s flat, and W. does so only under protest.
Freiburg
Full name: Freiberg im Breisgau. Small city on the edge of the Black Forest in the southwest of Germany. Freiburg was known as the ‘city of phenomenology’ in the 1920s, with Husserl and then Heidegger holding university Chairs there. Freiburg was painstakingly reconstructed street by street, house by house, after extensive bombing during World War II.
The Fish Quay
Historic part of North Shields, a small coastal town to the east of Newcastle, on the Tyne. Ferries run from the nearby terminal to the Netherlands (not Norway, as W. and Lars seem to think).
Friendship
W.’s touching faith in friendship and love can seem at odds with his perpetual hounding of Lars. But nagging, he says, is part of friendship; how else might friends push one another to greatness?
W.’s plan only to publish with his friends has led him into difficulties with his editor, whose publishing company seems to have failed, resulting in W.’s book having gone almost immediately out of print.
G is for …
God
The characters cannot but struggle with the idea of God. They are not, in any usual sense of the word, men of faith, but they do see themselves as, in some measure, religious: that is, they feel a kind of religious pathos. Alas, this is not enough to save them from atheism.
Golem
In Jewish Folklore, an anthropomorphic being brought to life by supernatural means. In some stories, the Hebrew word ‘truth’ needs to be written on the golem’s forehead in order to animate it. Other stories tell of writing letters on a piece of parchment, which is then placed inside the golem’s mouth in order to bring it to life.
Godspeed, You Black Emperor!
Canadian post-rock band, known for writing long instrumental songs making use of sampled sounds. ‘Dead Flag Blues’, which W. continually plays to his students, is the opening track on F♯ A♯ ∞ (F sharp, A sharp, infinity) from 1997.
Gossip
Lars is much given to reading downmarket gossip magazines (‘chav mags’) about celebrities, which W. finds particularly exasperating.
Greek
W. has tried several times to learn classical Greek, but has been defeated each time by the difficulty of understanding the operation of the aorist, a form of the verb that expresses action without indicating its completion or continuation. At one time, W. and Lars studied Greek together, but Lars, according to W., only retained one word from these lessons: omoi. Lars is said to have used classical Greek in one of his moments of illumination.
H is for …
Hinduism
Ancient religion of the Indian subcontinent, characterised by a belief in reincarnation.
Lars is Hindu, and exhibits what W. calls Hindu fatalism – the sense that what is to happen is preordained. Presumably this is one of the things which, for W., gives Lars his vivid sense of the apocalypse. At the same time, W. insists that the Hindu never really experiences the apocalypse. He argues that whereas for the Jew and the Catholic, time is linear, and the End Times really are the End, for the Hindu, time is cyclical. According to Hinduism, our age might indeed be the End of Times, but it will in turn be superseded; after the destruction will come the great flood from which the universe will be reborn. So Hindu fatalism is, W. argues, a comfort. At the same time, W. notes, with the idea of moksha (see below), Hinduism does promise a release from the cycle of life and death, providing a second kind of comfort.
Lars, according to W., has tried and failed to become a significant scholar of Hinduism.
Howard Hughes, 1905-1976
Aviator, film producer and director. Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, once occupying a screening room in a film studio for four months without leaving, living only on chocolate and milk and relieving himself in empty bottles. He did not cut his hair or nails in this period. In his later life, he became a recluse, living in hotel penthouses around the world. When Sal’s away, W. fears he’ll give in to his agoraphobia, turning into a scholarly Howard Hughes.
I is for …
Idiocy
Alleged state of W. and Lars in Spurious. W. claims Lars’s idiocy is the simple absence of thought, whereas his idiocy is the result of indolence. Either way, W. says that he and Lars share the fact that they have always known they were idiots, even as they’ve endeavoured to struggle against their idiocy.
Illness
The great figures that the characters in Spurious admire were often ill: Kafka died at 42 of tuberculosis; Rosenzweig, locked in by paralysis years earlier, succumbed to ALS aged 40; a botched medical procedure left Blanchot incapacitated for much of his very long life. W. and Lars suppose that the illnesses in the thinkers they admire was linked to their ability to think. A tempting idea, but the characters’ illnesses (coughs and colds) are not, alas, similarly productive.
Infinite judgement
A logical classification which appears in Kant’s typology of judgements in the Critique of Pure Reason. In Religion of Reason, Cohen discovers in this notion a positivity prior to both affirmation and negation – that is, to a superlative or transcendence which he links to a certain conception of the negative in ancient Greek thought. This leads W. to conclude that the in- of infinite should not merely be understood privatively (that is, as a mere lack of finitude); there is a positive sense to the word, too.
The Infinitesimal Calculus
Branch of mathematics comprising differential calculus and integral calculus developed by both Leibniz and Newton in the 1660s. The method of infinitesimal calculus, based on the summation of infinitesimal differences, has been treated sceptically by mathematicians and philosophers. However, Cohen made use of it in his discussion of the existence of God, influencing Rosenzweig. W.’s enthusiasm for Cohen’s discussion of the infinitesimal calculus is tempered by his inability to understand it.
J is for …
Jordan, 1978-
British celebrity and TV personality. Former glamour model.
Judaism
The main philosophical source for the ideas discussed in Spurious is the thought of those German speaking Jews who sought, early in the twentieth century, to address a crisis of traditional values.
Rosenzweig, Scholem, Benjamin and others share the view that the human suffering caused by World War I spelled the end of a simple faith in historical progress and the meaningfulness of history. More generally, they concur with Nietzsche that our time is marked by the ‘death of God’, a collapse of those traditions that made sense of the world, although they do not draw the same conclusions from this as Nietzsche did.
It is primarily with the thought of Rosenzweig that Spurious is concerned. In response to Nietzsche’s challenge, and under the influence of Cohen, Rosenzweig attempts to unfold a hidden, utopian dimension of Jewish messianism that creatively interrupts linear history. Scholem and Benjamin have similar ambitions. In his letters to Rosenstock, a Christian convert, Rosenzweig argues that Judaism is exemplary for the rest of humankind in its preservation in liturgy of its peoples’ relation to God.
Scholem and Benjamin follow some aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought in this regard. Levinas and, in his own way, Blanchot do the same in the second half of the twentieth century.
W. has a Jewish ancestry, although his family are converts. He is, among other things, a scholar of ancient Hebrew.
K is for …
Franz Kafka, 1883-1924
Prague born Jewish writer. Kafka’s unfinished, posthumously published novels The Trial and The Castle and Kafka’s many stories, notebook fragments, aphorisms and letters, are marked by a sense of a vanished religious authority. Many of his fictions, as Benjamin noted, are similar to parables: they seem to have a code, pointing to some meaning hidden to the reader. Alas, they are not truly allegorical – there is no Truth behind the fable. If Kafka’s work, as Scholem argues in his correspondence with Benjamin, ‘belongs to the genealogy of Jewish mysticism’, if, like that mysticism, it seeks to present a revelation, it is a revelation of the impossibility of revelation, an allegory of the absence of Truth.
Kafka’s life was marked by a faith in his vocation as a writer and a perpetual disappointment with the fruits of that vocation. He has been held up by many critics as a model of writerly integrity and an exemplar of the modern predicament of living in the wake of settled traditions.
W. and Lars immensely admire Kafka’s work. W. describes his life as having been marked by a sense of falling short of Kafka, which, given Kafka’s own sense of consistently fallen short of his own vocation – indeed, falling short because of that vocation – is a double banishment. W. has even attempted, but without success, to write literature in imitation of Kafka.
Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
Enlightenment philosopher, mentioned in Spurious solely for his condemnation of Schwärmerei.
L is for …
Lars
Narrator of Spurious, Lars lives in a damp-ridden flat in Newcastle. He is a friend and collaborator of W., who he visits in his hometown of Plymouth, as well as travelling with him to Freiburg and Dundee, among other places, to attend academic conferences and give presentations.
What we know of Lars is almost entirely refracted through W., conversations with whom, as recorded by Lars, form the substance of Spurious. He is, we can presume, employed in some kind of academic job, probably as a lecturer in philosophy, has published at least two books (according to W., they’re very bad), and has a role in the college where W. teaches, at one point inspecting W.’s teaching. He is also prone to making desperate bids to escape from his current position, attempting and failing over the years to become a scholar of Hinduism and of music. W. notes that because Lars has suffered periods of unemployment, he is ingratiating towards authority.
Like W., Lars cannot drive and has a penchant for flowery shirts. Lars is a Hindu by origin, but is, like W., an atheist.
For W., Lars is characterised by idiocy, obesity, over-exercised thighs and arms, continual illness, apocalypticism, administrative facility, emotional reticence, an inability to converse, Schwärmerei, whining, a sense of persecution, a victim mentality and general hysteria.
Leibniz, Gottfried, 1646-1716
Philosopher mentioned briefly in connection with Cohen, presumably since Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus so important to the Jewish thinker.
Levinas, Emmanuel, 1906-1995
Lithuanian born philosopher who spent his working life in France. Levinas is best known for his account of the relational genesis of the self. It is in our address to the presence of the other person, he argues, that we awaken to ourselves as individuals. In speaking to the other human, we become properly ethical. Levinas is distinctive in attempting to provide a phenomenological justification for this claim, and giving a new twist to what W. calls the logic of relations.
Leaders
W. and Lars have decided that their true role is to promote and serve the thought of others. This might in some measure redeem their own idiocy.
W. and Lars have picked out three leaders over the years, each of whom refused to accept that role. The first was characterised by his seriousness. The second was a man of faith and an expert in financial matters, who predicted economic collapse within the next few years. The third, apparently the greatest of them all, spoke with such profundity that he almost convinced W. and Lars that they could think.
The spiritual leader of W. and Lars is Kafka. They would like Tarr to lead them, too, if they could persuade him, which is unlikely.
Leper Messiah
The Talmud reports a conversation between Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and the prophet Elijah. ‘When will the Messiah come, and by what sign may I recognise him?’, asks the rabbi. Elijah tells the rabbi is already here, sitting among the poor lepers at the gates of the city. The Messiah binds his sores one by one, instead of bandaging them all at once, Elijah says, because he might be needed urgently, at any time.
Literature
The downfall of both W. and Lars, they agree, is that their literary enthusiasm has compromised their philosophical investigations. Reading Kafka’s The Castle set both of them off on the wrong path, W. spending years attempting to imitate Kafka in his own literary writing before giving up, and Lars, according to W., still thinking that he might be Kafka.
Logic of Relations, The
A synonym for the interhuman relation as explored in the German Jewish tradition exemplified by Rosenzweig and Scholem, as well as by Levinas and Blanchot.
M is for …
Man bag
Form of receptacle that W. finds vastly superior to the rucksack, which Lars favours. W.’s man bag is the perfect home for his notebook, he claims, and for his wipes.
Martini
Cocktail made with gin and vermouth, and garnished with an olive or lemon rind. W. and Lars find the Martinis at the members-only cocktail bar at the Plymouth Gin distillery to be particularly noteworthy.
Mathematics
Under the influence of Cohen and Rosenzweig, W. wonders whether mathematics might be the royal road to God. W. is a poor student of mathematics, however, having tried and failed to understand the infinitesimal calculus.
Mascolo, Dionys 1916-1997
Political activist and philosopher. Mascolo is best known now as a member of the Rue Saint-Benoit group, which gathered informally at the flat of Marguerite Duras. Mascolo met Duras, Bataille, Blanchot and others through his job as a reader for the French publishers, Gallimard.
Mascolo joined Duras in the Resistance in 1943, and followed her into the French Communist Party a few years later, before leaving it in 1949 with the aim of developing another institutional form for the left. With Blanchot, he drafted the so-called ‘Manifesto of 121’, and was also active in the Students and Writers Committee during the Events of May 1968.
W. sends Lars a quotation from Mascolo’s book, Communism, which reflects many of the views of the friends who gathered at Rue Saint-Benoit.
The Messiah/ Messianism
A restorative figure found in the Bible. Biblical prophets look forward to his coming, which will transform the world, punishing the sinful and rewarding the righteous. The figure of the Messiah gains particular importance in times of instability and persecution. It is also possible to speak of messianism, which is not simply a belief in a coming Messiah, but the sense that a new epoch is approaching.
Cohen gives the notion of the Messiah a new significance in his work, arguing that prophetic messianism names the defeat of injustice in the movement of humanity as a whole towards the realisation of universal ethical laws. The thinkers who followed him, Rosenzweig and Scholem among them, had, by contrast, lost their faith in such a movement. For them, messianism would intervene, if it did, by interrupting history, by showing that official history, the linear account of events, contains within it a utopian promise.
It is the relation to this messianism, this source of hope, to which Rosenzweig and Scholem, and thinkers who emerge from the same tradition (Levinas, and to some extent, Blanchot), link their reflections on ethics, politics and religion. They share a common sense that messianism is associated with the capacity to speak, to dialogue between human beings. For W., likewise, conversation can be said to be messianic, if approached in the right way.
In Spurious, W. and Lars are researching the topic of messianism with the aim of writing two parallel essays on the topic. They discuss the apostate Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, as well as the story of the Leper Messiah, and consider the doubling of the figure of the Messiah that Scholem writes about, which sees the Messiah of the old world duplicated by the Messiah of the new one. Their reflections are animated by a vivid sense of what W. calls the logic of relations.
Moksha
Liberation from the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (reincarnation) in Hinduism. Through moksha, the soul attains ultimate peace and enlightenment in the union with God. It is only through moksha, W. says, that Lars will really accept the damp spreading through his flat.
Moment of Illumination
Rare event when Lars actually has an idea, according to W. Sometimes they involve using terminology from ancient Greek. W. mentions two moments of illumination in Spurious: once in a pub garden in Oxford, and another time on the long pier at Mount Batten.
Mount Batten
Outcrop of rock in Plymouth Sound, on which Mount Batten Tower, a circular artillery fort, was built. Mount Batten is a gateway to Turnchapel and other parts of the coast. Reachable from Plymouth by water taxi, it was the site of one of Lars’s moments of illumination.
Mount Edgcumbe
Country house and extensive grounds, bequeathed to the city of Plymouth by the Duke of Edgcumbe. Reachable by ferry, it is a favourite haunt of W. and Lars.
N is for …
Newcastle upon Tyne
City in the northeast of England, on the north bank of the river Tyne. Newcastle played a major role in the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and was a major coal mining and shipbuilding area until the 1980s. Subsequently, the city was marked by poverty and unemployment. Newcastle saw concerted regeneration in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Lars lives in Newcastle, a city he and W. greatly admire not least because it, like Plymouth, is on the periphery.
Notebooks
Both W. and Lars have notebooks, W. following the advice of a friend, to write about the ideas of others using black ink, and, at the back, to develop his own ideas using red ink. Lars, according to W., fills his notebook with pictures of cocks and monkey butlers.
O is for …
Overpraise
Only hyperbolic praise can help one’s friends survive the Stalinist control procedures imported into British academia from business. Without it, as in Stalin’s USSR, there’s always the risk that ‘somebody’s going to be shot’.
Omoi
Classical Greek word meaning alas. The only word of ancient Greek that Lars learned from his studies, according to W.
P is for …
Puerility
Childishness, immaturity, triviality. Defining characteristic of W.’s and Lars’s sense of humour, which they’ve always regretted.
Philosophy
Branch of investigation that deals with questions concerning the nature of reality and the source of values. Most of the intellectual figures W. and Lars refer to in Spurious are philosophers, and we can deduce that they are employed in some capacity to teach philosophy. It also seems evident that W.’s and Lars’s route into philosophy was through Kafka, and therefore through literature. Indeed, both W. and Lars blame their inability to philosophise on the baleful influence of literature, and wonder what they might have become if they had a background in mathematics.
As they tell Sal, W. and Lars regard as impossible coming up with their own original philosophy, presumably given their idiocy. Nevertheless, they both rise early each morning to read and write philosophy, and W. in particular thinks he might be on the brink of having a philosophical idea.
Plymouth
City in the southwest of England, magnificently located on the stretch of coastline called the Sound, between the mouths of the river Plym and the Tamar. The Hoe, the public space running along much of the Sound, gives a splendid view of what is the largest natural harbour in the country.
Like the equally peripheral Newcastle, Plymouth is a poor city, which condition the imminent departure of the Royal Navy will only exacerbate.
Plymouth Gin
Gin distilled at the Black Friars Distillery in Plymouth, formerly a monastery of the Dominican Order. With corporate buyouts in the 2000s, Plymouth Gin was relaunched as a brand, and its bottle redesigned. Gone, sadly, is the depiction on the inside of the label of a monastery friar, whose pictured feet, it was said, should never run dry.
Plymouth Gin is best in enjoyed with water, rather than tonic, and should be sipped from a wine glass for full appreciation of its bouquet.
Poland
W. and Lars recall a visit to Poland, which took place before the events recorded in Spurious. They journeyed from Warsaw to Wroclaw in the company of a guide, and claimed to have learnt a great deal from the steadily paced drinking of the Poles.
R is for
Ringlets
Locks of hair hanging in corkscrew-like curls, as worn by Orthodox Jews. W. is cultivating his ringlets, which, he claims, are particularly disliked by drivers.
Franz Rosenzweig, 1889-1929
Great German Jewish thinker, known for developing what he called the ‘new thinking’, which combines philosophy and theology. Unlike what he calls the ‘old thinking’ of previous philosophy, which placed emphasis on an abstract, atemporal attempt to grasp reality, Rosenzweig takes up the insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in order to understand what is particular to individual human existence in its relation to God. In their correspondence, he and his friend Rosenstock co-develop an argument as to the significance of speech in human moral life, claiming that the moral self awakens in its address to the other person in speech.
The Star of Redemption, his masterpiece, was written in a six month burst of creativity whilst Rosenzweig was in military service during World War I. Upon his return to civilian life, Rosenzweig founded a well-known centre for Jewish adult education in Frankfurt, the Lehrhaus, which attracted Kafka, among other German-Jewish intellectuals, through its doors. Shortly afterwards, Rosenzweig was diagnosed with a progressive paralysing illness which soon saw him completely ‘locked in’. In the years that remained to him, Rosenzweig was, through a method of ‘dictation’, able to keep up a prolific correspondence and translate the Hebrew Bible in collaboration with Buber.
Eugen Rosenstock (later, Rosenstock-Huessy), 1888-1973
German born philosopher and sociologist, known to posterity chiefly as a friend and correspondent of Rosenzweig, who he influenced with his idea of ‘speech-thinking’. Rosenstock argued for the importance of speech as a responsive and creative act, claiming, in particular, that theoretical thought has thus far failed to attend to the significance of the vocative case in speech, in which the self is summoned or called by the other person. He thus replaces Descartes motto Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am, which grounds the experience of the world in the thinking subject with the motto ‘Respondeo etsi mutabor’—‘I respond although I will be changed’.
As has been revealed in recently published correspondence, Rosenzweig fell in love with Rosenstock’s wife, Margit Heussy, or Gritli. This love was reciprocated with Rosenstock’s knowledge, and inspired the central notion of revelation in The Star of Redemption.
S is for …
Sal
W.’s partner and inspiration. A talented worker with glass, she has practical skills, which W. and Lars entirely lack. Sal wonders why W. and Lars haven’t developed their own philosophy, and finds their work, when presented, to be vague and boring.
Sansrkit
Ancient language of the Indian subcontinent, with a status analogous to that of Latin or ancient Greek in Europe, being of only scholarly interest outside its use in religious liturgy. According to W., Lars tried and failed to learn Sanskrit as part of his study of Hinduism.
Schelling, F. W. J., 1775-1854
German idealist philosopher mentioned in passing in Spurious, whose unfinished Ages of the World was a particularly important influence on Rosenzweig.
Scholem, Gershom 1897-1982
Philosopher and scholar of Judaism, known for his writings on Jewish mysticism, messianism and Sabbatai Zevi. Scholem was one of several thinkers who sought to rethink the relationship to Jewish tradition in the wake of the World War I. He placed particular emphasis on the tradition of philosophical commentary on Jewish sacred texts and ideas. The story that Scholem tells in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which is paraphrased in Spurious, was originally from a Hasidic lesson told by Agnon.
Schwärmerei
Literally meaning to swarm, it is used in German to mean something similar to enthusiasm, exaltation or fanaticism. In a late essay, Kant characterises as Schwärmerei all attempts to access an immediate knowledge of the supersensible. For him, all such claims of direct knowledge – of ‘supernatural communication’ or ‘mystical illumination’ – entail ‘the death of all philosophy’ since the knowledge being claimed is not demonstrable to others.
Southwest, The
Region of England, encompassing the counties of Devon and Cornwall. The southwest is particularly admired for its natural beauty and warm, sunny climate.
Spinoza, Baruch, 1632-1677
Rationalist philosopher, famed for his claim that nature is an indivisible, uncaused substantial whole identical to God. For Spinoza, talk of God’s purposes, intentions, aims or goals is anthropomorphising; rather, everything which exists is brought into being with necessity by nature. In his masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza argues that human happiness depends upon the life of reason, as distinct from the ephemeral goods we normally pursue. Our main good, Spinoza argues, is the difficult to attain knowledge of God – of nature in its entirety. It is this knowledge which allows us to experience part of the infinite love that God/nature has for itself: in short, beatitude.
Spurious
Spurious is a novel, presenting the conversations and adventures of W. and Lars had over the course of two years. It would seem that the book derives from conversations that Lars has recorded and put on his blog. Some of these conversations are fictional, W. protests: he claims not to recognise himself in everything Lars has written.
It is also a name of a weblog, on which W. and Lars were introduced. http://spurious.typepad.com/
Strasbourg
French city on the borders of Germany, and home to the university where Levinas and Blanchot studied in the 1920s.
Syriac Book of Baruch, The
Apocryphal apocalyptic text written in the decades following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Baruch is a scribe in the Book of Jeremiah, but is here promoted to prophet. Like Jeremiah, he is subject to various visions concerning the apocalypse and the coming of the Messiah.
T is for …
Talmud, The
A compilation of rabbinical discussions concerning the Jewish law, ethics and other topics forming the basis of religious authority in Orthodox Judaism. W. sends Lars two quotations from the Talmud, the first of which looks forward to the restoration of the Kingdom of the House of David, that is, the coming of the Messiah.
The second quotation reflects the despair that followed the Roman persecution of the Jews after the second destruction of the temple. The claim that ‘those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah’ might seem a surprising one, but was directed against contemporary practices. Rather than bringing children into a corrupt world, men masturbated, or took wives too young to have children. For the rabbis, who believed that all souls are stored in heaven since the beginning of the creation, waiting only to be born, such practices only prevented the coming of the Messiah.
Béla Tarr, 1955-
Hungarian film director, whose work is characterised by a narrative slowness, bleakness of vision and apocalyptic sensibility that reflects their source material, the novels of Tarr’s close friend and collaborator, Krasznahorkai. Tarr, unlike Tarkovsky, refuses to give any sense of religious redemption in his films.
Tarr’s productions are notoriously disaster prone. He has said that his latest film, currently shooting in Budapest, will be his last. Tarr is an extraordinary interviewee, seeming to have stepped directly from one of his own films.
Playing Tarr’s films to his students comprises a great deal of W.’s teaching. He particularly admires the director for his devotion to the concrete, which is quite the opposite of W.’s and Lars’s windy enthusiasm for lofty philosophical ideas.
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1932-1986
Spurious alludes to Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s bleakest film, which sees the madman Domenico, played by Erland Josephson, set himself on fire in a public square in Rome as a warning to humanity.
Titisee
Resort in the Black Forest, close to Freiburg, where W. and Lars hire a pedallo to go out onto the lake.
Tohu vavohu
Hebrew phrase, used in the Books of Genesis and Jeremiah. It is translated in the King James Bible as ‘without form or void’ and has the general sense of chaos and disorder. This phrase can be found on the cover of Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s 1999 mini-album, Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada.
Turnchapel
Village in the southwest of England, for which Lars has a special love. It is reachable from Plymouth Barbican by water taxi.
V is for …
Vortex of Impotence, The
Phrase used in a quotation W. sends Lars. It’s from one of the essays in Virno and Hardt’s collection Radical Thought in Italy.
W. is for …
W.
Central character in Spurious, W. lives in a large, damp-free townhouse in a deprived part of Plymouth. He is a friend and collaborator of Lars, who he visits frequently, and has a teaching role in a college, probably in philosophy, though perhaps in theology (or, indeed, a mixture of both). He is a Hebrew scholar, and has recently published a book.
W. spent several of his childhood years in Canada, before returning to the prosaic city of Wolverhampton, where he attended a grammar school. It is not clear from Spurious when or where he met Lars, but W. thinks of his friend as a protégé.
A great deal was expected of him as a thinker in his early days, W. reports, but his sense of the apocalypse, as well as his enthusiasm for drinking and smoking, have prevented him from reaching his potential. The presence of Lars in his life has only made things worse, he says.
W.’s partner is Sal, who he loves and admires.
W.’s hair is long, with ringlets. He is of Jewish origin, though his family were Catholic converts. He is an enthusiastic reader of the work of Cohen, Rosenzweig and Spinoza, and admires Tarr’s films. He keeps Lars up to date with his research by emailing quotations to him.
W. characterises himself as having great generosity as a host, a love of conversation and a feeling for the messianic, as well as a general enthusiasm for rivers, the sea and the Southwest. He credits himself with a higher IQ than Lars, and is a reluctant atheist. W. is frustrated by his mathematical and linguistic inability.
W. dreams of returning to Canada, and of having a genuine philosophical idea. He is a great believer in friendship and an advocate of overpraise. Despite their many professions of gloom, he and Lars are essentially joyful people, W. believes.
Wipes
Disposable tissue for wiping clean one’s hand or anything small, which W. and Lars use to dab their wrists and behind their ears before giving a presentation.
Wolverhampton
City in the West Midlands, to which W. returned with his family after a few years in Canada.
X is for …
Mill on the Exe
W. and Lars drink at the pub called Mill on the Exe in Exeter, where they reflect on the splendour of the Southwest and the threat it poses to serious philosophical work.
Y is for …
Yard, the
Lars’s backyard particularly depresses W. It is a concrete patch behind Lars’s flat, shared with the flat above and filled, according to W., with rats, sewage, bin bags and rotting plants. W. suggests that only Béla Tarr would have interest in such a place, allowing it to tell its story in one of his famous tracking shots.
Z is for …
Sabbati Zevi, 1626-1676
Self-proclaimed Messiah who, although treated with suspicion by religious authorities, was able to attract a large following in Turkey and elsewhere in Europe. Zevi was known for his ‘holy sins’, which began early on with his eating of non-kosher food, and speaking the forbidden name of God, and, later led him to pronounce the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew, an act forbidden to all but the Jewish high priest on the Day of Atonement. Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666 was viewed as a betrayal by most of his followers, but by others as a sign of his messianism; many followed him. W. mentions Zevi’s apostasy as the outcome of a tradition in messianic thought that holds that the Messiah breaks the law rather than merely fulfilling it.
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