Lars Iyer

Last Days

Summer. Weeks when we had the office and the campus to ourselves. When we took up tennis, inspired by Sharapova. When we worked night and day. When we walked in the Lakes and North Yorkshire, and visited festivals and conferences. Weeks of discounted salads at Boots. Of snacks in the office. Of foccacia and guacamole. Of rice crackers and salsa. Of Ikea furniture and potted shrubs for the yard.

Soon R.M. leaves permanently for a life faraway, outside academia (though she hasn’t finished her dissertation quite yet) and for me the new academic year begins, the descent into winter and short days, the audit and the pass-the-beanbag learn-how-to-teach course. Summer is ending and it is as though a great epoch has come to a close. Or that everything which came to an end in my life ends once again as the door into summer closes behind me.

When I was twenty, I told R.M. as we crossed the field on the way back to my flat, I loved the intervals between work, time reading long novels or wandering streets, times of journeying (leaving and departing) – time to dream because my life had not found its course. And now? The channel has been cut and the river moves swiftly. There is no time, and time between is a haunted time, no longer open, drifting air, but a frightening expanse. The correspondences I used to keep by letter are ending, or have come to an end. Is there time? No time for that great giving of time to which reading and writing belong. There is only work-time, only today and tomorrow.

Mortal Derangement

Capitalism is deathless: it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegal immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.

The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away , all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…

We know it well: changes in means of production means workers are perpetually de- and reskilled; capital moves in real time from one place to another; production and consumption are continually revolutionised in view of the desire for profit, for surplus value, upon which capitalism depends and makes us depend.

What is to be done? Rethink the revolution which allows the ongoing revolution upon which capitalism thrives. Engage the crisis upon which capitalism depends.

A fundamental instability of meaning is built into capitalism from the start. Values are stripped away by capitalism insofar as they are unbound from traditional structures; the danger, however, is that they are replaced by the values of the market: with the value of work, the value of money. Constant movement: labour power is unbound from a particular conjunction of resources and bound again by others. If there is always a turbulence, a revolutionisation that is constitutive of capitalism, it is one whose movement is regulated. What is it regulated by? That process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus, a profit. This is not a simple reification.

As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when all other values break down. You tell yourself you do not desire money for its own sake, but for the goods and services to which it proves access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any financier or investor, capitalism desires and desires its own increase. As indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital.

We are mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. How do we resist? How do we retrieve another meaning of time, of money? It is never a question of returning to the security of older values. A derangement has already occurred; the circulation of capital escapes the coded, despotic system whose inhabitants obey a model signal. The task is to engage the revolution itself insofar as it implies a gap or an interval. But what can compete against money?

Capitalism is deathless. But says the philosopher to the rich and the powerful: even you will have to die. We are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Spreading to other parts of the body, they grow and replace normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. And capitalism will die with its host body when the ecological limit is reached.

Then how to awaken to ecological catastrophe? To the misery of those who merely try to subsist amidst the storm of finance capital? To the apocalypse that has already happened? Perhaps death opens its eyes in us. Perhaps there is an experience of suffering upstream of any other experience. What faculty permits this? What shaping category, what transcendental? Philosophers will suggest that they have a special relationship to death. It’s the oldest story: Plato tells it, but so does Heidegger. Live as close to death to possible, Socrates advocates. Relate yourself to your death, Heidegger says. But what of the catastrophe which has already happened?

Bataille:

Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later – it has the power to contest everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon everything, to render everything present. The crucial instant is that of death, yet as soon as the action begins, everything is challenged, everything is present.

It is a question of death, of establishing a relationship to death in life. But now death is not the inevitable that awaits each of us such that, by relating ourselves to it, we can lift ourselves from the hoi polloi and reclaim our possibilities and impossibilities for ourselves. There is not enough time. Instead, before I gather myself up – before, that is, I am gathered to myself such that it would even be possible to write of Da-sein, there-being – there is the experience of catastrophic loss, expenditure, sacrifice. The death of the other person is this sacrifice.

We live events according to a double relation. As that which can be borne and mastered, even if this is difficult, by relating it to a particular end; but then also as that which escapes end and employ. Then the latter is the interruption of the project and of the power which would enable me to relate myself to my death. The ability to comprehend, bear, master, but fundamentally, the ability to be able, depends upon the ‘I can’, upon the modality of possibility which enables the opening to the future. And when this ability fails us? When, in sacrifice, there is no temporality upon which the human being might be projected? When, that is, there is no one there, no time and no place to be-towards-death? When the death of the other awakens us?

Perhaps there is a way of experience this death. Of living it in turn. And perhaps this provides a way of rethinking the general equivalent upon which the value of money depends. There is another capital, an experience of a giving. No longer is the monetary sign substituted for the thing that is sacrificed. There is no general equivalent which can fix the value of money in relation to its referent. The desire to create surplus value is defeated for as long as the time of the project is sacrificed – for as long as there is nothing upon which the human being is projected.

Common presence: a system, a non-system of exchanges so marked by loss that nothing therein would hold together and that the inexchangable would no longer be caught and defined by the desire for profit. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the inexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces the value of money with the sacrifice of money. There is a celestial currency which has value only insofar as it is catastrophic.

Weariness

R.M. and I worked alongside one another all summer; she is spending a week tying her life up elsewhere (finishing her Ph.D.) and will be back soon (but then she will go again, and for much longer this time). Meanwhile, I am alone in the office as it comes to the end of the long summer teaching break. And alone, no longer bringing us splendid lunches to eat, no longer playing tennis after work and arriving back at the flat late (too late, it always seemed to me), my time is unstructured, I lose all grip on my projects, I’m overwhelmed by work …

Why am I entrusted with so much bureaucracy? It is unreal to me, or I am too unreal for bureaucracy…. But there’s task after task, all leading up to the quality audit. I’m hopelessly behind, as always. And there’s the project of the new book and a paper which has to be done by October 1st, and then a review article … everything written up to the wire, always half-realised, semi-botched, full of typos and poor grammar.

And the flat? Bare-walled, awaiting lining paper and wallpaper. Slugs die on the repellent at the back door … the shower needs an element and there are holes where the skirting board should be. Damp rises up from the darkness under the house. Ants find their way across the floors.

I read Bataille in the gym – what a contradiction! and feel, as usual, a nostalgia for a life I’ve never led. Bataille sleeps on Balthus’s floor during the war … Bataille reads aloud from Inner Experience in his lover’s flat. Bataille cycles in the fields during wartime. I attempted a kind of chronology of Bataille’s war five hundred posts ago.

How poor this writing compared to Guilty or On Nietzsche! I am one of those weak vessels who is smashed by the work of a great writer. I am so surprised such work exists I cannot muster my critical faculties. It all seems incredible to me that people still write in our world and regard it as important. I read an interview with Samuel Weber in which he speaks of French philosophers who will not let a day go past without going into the study. I still live from that great period when the translations of Bataille and Blanchot began to appear – Inner Experience, The Space of Literature …

Sometimes what I read and what I write seems to stream very far above me. As though what I read and wrote bore no relationship to my life as it is lived. At those times – and tonight is one of those times – a great power of unbelief seizes me. I reread my own book – painful experience! – I turn idly the pages of Bataille. It is always of Bataille that I think since he is the one who protests he is too weary for philosophy, or that philosophy makes him weary. He hasn’t the strength to develop a system of thought. He plunges, and he plunges as he writes, he plunges in a writing which falls away from him. And when you are only capable, like tonight, of writing of what you cannot write, of failing to let writing fall away, of clinging to writing, writing ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ …

New neighbours: lads, more lads, loud music, a roaring car. Gone the quiet old lady. I’ll have to sleep in the lounge for the noise, with earplugs handy (I went and bought a fresh set today). Weariness of a weariness which will not let relinquish myself and plunge into reading and writing …

The Impossible

Bataille’s The Impossible:

Day is falling, the fire is dying, and I’ll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. With the curtains drawn aside, I can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. Under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. It lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.

Klamm’s Pince-Nez

Recall the lines from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings.

Quoting these lines in the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.

Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.

Clichés? One might object that it is this accumulation of details which permits the verisimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg.

Levinas observes of the reader of Dostoevsky that ‘what holds his attention is neither Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, his metaphysics, nor his psychology, but some profiles of girls, a few images: the house of crime with its stairway and its dvornik in Crime and Punishment, Grushenka’s silhouette in Brothers Karamazov’. Is this the case? I am not sure. But Levinas is taking us in an interesting direction:

Introspection is taken to be a novelist’s fundamental procedure, and one supposes that things and nature can enter into a book only when they are enveloped into in an atmosphere composed of human emanations. We think, on the contrary, that an exterior vision – of a total exteriority […] where the subject itself is exterior to itself – is the true vision of the novelist.

This is a difficult thought. Why does Levinas on the one hand assert the importance of ‘a few images’ in Dostoevsky’s fiction and then proceed to write with what seems the greatest abstraction of ‘total exteriority’? A great deal is at issue in this question, which addresses, I think, an issue Steve once touched upon at In Writing. Steve remembers a distinction in Karl Kraus between those readers who take joy in the details the novelist offers us: in the ‘ponies and boots and shoes’ (George Eliot’s phrase) and others who look instead for a theme, obsession or an idea beyond those details. Beyond them? But, as Steve notes, one should not think of there being a simple choice between details and ideas:

It’s a fair distinction, I suppose. I’m in the latter camp for sure. Sometimes the first line is enough for me to reach for the handrails. But I would say that the themes, obsessions and powerful ideas of the better novels are also found at the level of ponies, boots and shoes.

This is what Levinas indicates when, in the same essay, he links particular images in the novel to exteriority – although the latter should not be understood as an idea (obsession is a better word). What, then, does it mean? One approach to this question is to consider Blanchot’s reflections on Hegel’s notion of symbolic art.

Hegel associates symbolic art with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. But if, as he writes, ‘what is human constitutes the centre and content of true beauty of art’, then depictions of animal symbols of the divine can only be deficient; if beauty is the sensory appearance of the idea, for Hegel, Egyptian art is not beautiful. When he calls it sublime this is a sign, for him, of its deficiency.

For Hegel, the symbol fails; it remains inadequate to the idea it would bring to expression. But through its failure, its very inability to embody its idea, it might be said to indicate a kind of excessiveness or strangeness which Levinas calls exteriority. Perhaps this is why Blanchot discovers in Hegel’s symbolic art a way of approaching what is most uncanny in the work of contemporary novelists.

‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes. But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned: what is at issue here is something which is both self-contained and perfect. But Hegel breaks from the conception of the absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world, stripping it of what precisely renders it absolute. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge.

What, then, is Blanchot’s negative absolute? One might say it is a resistance to such a conceptual system: it is the weight, density and materiality of matter itself as it refuses dialectical development. Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood. This is how we might understand the relationship between the particular details of a novel and exteriority.

The classic novel aims at verisimilitude. It wields the abstract power of language to aim at the depiction of concrete things and relationships in the world. But what if, conversely, the details of the story, the same concrete things (Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants) are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented? Here, the ‘object’ of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling’s absolute. It is not Nicholas of Cusa’s God. But nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the absolute to human knowledge, in the manner of Hegel. Those indications are disturbing even as they remain as what they are. They are disturbing because they resonate with a reserve which cannot be known. It is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner, perhaps, of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures.

Then the kind of novel in question indicates what slips from us in the world through its details. In so doing, it embodies not so much a body of knowledge but a black hole which escapes the measure of knowledge, not so much a theory of the world, but an excessiveness over any particular theory. The novel, in its details, keeps memory of what resists the measure of knowledge not because it would constitute an unknowable thing-in-itself, but a reserve in things. It presents the shadow of the real.

Let’s go further still. It is possible to discern in certain novels the attempt to seize this shadow for itself – to make every encounter a movement towards its reserve. Perhaps this is how one might understand Kafka’s The Castle. It is a system of indications comprised of specific encounters and details (I’ll try and substantiate this claim another day).

The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility (rather like the story by Josipovici Steve mentions).

A story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis: to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. A kind of concrete emptiness, a material nothingness which reverberates in the things of the story: these are mysterious formulations, which may sound hopelessly pretentious. Nevertheless, it is this concrete absolute which manifests itself through the most powerful fictional works of the last century (and isn’t it there, too, in a film like Last Year in Marienbad or The Adventure?).

Sometimes I think that the time of such novels and such artworks has passed, that the end has already been reached. But then I remember the music of Smog and Cat Power …

No one bears witness for the witnesses

In the opening paragraph of “The Last One to Speak,” Blanchot writes:

Plato: for of death, no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place.

Why does Blanchot bring together Plato and Celan, the themes of dying, witnessing and the notion of the companion?

One might suppose one knows about dying, about its causes, it course and its outcome, it is, after all, something that happens to others around us, but this is to mistake death as a solely physical process with death as a stepping over, and for Plato, a transcendence into the real. Of death, no one has knowledge; but death, as Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, grants knowledge to the immortal soul that was previously incarnated in the body. To strive to know it is necessary to strive to live close to death, as Socrates demands, to attempt to maintain a necessary distance from a body always prone to error. One knows nothing of death, but death is thus just the condition of possibility of knowledge; one sees, but it is the blindspot of the seeing eye that permits sight. Death, in this sense, is double, it allows knowledge, but of death we know nothing, permitting us to attain what is only possible for human beings only by withdrawing from us as something over which one could have power.

How then is death bound up with testimony for Blanchot? One is said to give or provide testimony, it is something of which the one who testifies is capable, that is, which falls within their powers to recall and to put on record what befell them. To use the figure of the companion, as Blanchot does, who is chosen for me is to point to another giving, to a passivity wherein the “il [he/ it]” is brought forward as someone who is “inside us, away from us,” as someone who comes forward in each of us in order to receive. Why does he invoke a companion as it were “within” us, or more precisely, who is away, that is, outside whilst remaining inside each of us? To “die” or, in the sense under discussion, to “witness” is to be traversed, but here it is a notion of death or witnessing that is at stake, that demands a new reflection on receptivity, on passivity.

The companion invoked so briefly in these passages from “The Last One to Speak” should be understood as one who witnesses “in” me when my capacity to witness is impossible. Memory usually allows us to bear witness, to recall something undergone, something taken on or assumed, but in the experience of the sort that Blanchot evokes, I do not bear witness in the first person. Upstream of its capacity to act in the world, the “I” has undergone something unbearable that cannot be recalled in an unequivocal manner. The notion of the companion sets the one who witnesses in place of the “I” at a distance from the “I” who emerges after the experience.

Celan’s phrase, “no one bears witness for the witnesses [Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen],” that Blanchot cites alongside the quotation from Plato* points to the difficulty of unearthing and testifying to certain experiences that are endured in another sense. The “other” witnessing in question is precisely what is claimed to have occurred in the camps. The paradox of the notion of witnessing in Blanchot bears exacting ethical stakes, for it bears upon the possibility of receiving the testimony of the survivors. The survivor has borne witness as the companion (understood as the locus of an experience of witnessing before the “I” has assembled itself), or, better, the companion survives in place of the “I,” enduring the unendurable. How does the survivor attest? And how can others receive the testimony of an event that barely offers itself to memorization?

In one sense, Celan’s phrase can be interpreted in terms of the impossibility of witnessing for the witnesses – for others, perhaps, who die around me, for the helpless ones whom the survivors resolve to remember. But it can also be interpreted in another sense, referring to the vigilance of a self that endures as “no one” [ne personne], as a traumatized spacing in which the companion as it were steps forward to experience something in my place. The latter can also be said to constitute an impossible witnessing, where impossibility is to be understood in terms of the impossibility of enduring an event in the first person. This is the interpretation of this line that Blanchot seems to offer, pointing to the experience of witnessing that is also an experience of dying: to a traumatized spacing that “survives” the disappearance of the “I”, living on as the companion.

Let us be these children

In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot evokes the cries of children playing in the garden, evoking: a muffled call, “a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: ‘who is me today?’ ‘who holds the place of me?’ and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him [il, il, il]’. As he comments in a later essay, ‘Who?’ in which he cites his own passage: ‘only children can create a counting rhyme [comptine] that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily’. Only children, then, could make a game of the ordeal of the self in which what one might call exposition occurs.

But the game and the children are themselves figures; if, as Blanchot writes, ‘all words are adult’, it is not because children would speak in a way that is absolutely pure or absolutely true. The child is itself a figure of the ‘il’, of the locus of the ‘he’ or ‘it’ that, as it were, says itself over again without ever lapsing into self-coincidence. It is the play of the ‘il’, of exposition, the neuter, always in default, to which the figure of the child refers.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot relates the story of the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps who was made to wear a placard in order to prevent the chance of a terrible substitution:

At ten years old, he sometimes came to fetch his father at the camp. One day, he couldn’t be found, and right away his father thought: he’s gotten swept up by mistake and thrown with the others into the gas chamber. But the child had only been hiding, and thereafter he was made to wear a placard for identification purposes.

This fragment is the emblem of the fixity of relations, of an ordering and mastery that absolutizes the power of the subject – of what, perhaps, one might think under the heading of adulthood. The identificatory placard, the insistence on retaining a proper name which indicates filiation and race, prevents the child being caught up in affliction (but affliction, for Blanchot, is another way in which the neuter gives itself to be experienced). If it is childhood in its infinite substitutability that is a figure for exposition – the neuter as the placeholder that is itself without place – the relationship between SS and prisoners in the camps is the refusal of childhood.

One can see then when he writes, as he does in ‘Who?’, ‘let us be these children’, Blanchot asks us to welcome a certain experience of substitution without arresting it or determining its form. In so doing, he asks, in the name of our childhood, our secret neutrality, to articulate a responsibility that would answer to events – horrible and joyful – in which exposition is at play. This is the chance of ethics, which is to say, of answering to the substitution which occurs in our opening, our greeting to the other person.

Polished Books

Conversation with W., who, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, makes sure he is always reading something from outside his disciplinary expertise. A book on mathematics, on infinity, on economics … This is admirable, and W. is certainly right to insist that this is the least that the authors of Anti-Oedipus would ask from us. But then I’m still sore that W. agreed with me that we ought to be content to write ragged books, to write quickly, on the hoof (his example was Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) and yet is still polishing his book, nearly a year after I submitted mine to the publisher.

Of course, W. was right: my book is a mess, a living afront. I now have my own copy and I’m flayed daily on the hooks of it’s typographical errors. W.’s book, proofread by a colleague, is immaculate …

An Axiom for Everyone

If capitalism is a kind of cancer, does it need to be cured? What would it mean to be returned to health? Perhaps it is a question of exacerbating that cancer itself – or at least one aspect of that cancer: of allowing the disease to cure itself, or at least to metamorphose into something less horrifying.

Like a metastatising cancer, capitalism spreads, and it does so, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in their classic analysis, by releasing codes from their fixed determinations, unleashing a flow of means of production which is deterritorialised. This is what Marx called the ‘continual revolution of the means of production’ and it is a revolution: there is a great leap in creativity. But this unleashing is governed by the logic of money, which assigns everything a price. Herein lies the ambivalence of the revolution implicit to capitalism: at one and the same time, a new world is opened and then barred from us. New forces are unleashed but are captured almost instantaneously.

Deleuze and Guattari call axiomatisation the way in which flows are cojoined so that surplus can be extracted from them. The reterritorialisation this accomplishes shackles the creative forces unleashed through ‘constant revolutionising’. Still, there is always an interval: if forces of creativity, what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring-production, are freed, they are only freed for so long as the capitalist cannot make a profit on such freedom.

What chance is there of truly revolutionary action? This will depend upon experiencing the interval between the encounter with desiring-prodiction and the axiomatisation of such creativity. But how is this possible?
Do not think of it as what you set out to experience, but of what engages you. Do not think of this encounter as one you can bring about. Yes, we are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital; our future is determined by what is owed to capital. Capitalism has passed the stage of what Marx calls the ‘formal subsumption’ of labour by capital in order to accomplish ‘real assumption’, wherein, as Negri argues, all social activity is determined by capital. This is our control society …

Nevertheless, there is the chance of tracing those intervals which open as it were in the very articulation of capital: they become the hinge which might unjoin capitalism from itself. This disarticulation, crucially, concerns time, or the temporal synthesis upon which capitalism is predicated. What is necessary is to attend to the interval as it unjoins the time of capitalism from itself. The time is out of joint.

This still sounds vague and utopian. The objection arises: how might this lead to a political programme? How to translate the revolts which occur from time to time and place to place into a global movement?

A Cure for Capitalism?

Captialism is deathless – it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegral immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.

Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Whether cancer develops as a tumour or, with leukaemia, in the blood, cancerous cells spread to other parts of the body, growing and replacing normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. Capitalism will die with its host body.

Is there a cure for capitalism as there might be a cure for cancer?

The great obstacle is money, the general equivalent. It is in terms of our experience of money, of money as it determines our experience, that our consensual reality is defined. It is because of money that we no longer believe in the world.

A value that supplants all other values is inscribed on coins, banknotes and cheques. Yet money is not just the measure of the value of commodities, it is a commodity itself. There are a number of great changes across this history of money. The most recent came when it was possible to raise finance capital. It is wealth that comes to assume the most value. Donald Trump is a monster miraculated from the body of finance capital. Be afraid, for it is not just that capital has liquified reality by turning it into commodities, but that those commodities have no weight or substance in comparison to the abstraction of wealth. All that matters is the future from which more wealth might come.

Why not let the Trumps of this world wait for their enormous returns? Acccording to Marx, money has the amazing property of increasing itself. Then why worry? Isn’t it a good idea to borrow from the future for the sake of a better life now? But others cannot wait. An investment is always a contract over time – it is necessary to wait for future profit. Although shares appear to resemble property, their value cannot be realised all at once. You can sell property at any time, but you will need to wait a little to realise a profit from your shares. Traders in shares must wait; speculators can even sustain a loss while they wait, but those who trade for their subsistence cannot wait. The horror is that the terms of exchange are set by speculators, not be those who seek only to live. The result? Thirst, famine, shelterlessness.

Capitalism involves a determination of time. More than that: it captures our awareness of time. It does not die, but millions are dying. Beyond those millions, it is the earth itself which dies. Capitalism is cancer and a cancer which is killing its host body. Then what is to be done?

Perhaps it is the problem of confronting the fact that our time is not infinite, and that even Donald Trump will die. But the ideals which arise like great phantasms from the body of capital seem stronger than death. It is only when he is dying that Ivan Illyich experiences beatitude. And the Ivan of Ivan’s XTC? Perhaps, then, it is the confrontation with the threat of the dying earth, of the fragility of life. But still, the ideals seem stronger and will do so until the ecological catastrophe finally arrives.

And when it comes, as it is coming? Perhaps there will be a new ethos, a new synthesis of time. The past: no longer must our traditions, our memories be stripped away by capitalism. The future: a place for hope, and first of all a hope for hope. But how do we avoid the desire to retrieve the barbarisms of the past, and for our hope not to dissipate in a vain utopianism? What is it that engages us from the past and from the future?

The Tone of the Work

Kafka’s Diaries and letters are a boon to any biographer but are also misleading. Compared to writing, everything, for Kafka disappoints. He falls short of his vocation and this is why, writing to friends, to his lovers, and to himself (but does he write to himself?) in his diary, it seems always that he is in lieu of his own existence. But one should not be too quick to understand the privation to which he seems bound by his desire to write, nor indeed to read his Diaries or even his literary writings as marked by despair. Think of what Kafka wanted from writing – think of what he allowed this word to name.

If I had the Diaries here, I would quote from them, but they are familiar enough. If you find despair in its pages, it refers to what is an impossible task: to pursue a story across days and nights, to maintain that prolific energy which allowed Kafka to write the tales for which he was famous in short bursts. Of course this energy failed him; stories were botched, and could not find their way to a conclusion. And if he had time, all the time in the world, would he be able to write? If he needed no sleep and just wrote, one day after another, would be create a work which would allow him to answer his vocation? Perhaps he was like that man from the country who asked the doorkeeper for access to the Law. The doorkeeper says he can’t let him in now. ‘Later then?’, asks the man. ‘Its possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not now’. The man waits for days and years, until, in the last moments of his life, he realises that no one else has ever asked for admittance to the Law. Why?, he asks the doorkeeper. ‘No one else could have been admitted here, for this door was intended only for you. I’m now going to shut it’.

Perhaps this is what Kafka seeks as he pursues the work night after night. Does he realise that its essential characteristic is to be interminable and that to write lines on a page is already to betray the peculiar absence of time which marks the work? The absence of time? What does this mean? The impossibility of undertaking tasks, projects and personal initiatives, of suspending a kind of suspension which prevents action. For this is the peculiar absence which disjoins time from itself, a disarticulation which unjoins Kafka from the chance of even beginning the great task which opens to him. Of course it is a pseudo-task: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.

How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s Diaries and letters allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss – when he writes about writing he is lost again.

Doubly lost, and commenting on the great refusal to which writing is linked, I wonder whether Kafka doesn’t come closest of all to the condition of writing. For isn’t all writing a lament for what it is not? Whence the temptation to ally writing to a great political cause, or to give up writing altogether – for who can justify this vain effort? A temptation to which Kafka often resorts in his Diaries and Letters, setting out his plans to emigrate to Palestine or reporting his new habit of undertaking two hours of manual labour each afternoon. But he does not yield to this temptation; writing saves him. But from what does it save him? A life lived outside writing. But isn’t writing precisely the door which will not admit him? Isn’t the way barred by the great doorkeeper with his Tartar beard? The man from the country tries to bribe him, this doorkeeper, but he must return to his stool at which he sits and waits, as others, presumably wait by other doors. Kafka waits. He is eminently patient. And whilst he waits, he writes with a writing outside writing. It disappoints him, it is true, but at least it allows him to keep hold of himself. To keep hold? Ah, but that is what he doesn’t want!

A whole series of authors from Holderlin onwards wanted to write about writing, to seize upon the origin itself and make it speak. Each of them wanted to make writing speak of itself and only of itself, to give birth in their works to the impersonal words which were spoken without them. What did they achieve? Often, their lives are ruined, tragic. Still more often, their lives can be presented hagiographically: they are testament to a kind of purity, a flame which consumes only itself, or a star which has broken away from everything but the night. But written across their lives, written with the whole of their lives there is the writing that reverberates with a kind of murmuring or rumbling, as if, in it, there were allowed to resound the tuneless song sung in the absence of time, time’s void. What differentiates each author from another (Holderlin from Rilke, Mallarme from Beckett, Pessoa from Blanchot, Duras from Bataille) is only the way in which that resonance reverberates: the tone of the work.

Subjectivity Battles

In our time, no one has to believe in anything other than capitalism. It believes and desires for us. But in what does it believe and desire? If you push the capitalist who accumulates capital for its own sake, he might tell you that self-interest is the expression of the common good. This, of course, is a compensating ideology. Oddly enough, although we believe and desire in capitalism (our beliefs and desires are captured), we don’t like to admit it. There is an immense self-interest even if we are too embarrassed to admit its existence. For example, in the general election of 1992, voters were too embarrassed to declare they were voting Conservative. Recall, also, the middle class voter to whom Newt Gingrich and the Republicans appealed by running against Clinton on abolishing the welfare state. We hate politicians, but regard our political system to be eminently exportable. We express concern about the poor, but we never blame the movement of capital itself, understanding poverty to be an aberration and not endemic to capitalism. We are suspicious of those who seek to defend capitalism even as we believe in and desire it. How has this happened?

Recall the vast post-war consumer boom. This led to a retreat from any concern that there would be insufficient number of consumers to an explosion of consumer desire, a massive consumption boom with apparently infinite horizons. Finely targeted groups whose desires can be met by ‘short runs’ of manufactured goods. Cutting across all such groups is the sense each individual possesses that they are an individual consumer. Neither workers nor consumers feel exploited by the free market (this is why, for example, Labour were able to drop Clause Four); it flatters them. This leads to a short term and contradictory politics. Clinton turned to Dick Morris, the strategist who understood what mattered was to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups each of which needed to be targeted by specific methods. Techniques of marketing are carried over from the business world to politics. Groups are identified: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘polls and patio’ etc. The political question concerns day to day lifestyle, values and issues. Thus the views of swing voters are sought in focus groups.

This is what the Right know as they campaign on lifestyle issues. As Massumi comments:

The New Right, for all its apparent archaism, has been far more attuned than the traditional Left to the actual lines of forces in late capitalist society. It has perceived that the most volatile pressure points have shifted from class conflicts to subjectivity battles.

This is one way to understand the rise of Neoconservatism: it appeared in the mid 1970s to circumvent the apperance of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘molecularities’: new sexual becomings, new kinds of identities, a break with traditional institutions etc. The problem: how to awaken these becomings-other, and in such a way that we do so together?

Credit, Trust, Desire

(Some notes in the margins of Goodchild’s work. I also draw on Holland’s study of Deleuze and Guattari.)

Money was born as a means of passage where coding reaches its limits. Alliez sumarises Aristotle’s account of the invention of money thus: cities far apart, cities which do not share values, can trade with one another. Money can now pass across the plains, the steppes, the whole world. But money is not just a way of mediating a spatial distance. As I argued in another post, it also implies a disassociation of time because of the temporal split between buyer and seller.

One might contrast a natural and a credit economy to make this point more clear. In the former, money facilitates exchange. Goods, labour and services can thereby answer wants, needs and interests. Property and money are exchanged’ they are commensurate. But when money is raised as a loan on the basis of a debt, then it is necessary to increase production to generate a profit in order to pay back this loan. When the supply of money is increased, prices do not rise proportionately to take account of this increase. It is the production of goods and services which expands.

In order to receive credit, it is necessary to commit to future production and profitability. One does not pay back one’s creditors in wealth (in goods), but in money. The circulation of a ‘natural’ economy can be increased without limit; money is now deterritorialised from natural exchange. The cycle of profit and debt drives the circulation of capital insofar as it necessitates the incessant creation of money through the contracting of new loans. It is not simply having money that matters, but credit-worthiness. Credit can be produced from thin air; it is born by fiat. It does not need to be repaid in goods and services. It is to be repayed by taking out more loans. But the circulation of credit demands the commitment to further production. Thus the future of capital opens which takes heed of nothing but its own increase.

As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when coding breaks down. You tell yourself that you do not desire money for its own sake, but for goods and services to which it provides access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any particular investor or financier, capitalism desires and realises its own increase. This desire produces other desires within the capitalist social machine. This is why William Large can write, ‘Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money’: as indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital. Our desires attest to this operation.

Here desire, along with belief, arrives from capital itself. Zizek likes to quote Sloterdijk: we know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it anyway, then comments that capitalism operates in the manner of Tibetan prayer-wheel. It desires for us and through us. But might there be other beliefs in desires which await us within this socius? Deleuze and Guattari’s two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia provides some indications.

A great shift occurs with capitalism as Deleuze and Guattari show in their analysis of the transition from savagery through despotism to capitalism: no longer are flows of matter and energy organised qualitatively and symbolically as in savagery and despotism. In savagery, social codes determine what is of value and therefore collectable. Bataille was right, however, to highlight the role of expenditure in such a system, whereby accumulation is always limited by the ritual destruction or dispersal of accumulated goods. In despotism, the despot must be paid in one representative of value, that is gold, which has a meaning over above the values particular goods have within particular tribes in savagery. Value is deterritorialised from goods with specific value and now accrues to a universal equivalent. But this equivalent is not yet the money of capitalism since it is imposed on tribes from without; it accomplishes the political subordination of particular groupings. Money is here only a kind of debt which passes to the despot.

What changes with capitalism? There is a more general deterritorialisation as money becomes a common currency whose value is to be understood in terms of exchange-value. Previously, the social machine was organised through symbolic codes, whether they are understood in terms of the goods of the savage or the figure of the despot who imposes a hierarchy. With capitalism, there is no such organisation; what matters above all is the production of surplus value; to that end, qualitatively dissimilar resources are brought together as quantitatively exchangable commodities in the universal market.

Deleuze and Guattari call axiomatisation that process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus. This conjoining of quantified flows operates through an ongoing decoding of all established meanings, customs and beliefs. But this decoding is not to be rejected as a simple reification as Lukacs argues. Decoding awakens a difference even as axiomatisation attempts to recapture this difference. In despotism and savagery, coding is the basis of identity. In capitalism, however, it is the addition of new axioms which allow a profit to be extracted from difference that operates as a principle of identity. True, capitalism is linked to a cycle of decoding and recoding; the axioms of capitalism sweep away existing codes of meaning and conduct replacing them temporarily with another set of codes, before this recoded set is itself swept away. But this is no reason to despair since there is a fundamental change in the shift from despotism to capitalism. As Holland comments:

Social valuation is now quantiative rather than qualitative: exchange-value simply disregards or over-rides the concrete differences between commodities, rather than reducing them in the name of similarity and identity, as codes strive to do.

The danger is that before we become aware of such concrete differences the addition of new axioms interrupts the potentially revolutionary movement of decoding. We all believe in capital; we believe in it and desire it. But there are other potencies which may engage us that offer the possibility of a new belief and a new desire.

Beliefs and desires: in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari draw on the work of the nineteenth century French ‘microsociologist’ Gabriel Tarde. They write: ‘Tarde’s best work was his analysis of a miniscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc.’ What does this mean? Bonta and Protevi provide a useful gloss:

… flow is that micro-deviation from the norm, that little nuance ‘sure we’re all Americans but here we start our 4th July celebration with a parade from the our local Veterans Against War group, then we have the Dykes on Bikes group, then instead of hot dogs we have veggie burgers …’ (Of course, on another level of analysis, there are always molecular flows escaping these representations: vegetarians who once in a while … and so on).

A micro-deviation. The market is integrated, begetting money of itself. Yet there are openings within the infinite increase of money. True, capitalism always works through a reterritorialisation of flows. It does so for the most part through a reterritorialisation onto arbitrary, archaic signifiers, but there is also a reterritorialisation of credit capital onto exchange capital. The latter is more deterritorialised than the signifiers which play such an important role in savagery and despotism and offers us the potential of revolution. It is here one might seek the micro-deviation which could give rise to new beliefs and desires.

Goodchild: ‘It is […] theoretically possible to isolate the flow of belief and desire from their reterritorialisation on credit capital, so as to fold them back upon themselves as specific styles and modes of existence.’ This from his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari (Religion and Capitalism develops this thought). But what does it mean?

Credit, folded back on itself, produces credit, not an exchangeable quantity. People are trusted who are capable of generating trust, and such trust becomes the precondition for collective activity. Such a refolded ‘capital’ no longer needs to be quantified; one discovers the liberation of autonomous and non-quantifiable flows of belief and desire.

It is credit, then, which Goodchild finds potentially liberating insofar as it may produce a different set of beliefs and desires. But is trust enough? After all, it can always be reterritorialised by directing itself towards a particular process or end. Accordingly trust must be ‘folded back upon itself’, Goodchild comments, ‘in order to open itself to a new threshold of deterritorialisation: trust in trust, an immanent faith in this life as it is’. Only thus might it allow us to reach what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence of capitalism – its ‘outside’, that is: desire.

I’m still not sure what Goodchild is pointing towards (this is my mistake, not his; I will simply have to work harder), but I think it has to do with the engaging of particular potencies which are given as the outside of capitalism, insofar as they escape the articulation of capital as a kind of chaos which has to be bridged by the operation of money. As chaos, this ‘outside’ gives itself to be experienced in terms of a different set of beliefs and desires ‘within’ capitalism. And it is given such there is a kind of folding of past and future into the present on the part of the experiencing individual.

This should no longer be understood on the model of autonomous self-determination. Rather – and here Goodchild breaks from the humanism of political science -it will entail the engagement with nonhuman powers, for example, fertile soil, fresh water, crops and domestic farm animals, all of which escape the technological-industrial subordination of producitivity to efficiency and output as well as with power-relations which open between us which usually passed over with too much haste.

In The Future There Will Be No Death

There is a justified suspicion of those who use the third person plural to designate a particular groups with particular interests. How can I say ‘we’ at all without usurping the place which would allow you to speak? And how could you invoke a collective identity without excluding me in my specificity and difference? The danger lies in refusing to acknowledge that we all stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not.

What is this horizon?

Time and money come to us from the outside. They fix our lives, rather than express it. We measure ourselves in relation to them, rather than evaluating them in relation to ourselves. It is not man who has replaced God, but time and money that has replaced man. Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money.

That from a paper from William Large. How should one understand the apparently abstract claim that the human being – you or I – are merely the projections of time and money? The capture of our belief and our desire by the impersonal workings of capital.

The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value.

Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates what has been already set in motion.

What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.

‘Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money’: as indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital. What does this mean? Is it a question, as I have suggested in a previous post, of a change of perception which might precipate direct political action? I argued, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, that one might rethink the proletariat as the subject of history, expanding this notion to include each of us, all of us, insofar as we fall short of a molar ideal. But I think my argument remains naive whilst I pass over the real class differences which Large indicates as follows:

In finance capital, the fundamental class difference is not between capital and labour. Rather inequality is measured by mobility. The lie of the market is that exchange is equal, but one exchanges for subsistence, whereas the other for speculation. In the latter case, the presene exchange is measured against future profit, and in the short term a loss can be sustained, whereas in the former, exchange is measured against life now. Nonetheless, it is speculation, rather than subsistence which determines the terms of exchange, and thus 24% of the world population lives in extreme, not relative poverty.

Large is drawing on the arguments of Philip Goodchild in his brilliant Capitalism and Religion. As he continues:

The second fundamental class difference, Philip writes, is between ‘relations of contract and those of property’. Normally in exchange, it is imagined that there is an instantaneous swap between the buyer and seller, since even if the product takes time to reach the buyer it is no different from what it was when it left the hands of the seller. But in finance capital, profit cannot be given all at once. It takes time, and the time is measured by the expectation of profit in the future. Every investment is a contract over time, as opposed to property which can be disposed of at any time, and the power of finance capital is measured by how much time it can wait for future profit. It obscures the inequality and property capital, by treating contracts as though they were properties. Thus shares are bought and sold as though they were property like any other, but in fact the value of shares are only truly measurable over time, as the expectation of future profit.

Result? The autonomous free market leads to the transformation of the world into a market for goods and services; formerly self-sufficient peoples, along with their customs and traditions, are homogenised; more fossil fuels are consumed and carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of goods and services; fertilisers, pesticides and pollutants are used in order to extract the maximum possible yield, and agricultural land is taken from rural populations in order to provide irrigation for industry. Alongside the reality of ecological catastrophe, there is the threat of economic catastrophe: how might any government bail out an economic crisis when the national economy is vulnerable to the volatility of the international movement of finance? There is also the danger that national economies default on the loans.

The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe. But no longer can this be conceived operating within the existing political framework. Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters most. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable.

How to bind apathy in the face of existing politics into a universal mobilisation? One might say: there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared; there is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being. Another response: those values have been swept away by the value of money, which is not just a medium of exchange, but the very possibility of economic relations. Then what matters is to transvalue those values which have been handed down to us, and, through this transvaluation, understand why it is the world has been stolen from us, and by what infernal mechanism.

Large continues:

As Philip reminds us, since Plotinus, philosophy has seen the life of the soul as being synonymous with time. Our interiority, as opposed to the exteriority of nature, is essentially temporal, and the temporality of the universe ows itself to us. The quantifiable time of movement is dependent on the intensive temporality of life. This intensive time cannot be exchanged. I can give my time to you, but nonetheless I still have to live this time. I cannot abstract myself from it, and this time can either go slow or fast. The fact, however, that I cannot live forever means that this time can be used as measure. The value of something is measured by the amount of time I am willing to spend upon it in relation to the amount of time I have left. Time appears, therefore, to have the same function as money. it is both a measure of value, and a value in itself.

Against what I wrote in an earlier post, the issue surrounding the ideal form of the worker as it is ‘miraculated’ from the body of capital is a sideshow. It is not our aspiration to live up to molar forms of worker or consumer that matters so much as the body of capital itself as it opposes itself to subsistence and survival. A transvaluation of money would involve a transvaluation of time. Seize back the time that has been taken from you. And, in doing, learn to say ‘we’: for is it not in this seizing back that a new kind of commonwealth might open? Beyond micrological analyses of micropolitics and the elevation of specific differences to the level of the analysis of class difference, there is, first of all, the task of awakening oneself to the commonwealth of those whose time has been stolen. The commonweath which comprises each of us, all of us, as we fall below what the transcendencies of time and money require of us.

Then we are bound together by a sense of our finitude – by a sense that time is limited. By an urgency born from the fact that we will die.

The future of capital is diametrically opposed to subsistence and survival. To survive is to postpone death, but for capital there is no death. Capital does not flee death in anxiety. To avoid death is to know that it is there. Capital does not even recognise it. It does not have to triumph over death, since it is not part of its time. In the future there will be no death.

Capital will not die. But we will. What, then, of our future – yours and mine?

Outside

Blanchot on the image, continuing from the post on dreams from a couple of days ago.

Just as the dream of which Blanchot writes has no content, the image is only an affirmation of what breaks through our ordinary dealings with things in view of particular projects. Like the dream dreamed at the heart of the dream, the image is an experience of the real at the heart of the real, the reserve which is the opacity of things which do not place themselves at our disposal. This strange correspondence between the dream and what awaits us in the day is not surprising for both bear upon the same enigma; if the essence of night and the interminable day are one, it is because they are concerned with what Blanchot calls the image.

How should one approach Blanchot’s notion of the image? In Nadja, Breton recalls a flea-market he used to visit to buy curios,

Again, quite recently … I went with a friend one Sunday to the “flea market” at Saint-Ouen (I go there often, in search of those objects that can be found nowhere else, outmoded, fragmented, useless, almost incomprehensible, perverse in short, in the sense that I give to the word and that I like).

Remembering this passage, Blanchot writes:

a tool, when damaged, becomes its image (and sometimes an esthetic object like “those outmoded objects, fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible, perverse,” which André Breton loved). In this case the tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object’s double, if you will. The category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to “appear,” to surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing — but being. Only that which is abandoned to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense, imaginary.

Blanchot is also drawing upon Heidegger’s famous analysis of the hammer in Being and Time, where, after explaining how our relation to the hammer may be understood in terms of our involvement in making something fast, which in turn is involved in providing protection against bad weather, and ultimately for the sake of [um-willen] providing shelter for Dasein, which is to say ‘for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s Being’. When the hammer breaks and we hold the broken shaft and head in our hands, it breaks itself from the totality of involvements, that network of references in in terms of which it was understood; it is no longer something which is part of the articulation of one of Dasein‘s projects, but is, like Breton’s perverse object, ‘fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible’.

Is this what Blanchot means by the image? Or is he indicating an experience which is far more wide ranging?

The image speaks to us, and seems to speak intimately to us of ourselves. But the term “intimately” does not suffice. Let us say rather that the image intimately designates the level where personal intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in this movement the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside, the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance. Thus it speaks to us, à propos of each thing, of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing.

How should one understand this? Recall the conception of the self Blanchot takes over from Hegel, Heidegger and Kojeve: the self as project, as a ‘temporal transcendence’ which leaps beyond itself and towards a future which it understands in terms of specific tasks. According to this tradition, the self is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ek-stasis or standing out which understands itself from what it will accomplish. The ‘I’ as the ‘I can’; the self as potentiality: all relations between the ‘I’ and the world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit in the ‘I’: it is as though the ‘I’ were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring, risking himself, but always in view of the task of returning to Ithaca, to his Kingdom. In truth, his adventures do not change Ulysses; likewise, the ‘I’ of projects and tasks itself remains constant in its dealings with the world.

Yet in the relation to the image, as Blanchot sets it out, something different occurs. No longer are things experienced in terms of a mediating self-relation. It is as though the relation itself were truncated or suspended – it can no longer reach the thing, the person as an object. Conversely, this relation can no longer be understood as the reaching out, the transcendence or ek-stasis , of a subject. In place of the self, the ‘I’ which would retain is reflexive self-identity, there is the place where ‘personal intimacy is destroyed’ and there is only ‘the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside’. What remains? Blanchot will often reply: vigilance.

What does this mean? Levinas will always oppose Ulysses’s journey to Abraham’s: the prophet made an authentic voyage insofar as he was willing to give everything up in heeding God’s word. Understand vigilance as the exposure not to a word but to a noise without form which is delivered not from high, but from the heart of the real – a formless noise which does not commands but fascinates, claiming our attention while refusing to allow it to close on a particular, determinate object. Our attention is claimed and lost; no longer can we fix ourselves at a distance from the things in the world which would allow them to enter our schemes and our projects; no longer, indeed, can we determine a place for ourselves at all.

To keep vigil is, one might suppose, to watch over something, but Blanchot is not interested in the experiences of a subject which would be present to itself, able to integrate its experiences. No longer is it possible to synthesise what has happened. Outside the psyche, outside memory and the possibility of memorisation there is a ceaseless unfolding in which the ‘I’ is turned inside out. Who am I, in the experience in question? No one – there is no one there. Not only that, there is no world either, if this is understood in terms of a totality of involvements, a contexture in which things make sense in accordance with the for-the-sake-of-Dasein.

What speaks in the experience in question? ‘the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance’; of what does it speak ‘of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing’.

In Blanchot’s terms, there is no one there to be vigilant – but vigilance is there nonetheless. Does this mean someone or something else is vigilant in me – that I have been possessed as by an alien force? Rather, it points to a dispossession; I am occupied not by a subject or a substantive but by an impersonal streaming. It seems the ‘I’ always survives its encounters with things and with persons, leaping forth into the world and returning to itself. But there is always the chance of an experience which causes it to lose its position in the midst of this leap, stranding it among the things and persons towards which it would press forward.

In this instant, (but is it right to invoke a temporal punctum, a particular instant?) self-relation itself is broken; the self is torn apart like Orpheus by the Maenads. Torn apart – but something remains. Not the self, but something like an awareness of the river upon which the torn body of Orpheus was cast (an awareness of the river ‘in’ his dispersed body). Of the river which flows ‘in’ my place; the outside streaming inside of me. In this instant (but this is an instant torn from itself, a ‘now’ in dissension: diachrony) there is no longer the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to act in the world, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il’, the ‘he’, the ‘it’. Vigilance refers not to a personal experience, a traumatic memory, but to the exposure of the inside to the outside, a turning inside-out.

Here it is not matter of positing a pure outside, of substantialising this term, rendering it an inaccessible thing in itself. The outside must be thought in its relation with the inside; exteriority and interiority are entwined and cannot be thought each without the other. Think the ‘I’ and the ‘il’, the personal and the impersonal together – recall the struggle at the heart of the ‘I’, that secret violence which joins and unjoins the unity of the self.

At the essence of the night, there is the dream. And in the interminable day, the image.

Minor Communism

The Communist Manifesto:

We know it well: changes in means of production means workers are perpetually de- and reskilled; capital moves from one place to another; production and consumption are continually revolutionised in view of the desire for profit, for surplus value, upon which capitalism depends and makes us depend . This movement is like a moving band of locusts, alighting to devastate everything and then taking flight once more. Nothing is spared this devastation even as new places open to devastate …

What is to be done? Rethink the revolution which allows the ongoing revolution upon which capitalism thrives. Rethink the ongoing crisis upon which capitalism depends. It is here that Deleuze and Guattari’s work is immensely valuable; I also draw on Thoburn’s excellent Deleuze, Marx and Politics, which brings their work into relation with the Italian autonomia movement.

A fundamental instability of meaning is built into capitalism from the start. Values, Deleuze and Guattari claim, are decoded by capitalism insofar as they are unbound from traditional structures; the danger, however, is that they are recoded by the market, which itself acknowledges no values except work and money. On another level deterritorialisation occurs such that labour power is unbound from a particular institution (unemployed miners in the North) and reterritorialised by others (light engineering). If there is always a turbulence, a revolutionisation that is constitutive of capitalism, it is one that is regulated. Indeed, it was this regulation, which Deleuze and Guattari call axiomatisation which first gave rise to capitalism. Recall the classic account of capitalism’s emergence in Marx: capital resulting from sold property meets workers who have been deterritorialised from the land.

How to resist, when capitalism proceeds through a massive and ongoing decoding and deterritorialisation which is the very basis of the economy? It is a matter of opening up the potential which emerges in the articulation of capitalism. Firstly, there is a question of perception: how do you attend to movements of becoming? How do you gain a perspective which would disclose an immanent potential within capitalism? How do you attend to what is active, inchoate, unformed which unfolds such that it is not recaptured by capitalism? Then, secondly, it is a question of engagement: how do you call forth a virtuality or potentiality which might permit a new effectuation, a counter-interpretation which would draw on these unforeseen powers?

These questions bring us towards the word communism. From the Communist Manifesto:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

True, Marx will sometimes hint at a post-capitalist state to come, presenting communism in terms of endstate where the division of labour is abolished, but the communism of the Manifesto is never simply an ideal. ‘The real movement which abolishes the present state of things’: It names a real engagement, a local and strategic intervention within capitalism. The danger is that the chance of communism appears to be given by capitalism. It is a question of thinking the relationship between capitalism and communism such as the latter is never simply a moment of the former. It is a question of resistance.

One might approach such a communism through the notion of the proletariat. When Marx writes about the proletariat, it is not to appeal to a class that is already constituted, which would have a conception of itself, of its history. The proletariat are deferred in the relation to themselves as a class and this is the point: they are not yet fixed on a molar model of the worker. This is why the term ‘working class’ is misleading. Gilles Dauvé is right: the proletariat are indeed ‘the class of the critique of work’.

But what would this mean? What is a critique of work and how is this linked to communism? Work, as the source of surplus value, is what allows capital to produce itself. Thereby the identity of the worker is delivered over to the relations that stretch across the capitalist socius. This is precarious because capital is ever-shifting and ever-revolutionizing; it is continually in crisis. If capital deterritorialises and decodes, it also reterritorialises and recodes; the worker continues to be elevated as a molar form, being ‘miraculated’, in Deleuze and Guattari’s expression, over and again from the body of capital. Marx and Engels: ‘The capitalist functions only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified’.

Each of us is enfolded within the capitalist socius, buying into its dynamic of ideals. One ‘works on oneself’ to transform oneself in accordance with the molar ideal of the worker. One is, as a worker, never hard-working enough. If labour, under capitalism, is the extraction of surplus-value from the world, this depends upon the elevation of the molar form of the worker as an ideal. Such an elevation is merely a reaction; the minor is ‘miraculated’ along with the worker from the body of capital. This means that although the molar might seem to come first as a norm or standard, preceding that which would subject it to variation, it must emerge as the virtual at the same stroke as the appearance of the minor since the ‘miraculation’ of the molar ideal is only an attempt on the part of capitalism to shore itself against ostensibly anti-productive, non surplus-value-producing movements – against what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘lines of flight’.

It may appear that it is not a question of a particular class which would come to understand itself as the agent of history, but of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a minor practice, which entails a tentative negotiation of existing social relations. What does this mean? It should not be understood as the elevation of a ghettoized or marginalized identity to the status of a molar standard, which would grasp itself in its exemplary ‘truth’, but attending and engageing with ‘lines of flight’ which open within the ongoing crisis, that is, the deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation, decoding-recoding movement of capitalism.

If it is to draw upon the potential of these lines of flight, communism must seize upon what is immanent to work itself, grasping the imbrication of the molar with the minor. But since this imbrication has always and already occurred in the capitalist socius, this means the critique of work, communism, has already happened. Communism, on this account – which is not Deleuze and Guattari’s – is neither a particular strategy nor the position held by a political party but a kind of event: an ongoing differentiation or deviation from a molar standard. The question is once again one of perception (where is communism happening?) and engagement (how can we seize upon and intensify this event?) both depend on and affirm what has already occurred and will happen again as communism.

It may seem that means communism does not imply the privilege of a particular class as the subject of history. We begin wherever we are. Is this why Deleuze and Guattari write there is ‘only one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses, and that draws from the machine an undivided flow of income convertible into consumer and production goods, a flow on which profits and wages are based’? Still, perhaps their analysis offers the possibility of displacing the figure of the proletariat still further from any molar standard – displacing it back into each of us, any of us insofar as we are each subjected to capital by capital.

What does this mean? The word proletarian would name that which names ‘in’ us, struggles against molar forms, against, in this sense, the figure of the worker. This is not Deleuze and Guattari’s account. Where does this struggle, this resistance, this critique of work happen? Not in the will, that is, in the activity or work of a conscious subject. Nor in the beliefs or meanings which devolve from capitalist axiomatisation. If it occurs in the proletarian, this is no longer conceived as a member of a class but as a locus of experience that is as it were ‘set back’ (my expression) in each of us.

To be ‘set back’ – how should one understand this? The one who remains amidst our world, with its regime of productivity. The one who laughs, reads, makes love … each of us, any of us, insofar as we fall short of that molar standard of being-a-good-worker. But isn’t it the case that a certain model of work, of productivity has contaminated our private lives? No doubt, no doubt … but there is something in us which outplays the molar standard of lover or host, intellectual or new man. (I will come back to this another day. I should note that the account of the figure of the child, the reader, the not-yet-thinker, the dreamer in my last few posts is an attempt to gesture towards a new account of the proletarian …)

The proletarian names the one who is engaged by a minor movement such that we have each already been turned from the articulation of capital. Thus communism is the relation which would open from each of us to an ongoing, affirmative differentiation. It is the relation which calls us forth as proletarians. Yes, communism is inscribed within capitalism; it is part of the infernal machine, but it reinscribes or ex-scribes capitalism outside itself. The perpetual danger is that capitalism itself proceeds through such an exscription; resistance will depend upon how one understands the ex- of ex-scription.

Two tasks, urgent and necessary. Firstly, to engage communism itself, communism as event. It is not that the negotiation with capital is an effort, or something for which one would have to plan. What it is necessary to plan, by contrast, is the political project which would draw upon this ongoing event, affirming it and repeating it in turn. This is the minimal account of the notion of strategy with which it would necessary to work. (Example: it would be necessary, through the critique of work, to permit new kinds of worker self-management. What matters is the way in which anti-production is bound to production.)

Secondly, to produce a theory that would permit us to understand the relationship between production and anti-production, capitalism and its outside. Deleuze and Guattari provide indications of one kind, Hardt and Negri of another. Still others might be sought in a whole range of contemporary philosophy and political theory, as well as in the activities of new militantisms of various kinds. This is what I will now explore over the next few posts.

The Night’s Dream

The real, the surreal, writing about Breton’s attempt to bring the real and the dream together yesterday reminded me of an analogous discussion in Blanchot. But in his work, as you would expect, there is something much more rich and strange.

Recall the thematics of the day and the night in Blanchot – the day is that place in which it possible to begin, when the human being can engage in those projects before it; the possible is its dimension. If the night is the contrary of the day, it is only that place wherein one rests in the midst of tasks and projects; it is still governed by possibility. Thus, day and night, action and repose belong to the same economy; to sleep after the day is done, to prepare for another day, is to remain secure in the measure which permits the project.

But there is another experience of both the day and the night. First of all, ‘the essence of night’:

In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep. And if you fail sleep, exhaustion finally sickens you, and this sickness prevents sleeping; it is expressed by insomnia, by the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution. In the night one cannot sleep.

Then, secondly, there is the day which ‘survives itself in the night’, which ‘exceeds its term’: the ‘interminable "day"’ linked not to the time of the project, but to ‘time’s absence’.

The interminable day, the essence of night: what do they name? They are linked, Blanchot writes, to ‘the threat of the outside where the world lacks’. The world: what does this mean? That field which is open to the human being which is measured in terms of what it can or cannot do. Can or cannot – isn’t this to have it both ways? They must be thought, both of them, in accordance with what is possible for the human being – in terms of what the human being is able to do. Both alternatives keep the measure of this ‘ability to be able’ intact; they preserve the human being as the one for whom tasks and projects are possible. That which is outside my capacities is still organised by the measure of those capacities themselves.

What, then, does it mean to invoke the ‘threat of the outside’ – of an experience ‘where the world lacks’? No longer, in this case, can tasks be weighed up in terms of what I am able or unable to accomplish. One must think, instead, of an event which no longer falls within the field of possibility. Put it this way: possibility finds itself inscribed within a space which it is unable to control, a space opening onto an outside which is no longer its outside. Or, once again, there is an inadequacy of the field of the possible to itself; as if within it there is something that escapes. Inside and outside; the outside is inside from the start, so long as this exteriority is undersood as it is given within the very possibility of possiblity. Could one call it, then, the impossibility of possibility, thinking of it in quasi-transcendental terms? Might one write, like Bataille, of the impossible as it would name an experience which falls outside what possible for a human being? Of an inability-to-be-able?

This, I think is what Blanchot thinks under the heading of both the essence of night and the indeterminable day as well as in the experiences to which he links these terms, respectively: the dream and the image (I’ll come back to the image in a second post.)

In the essential night, nothing can be done; sleep is not the place of repose, but of restlessness. Coming from outside the world, outside the order or the economy of the possible, the dream is not the secret repository of our wishes, assembling the residues of our daily experience beneath whose content the psychoanalyst would be able to find latent desires. It must be thought, according to Blanchot, in terms of an insomnia or awakening which is no longer linked to the particularities of the dream. It is no longer you or I who dreams – you or I, that is, understood as those beings who can make their way in the world.

Who is it who dreams? Who dreams ‘inside’ me? But isn’t the dream, on Blanchot’s account, what is outside me? ‘The dream’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the reawakening of the interminable’. It is the return of an experience which cannot be delimited. Like the essential night, it does not permit rest; it presents no secure foothold from which to launch oneself into the future. It entails, rather, the collapse of the beginning and the repetition of an experience without any determinate content. Affirmed in this repetition is an experience which shatters not only the ‘content’ of the dream, but the very idea that a dream could be a receptacle of meaning, latent or otherwise. There is no ‘content’ to the dream since there is no interiority of the dreamer. The dream is the breakthrough of the outside – not your dream or mine, but something like the dream of the night – a dream from which the dreamer is reborn each time she dreams. But a rebirth which is momentary, which lasts an instant – only as long as the time of time’s absence, which is to say, in the suspension of the time of work and the time of repose, of the temporal order of the possible.

Shattered time: the ‘manifest’ content of the dream, which evidences, according to Freud, the secondary processes through which its scattered ideations are synthesised into a narrative unity, always pass over the disjunction to which the dream belongs. For Freud, the unconscious is timeless – but what the latent desire the dream reveals belongs to an experience of time which is neither ‘in’ time (the time of the project, of the possible) nor timeless (that will lead Freud to posit a common, perhaps transcendental account of the symbolic universe to which we would all belong) but, as it were, the ‘outside’ of time ‘in’ time.

Who experiences the dream? Perhaps it necessary to think another locus of experience – not the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleeps or wakes, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il‘, the ‘he’, the ‘it’. But one must not think this as an unfolding, an explication of the ‘il‘, so much as the unfolding which is there from the start, which inhabits experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a singular psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time’s absence.

‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’.

To what latent desire does the dream attest? Only to that desire to be extinguished in the instant where the ‘il’ comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.

Desire, yes, always

What governs the strange movement of Breton’s great prose trilogy, Nadja, Communicating Vessels and Mad Love? There is a sense of a great quest, a great movement, but to where is it going? What magnetises these peculiar texts? ‘Desire, yes, always’, Breton writes – but a desire for what?

n Mad Love, Breton writes:

Desire arranges multiple ways to express itself … the least object to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation than can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like the other….. Whether in reality or in the dream [desire] is constrained to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations.

Condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations: Breton is drawing, of course, upon Freud.

It was his technique of allowing his patients to free associate which drew Freud towards the phenomenon of dreaming. For it was to their dreams that such patients returned. Freud began to see them as symptoms which were capable of an interpretation which would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The ‘manifest’ dream – the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient – conceals the true meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the superego. For Freud, it was necessary to understand what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attests to the play of latent desires, in a kind of thinking-desiring.

Such latent thoughts can be divided into prelogical ways of thinking – condensation, displacement, plastic representation and a rational, logical component: secondary revision. Here, condensation should be understood as the combination of latent dream thoughts into a single manifest element and displacement as the way in which, in the dream, the apparently innocuous detail can become highly significant and the apparently significant event is treated casually (more formally: there is a transfer of cathexis – interest, investment and affect – from one content to another). Thirdly, there is plastic representation (this is perhaps what Breton means by substitution) through which important people in the patient’s life are represented by a stock of common symbols (the king = the father, etc.) The latent content manifest in prelogical thought is retrospectively ordered by secondary revision, through which the patient, under the guidance of the censoring superego, is able to construct a narrative out of the material of the dream.

The shared goal of psychoanalysis and Surrealism is to show the play of latent desire not just in dreams, but in fantasy, parapraxes, myths, symptoms – and then to surprise it and catch it unawares.

Recall Breton’s account of his visit, with Giacometti, to a curiosity shop. Breton tells us he was obsessed with the phrase, cendrier de Cendrillon, the ashtray of Cinderella. He encounters a spoon, which, for some reason, he feels is linked to the ashtray of the phrase. This seems to link, for him, to the symbol of the shoe, the slipper of Cinderella. A series of associations is produced: ‘slipper-spoon-penis-perfect mold for this penis’; thus, according to Breton, the mystery announced in the phrase le cendrier de Cendrillon is solved: the series spoon-shoes-slipper, the search for the foot that fits, is about a desire for love. Now recall the analysis of Dora’s mother’s jewel case – Freud insists, to cut a long story short, that ‘The box … like the reticule and the jewel case was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals’. The correspondence between Breton and Freud is clear. For Breton, desire opens a path through the world; it is a matter of attending to the signs of this desire. For Freud, the neurotic patient might be cured if those signs are understood in terms of the latent content to which they bear witness.

The paths of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism diverge in their respective methods of research. Freud is a man of science, Breton a poet; Freud separates unconscious desire from reality, and Breton seeks to bring together desire and the real, claiming our conception of the real is produced by our desire. ‘Desire, yes, always’: everything in Breton is magnetised by a desire for the surreal, understood as a revolution of desire and the real (they cannot be thought apart from one another). This is what drew Breton and his friends towards communism just as it made Surrealism forever incompatible with the French Communist Party.

Still, I can’t help but remember the way how, after the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents symbolism as on a par to the Kantian categories, innately and universally organising experience according to shared unconscious fantasies. Why didn’t this bring Freud closer to the Surrealist desire for the great revolution, the great liberation of desire? With fascism on the rise and the second world war looming, Freud despaired of the liberatory force of desire. It is hard not to share that despair and to regard Surrealism as a period of joyous adolescence, a dream which had to vanish in the realities of an absolute war.

Giacometti, the former Surrealist, did not want his work included in the Surrealist exhibition of 1947. He commemorated the dead women and children of the Shoah in a sculpture called ‘Night’. A woman strides, hands splayed, across a sarcophagus. Could it have been shown alongside the works of the Surrealists? I don’t know the answer. But, strangely, in the same year, Bataille, against whom Breton directed such a fearsome invective in the second Surrealist Manifesto, wrote several articles celebrating Surrealism. ‘The great Surrealism is beginning’, he wrote. Why? What was left in Surrealism to begin? A liberation of desire? But look at where desire could lead! But perhaps it is still a matter of thinking and affirming desire, even as it appears to lend itself to its own denial. To understand why it might be brought to deny its play, and how that play might play anew. Desire, yes, always.

Consolation

after my own disaster:

… on the last day of August 1953 Beckett sighed with despair as he read his copy [of Watt], just as he blanched at the sight of the ‘awful magenta cover from the Merlin press’ with its frame of busy asterisks. His own copy (number 85 of the ordinary edition) shows that he found over eighty spelling and typographical errors, and that, on page nineteen, an entire sentence had been omitted.

Resemblance

We know why Giacometti was drawn to Surrealism: like Breton and his friends, he was fascinated by alchemy and by its conjunction with psychoanalysis – in the general claim, which both practices shared (as Silbere’s studies brought out): the sexualisation of matter (it is in this context one might understand Breton’s call for an occultation of Surrealism in the second Surrealist Manifesto – if he expelled Bataille, this was to keep a place only for those evolved individuals who were sufficiently pure. The early Giacometti, abandoning the naturalism of his father’s paintings, would mix occult symbols with personal symbols in his work.

But Giacometti broke away from Surrealism. By 1947, he became one of Sartre’s circle, no longer allying himself with Breton. But what precipitated this change? Laurie Wilson provides several indications. There was the influence of Egyptian art – Giacometti’s fascination with Akhenaten, the young Pharoah who called for a new religion of the sun. The physical similarity is unmistakable: both had a long chin, thick lips, splindly legs, long arms; but there are also other parallels – both had dominating mothers, close relationships to beautiful young sisters; both attempted to turn over their father’s way of understanding the world.

More specifically, Egyptian art, according to Schaefer – an authority with whose work Giacometti was familiar – was not realistic, but an attempt to depict the essence of a person rather than real appearance. Schaefer attacked the Greek discovery of the artistic representation of perspective because it breaks with the way in which we remember images – frontally or as a profile. Giacometti says enthusiastically: ‘no other sculptures as closely resemble real people as Egyptian sculpture’; but resemblance to what? Not simply to the sculptor’s models. True, the portraits of Diego, Giacometti’s brother, are noticeably portraits of this and not another individual. But it seems Giacometti has another kind of resemblance in mind.

Perhaps the sculptures allow something else to emerge, bringing the model into proximity with what Blanchot calls the image.

In an interview Giacometti claimed he always turns familiar models into strangers: ‘You are no longer the person I though I knew. You no longer have any particular characteristic. As for individuality, you become a generalised head, the head of everyone.’ Such impersonality was already a practice in Egyptian art: it is difficult to tell a sculpture of Akhenaten from his wife Nefertiti, for example. Wilson speculates that this was to provide a political stability in maintaining the appearance of an unbroken continuity in the royal line. Perhaps, too, it was a way of keeping something from death, and some speculate that Egyptian sculptures are ‘doubles’ or ‘ka’ figures, depicting an ethereal replica of the body. The aim of sculpture was to preserve the double, the soul from its own ‘second’ death. Were Giacometti’s post-surrealist figures likewise a way of keeping something alive? Perhaps, as in Blanchot’s analyses of the corpse, death reveals something which was never alive:

He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather, it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistance, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.

This is why, according to Blanchot, funeral rites are performed quickly: the horror of the corpse is of what it reveals in the body which was once familiar to us. But what is this ‘world behind the world’? To what does the cadaver join us?

Presently, there will be — immoveable, untouchable, riveted to here by the strangest embrace and yet drifting with it, drawing here under, bearing it lower — from behind there will be no longer an inanimate thing, but Someone: the unbearable image and figure of the unique becoming nothing in particular, no matter what.

The cadaver joins us to a kind of impersonality. No longer is the cadaver that of anyone we know; it has already drifted from our world and from those relationships which bound us to the one whose body it was.

It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself. Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn’t we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? "Resembles himself" is, however, correct. "Himself" designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day. Yes, it is he, the dear living person, but all the same it is more than he. He is more beautiful, more imposing; he is already monumental and so absolutely himself that it is as if he were doubled by himself, joined to his solemn impersonality by resemblance and by the image.

It is not something which survives death which a sculpture must preserve, but something hidden by life. ‘… no man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes. Animation, liveliness, the friend we know through her gestures or his laughter, all the particularities which allow us to recognise our singular companion as the unique being she us – all of this conceals a kind of material presence which foregrounds itself only after she dies.

Perhaps what Giacometti’s sculptures bring to the surface is precisely this presence. This is why he praises Egyptian statues for their resemblance to the living. No longer, then, is it a question of allegory, of metaphor, of that great sexualisation of the world in which Surrealism placed its faith. It is upon a kind of materiality that Giacometti draws – a substance of which we are made, a solidity which remains even as he makes his figures almost impossibly fragile.

Why, then, are his sculptures stretched so thinly? And why, for such a long time, was Giacometti unable to stop his sculptures shrinking? Giacometti’s answer to the second question: ‘If I made them larger you would recognise who it is’. And to the first? Perhaps a similar explanation could be given. Stretching, thinness, smallness: all a way of passing the resemblance of the model through a great detour. Who, now, do the sculptures represent? But they represent nothing; they are.

The Regression of the Origin

Inspiration: there is a puzzle from the first. Why did the Muses, who, as gods, were witness to everything, want to hear stories of the world told to them again? Was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events as they happened anew in the song? Perhaps it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive, through the song, something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy from Homer’s Iliad and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves.

There is a revealing anxiety in the recasting of the theogony of the Muses. Initially, they were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. But how, if this were the case, could the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus? Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, only darkness, the forgotten, the hidden origin.

This strange regression of the origin marks the enigma of inspiration, which is never a matter of simple receptivity. Inspiration involves a kind of receptiveness, but also an answering desire to suspend reason or wilful deliberation: a willingness to admit an empowering spirit into the work, to render it productive. The artist must embrace dispossession, acknowledging the authority of a possessing voice, but it also necessary to assume responsibility for the work, to shape and realise what has been received such that it might inspire others in turn.

The scene of inspiration can be found long before the poem had been separated from other forms of making, when the poet was a singer [aidos] and not a poet [poietes]. For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.

It is thus a gathering or assembling that, for the Greeks, marked the recitative event; the separation between text and reader that will lead to an interruptive unraveling of the self-presence of the recitation, the sundering of poet and audience, is as yet unmarked. With the birth of poetry, of literature, the Muse, the figure of inspiration, is given over to the disseminative effects of history. When literature becomes a delimitable body of writings, the scene of inspiration shifts; it is no longer the Muse who would allow human beings to reveal and receive the truth through the song, nor the God of whom the author would be the scriptor. Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would to be able to secure the origin of inspiration?

This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world, and in the faith that the regress of the origin can be mastered by the power which belongs to us as human beings.

This allows inspiration to be understood as part of a battery of artistic techniques, allowing the writer, for example, to draw upon a deeper level of self-expression, an enhanced fluency. God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God. At one stroke the human being is lost to itself and God is lost to the sacred. And art? What of art?

Humanism is present not only in the creator-God like Wagner for whom Feuerbach seems to prepare, but in the most basic experience of the novelist. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: this innocuous statement reflects the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of the regress of the origin. Would Beckett or Sarraute ever speak of themselves in this way? Did Blanchot or Duras ever lay claim to that regress in their own name?

This is the age of a humanism: the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life? It is a question, in each case, of a reactive desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being which might pass by way of a reflection on art, on literature. Perhaps this is part of a larger reflection neither on human beings or gods, literature or art, but on the way in which the origin retreats from us.

We know today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more. Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with works of art.

What are they these works? What do they become when they are unbound from culture, from the forces of culture. Broken from the museum and the Sunday supplement. Turning their face away from the great machines of publicity. But to what do they turn their faces? To the readers who might still be gathered by the experience of the origin. To an experience which no longer falls within the measure of the human. Reviving that old word, inspiration, may seem to lead us back to the vocabulary of the divine or the sacred. But this is only a way of safeguarding an experience with no determinable source.

Wasn’t the chance of this experience there from the first? The Delphic oracle, placed at the centre of Hellas, and perhaps at the centre of the inhabited world, is formed at the lips of a cave which reached into the depths of the earth. Who spoke through these lips? The gods? Or the priestess whom the gods appointed so they could hear the peculiar song whose gift belonged to human beings alone? Or was it the depths themselves, reverberating in the songs of those who would sing in the competitions held at Delphi?

The depths themselves: before the gods there was the rumbling of the earth, the resonance of a song that still resounds in Heraclitus and Xenophanes. A song of the earth, of an inhuman origin: is this the sacred from which the gods and born are born and into which they must return? The sacred, the origin: it is the whirlwind which refuses all names.

The Gods Themselves

We know the old story: God was once the name for the unnameable, for what comes to language, to determination. The sacred, with Hölderlin, is a name which no longer covers up the unnameable. It is a placemarker for what the poet cannot name except as the unnameable, maintaining it there, keeping the space open. This is what according to some (Heidegger, for one – and perhaps Blanchot, too) Hölderlin achieved, and, after him the authentic poet stands guard over the absence of the gods, maintains this space, the sacred, as the sacred (the absence of the gods). And over the name God (the name God in Hölderlin’s poetry – the Christian God of the poetry whom Heidegger will always play down)?

The great danger of the modern period is that the death of God is confused by the movement through which creation, the power to create, is isolated by the most important trait of God, the one the human producer wants most to imitate. Art, for example (it’s not just any example) is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of one aspect of God. Whence Feuerbach’s critique and its aftermath: the death of man must follow the death of God, etc. etc., we’ve all heard this. And if the isolation of the power to create was a sign of an alienation of the human being from itself? Of a transformation of the sense of work, of the power to transform the world, to produce? Then the death of God and the death of man both name phantasms, for what has died can only be thought in terms of that which occured with the appearance of homo laborans. The death of God, the death of man name an attempt of human beings to kill themselves and be reborn under a new sky, and not a sky without God, without gods. To be reborn on a new earth.

What happened in the period of these great discourses (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx …)? The determination of the human being as the worker. The elevation of the status of work. What died? The death of God and the death of man are only the death spasms of a particular conception of the human being. What does the name God name? And the human being? Before any affirmation of theism or atheism there is the question of what trembles in the name of God and in the name of the human being. Of what these names allow to tremble. And of what of the gods? What trembles in their names? Or even in their collective name: the gods?

(Heidegger helps and hinders with respect to these questions. On the one hand, he passes over the question of Hölderlin’s Christianity. On the other, he provides an account of the appearance of homo laborans as part of a broader determination of being as actualitas. Hegel and Marx, according to Heidegger, answered to this conception. Reread them from this perspective (hasn’t Axelos done this?) But Heidegger himself neglects to provide a theory of commerce and his conception of the political is too narrow. On the other hand, the appearance of the gods, of the last God in his later work …)

A Child is Being Killed

I’m not sure I quite understand Serge Leclair’s dense but beautiful book A Child is Being Killed, and I’m not sure I want to. It fascinates me because it remains out of reach, and this is why, perhaps, I have begun to write about it several times without ever satisfying myself I have anything to say about it nor even the means to say it. I remain hesitant about treating a text that answers to the experience of psychoanalysis as I would a theoretical work since I lack this experience. Nevertheless, reflecting on Leclair’s work will allow me to return to the theme of childhood.

Leclair focuses on what he calls “primary narcissistic representation” as it is incarnated in the infans. In the later Freud, primary narcissism structures the first stage of life, preceding the formation and consolidation of the ego. As such, it is once again the “subject” of an experience to which the child cannot oppose itself or overcome since it is undifferentiated or “objectless.” In Leclair, the child becomes the primary narcissistic representation who must be killed not just once but over and again if there is to be the lack of an object required for desire and speech.

Leclair draws on Freud’s “On Narcissism,” agreeing with Freud that the affectionate parent lavishes the attention on their child that they would themselves have liked to receive. In this way, they feed the primary narcissism of the child with their own primary narcissism. The ascription of perfection to the child, the dream that he or she will enjoy a happier and more fulfilled life than his or her parents, that he or she will resist illness, death, suffering and restrictions on his or her will repeats and re-enacts the primary narcissism of the parent who, all along, wanted to be “the center and core of creation”. Freud invokes “His Majesty the Baby” – the image of ourselves that the parent bears as the narcissistic object of their parental love.

Drawing on Freud’s analyses, Leclair underlines the importance of the primal phantasy “a child is being killed” as the attempt to overcome this self-sufficient tyrannical child who is unable to speak and desire insofar as he is without lack. Leclair makes the programmatic claim that psychoanalytic practice must aim at exposing the ongoing labor on the part of the subject to “kill” this wonderful child whom, as he writes, “from generation to generation, bears witness to parents’ dreams and desires”. The psychoanalyst must understand that “there can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone’s birth is inscribed”.

In a phrase that draws Blanchot’s attention, Leclair invokes the “impossible but necessary murder” that permits life to refer to the putting to death of the returning “wonderful child”. The primal phantasy to which Leclair refers echoes Blanchot’s own account of the companion who comes forward in us to experience what cannot be endured in the first person. It recalls the passages on Levinas where Blanchot writes of the “unbearable,” referring to a pre-originary affection – a receptivity to the Other that occurs before the organization of the subject.*

In his fragments on Leclair in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot refers to the infans as a “silent passive,” a “dead eternity” from which we can only separate ourselves by “murdering” it. This murder, Blanchot notes, liberates our desire and our speech: it is also the condition of the capacity to murder. In this sense, the infans is, he writes, a companion “but of no one”; the one who we seek to particularize as an absence that we might live upon his banishment, desire with a desire he has not, and speak through and against the word he does not utter – nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed)” (71-72).

It appears that Blanchot concurs with Leclair: in one sense, the child is being killed; the experience of absence annihilates the child by turning upon him a capacity to negate that grants him an apparent freedom. But Blanchot concurs because he allows the child to stand in for the companion and the murder of the child to figure the movement from the first to the third person. The child becomes a name for an asymmetrical and non-reappropriable reserve harbored by the “I” which suspends the possibility of its ever achieving self-presence, of a stable being-there in the first person.

The return of the child is the return of “il” in the place of the “I” as the bearer of the experience in question. Yes, the “I” will regain the power that is proper to it, but in the instant to which Blanchot refers, there is no “I” there to detach itself from the experience who could recollect it or who could synthesize it into a sequence of other instants.

In this sense, Blanchot reads Leclair just as he reads Freud: he points to an alteration – a primary event that is the repetition of a “first time” without anchorage in what is properly individual about our histories, any of us, each of us. A child is being killed: what returns, for Blanchot, is not a tyrannical child but the “il” that disperses or disarranges the power of the “I” – the neuter as refusal. But the attributive function of this phrase, the reference it makes to being, to the positing of the “is,” is itself suspended. The “murder” that the “I” seeks is a murder of the companion, the “il” that would refuse to allow itself to become negated and to be particularized in this negation. This refusal prevents the “is” of the phrase fixing an event in place and time, of assigning a discreet point, a single experience to the origin. The origin is originarily repeated in an experience that undoes the self that is unified under the sign of the “I.”

What is important for Blanchot in his reading is the role Leclair allows the phrase “a child is being killed” to assume, repeating it until its strangeness becomes apparent, until it resonates outside a psychoanalytic context, rejoining his meditation on language. The figure of the child bears no absolute privilege in Blanchot’s writings; in happily acceding their places to the “il,” the children in the fragment are a figure for the words like witnessing in which Blanchot opens a dissension. This is what Blanchot does with words like "work,” “death, “inspiration,” “fascination,” “the "night,” “insomnia,” “vigilance,” “communism,” “community,” “the companion,” “friendship,” in order to name whilst declaring the inadequacy of that and any other act of naming, thereby indicating a heterogeneity borne by the conventional meaning of the name in question. Thus the “other” work is not binary opposite of work, just as the “other” friendship is not enmity. To use formulations of the kind, “a communism without communism,” the “other” night, “daytime insomniac,” etc. is simply to make each word the locus of an impersonal naming.

In this sense, the word neuter, like the figure of the child, has no absolute value in Blanchot’s work; it is a placemarker, the empty, infinite strangeness of the “il” as it resists the attributive function of language, the spacing that unfolds and refolds in speech. The neuter indicates the enigma of nomination, uprooting ostension in the repetition, the flux and reflux of a speech that is the faltering of language, of speech, of reason. It yields its place to the “il”, the "he" or the "it" that hollows out an infinite gap in language whilst remaining empty, rendering intercalary any word that would fill in this initial caesura. The phrase to which Blanchot points in his reading of Leclair is a sign less of the respiration of language than its asphyxiation, less what Levinas might call Saying than smothering, less the wisdom of love of Otherwise Than Being than the madness of a foreword that unravels every word in advance.

Leclair’s child becomes for Blanchot the word that speaks the neuter, the “il” whose interminable repetition says over and again the displacement of the speaking “I.” Perhaps this is what speech would mean in Blanchot – it is not the response to Autrui that Levinas calls Saying, but a response to the impersonal other, to l’autre as it is incarnated in the experience of the excess of language over the power of the speaker, in the void that absents itself in the “I” such that an impersonal language, the rustling and murmuring of a language without a subject, can reverberate in its place.

Singularity

Do not think the world in terms of the representation of a destiny; its sense is immanent, not transcendent, and each being opens to the other in distance and nearness. It is the world that has become infinite; it comprises things, persons which have been set apart from one another even as they lie together. Think the whole as a coherence which is no longer part of a order or a plan. The co-presence of things: the roundplay of substitution through which everything can take the place of the whole, in which anything is infinitely mysterious and refers, in its mystery, to the mystery of all things.

Think the affirmation of beings in their common destitution. No longer are they part of a system which provides them with an assured signification. And even the word universe only designates the endless expansion, expansion without end through which the whole presses itself further into itself. Every being is adrift; each singularity is as singular as any other.

The Whole

Goethe murmurs of Romanticism: unfinished books, unaccomplished works. Blanchot responds:

Certainly it is often without works, but this is because it is the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the purity of the poetic act, an affirmation without duration, a freedom without realisation, a force that exalts in disappearing and that is in no way discredited if it leaves no trace, for this was its goal: to make poetry shine, neither as nature nor even as work, but as pure consciousness of the moment.

Without works? But then it never tried to produce a work, but only to mark in the work, to the extent that it broke its ancient forms, what refuses its measure. Wrecked lives, broken works better to affirm a movement of research, a search for a poetic knowledge. Poetic consciousness: a thinking, a not-yet-thinking in which the meaning of poetry and art is itself transformed. Schlegel, Novalis, Holderlin know themselves, as they write, to be true philosophers, truer to philosophical research than the philosophers around whom later Romantics will gather (Fichte, Schelling). It is as though for these three names such research had to take on another name: the Work, writing, in order not to realise itself but to experience and attest to what cannot be realised in the Work.

Novalis: ‘The poetic philosopher is "in a state of being an absolute creator."’

Schlegel: ‘The history of modern poetry is a perpetual commentary on this philosophical axiom: all art must become science, all science, art; poetry and philosophy must unite.’

The Athenäum is a manifesto, not the first, perhaps, although it is absolute new in affirming, as its content, something like an awareness literature would have gained of itself. Blanchot:

The poet becomes the future of humankind at the moment when, no longer being anything – anything but one who knows himself to be a poet – he designates in this knowledge for which he is intimately responsible the site wherein poetry will no longer be content to produce beautiful, determinate works, but rather will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination. To put this differently, literature encounters its most dangerous meaning – that of interrogating itself in a declarative mode – at times triumphantly, and in so doing discovering that everything belongs to it, at other times, in distress, discovering it is lacking everything since it only affirms itself by default.

Literature lacking itself, in lieu of itself, makes itself responsible in the figure of the poet for keeping open an absence in the work. An absence? A kind of presence, too: presence which only literature can affirm. But what does this mean? If the Romantics are inspired by the French Revolution, it is not by the classical oratory of the revolutionaries, but by the Terror itself. Heads tumbled from the scaffold, death was everywhere.

True, the Athenäum warns us ‘You will not waste your faith or your love on political things, but reserve yourself for the divine domain of science and art.’ Science, art: it is a question of a responsibility which will not be limited by anything but the great Work itself. The Work which indicates an absolute freedom unknown to even to revolutionary politics. And yet it still bears a revolutionary inspiration – it is still a matter of a manifesto, a manifestation:

Art and literature, on the one hand, seem to have nothing other to do than manifest, that is to say, indicate themselves in accordance with the obscure mode that is proper to them: manifest, announce, in a word, communicate themselves. This is the inexhaustible act that institutes and constitutes the being of literature. But, on the other hand – and herein lies the complexity of the event – this becoming self-conscious that renders literature manifest, and reduces it to being nothing but its manifestation, leads literature to lay claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics and philosophy – this would be little – but to everything, to the whole that acts in every instant and every phenomenon (Novalis).

The whole: how should one understand this? There is, in the Romantics a kind of power that revels in itself – the work of furious negation, the denial of everything, the denial of God, the denial of nature. This is the Terror: write, negate the given, lift the world from its hinges, celebrate the power to name which grants the world to you as a writer, allowing it to be reborn in your words. Speak the whole, say the world and you no longer depend upon it; speak and the world might be destroyed but you retain the power to speak.

But know that words are never yours, that by writing you only play with the words that were there before you. To write: sham power, power over nothing. Ah but the temptation is there nonetheless: the whole is that space which spreads itself before the writer: the world become page, the page become the blankness before the creation, the writer as the revolutionary who will call everything into being anew. Lay claim, then, to the sky, to the earth, to the past and the future, lay claim to science and art – and lay claim to more than this: the world is yours, the world is reborn on those pages upon which you write. Write furiously, do not pause because then you will remember that this revolutionary movement is empty, that those words were there before you, that language itself is an impersonal structure whose power is lent to you and will soon withdraw. Live in the madness of the revolution, blood pouring from your pen …

Isn’t this to accede to humanism, to the supposition that each of us, any of us, can occupy the place once taken by God? Or is it to depose humanism itself, to restore power to the power of the language which streams through us and allows us to speak? By whose power do you speak? Your own? – Or is it a borrowed power – one which you will punished like Prometheus for stealing the divine fire?

The Romantic poet embodies Prometheus in his daring and in his punishment. For the dullness of the daily round, when words, dull words, steal you from yourself over and again, is the eagle which swoops upon the Titan, devouring anew the lobes of his liver. But there are moments in which the whole glitters before you like fire in heaven and you dream of the Work which would bring heaven to earth.

In the end, the writer has no power over the power of language; the poem must fail; literature falls short of the Work. What matters is only the trace of the Work in such failures, the break in the poem which indicates the whole.

Romanticism inaugurates an epoch; even more, it is the epoch in which every epoch reveals itself for, through it, the absolute subject of all revelation comes into play: the "I" that in its freedom adheres to no condition, recognises itself in nothing in particualr, and is only in its element – its ether – in the whole where it is free.

Romanticism understands the whole as all that is, all that was and all that shall be. And thereby the Romantics confer that great act of recognition which reveals the significance of those titanic creators of the past (Shakespeare, Dante, da Vinci …) and of the innocent splendour of classical art. But if this is its achievement, it also deprives it of consolation: romantic art is adrift from itself, from its classical certainties; its task is not to realise but to indicate, not to complete but to fragment. It is no longer constitutes a world or inhabits one, belonging instead to the whole which retreats from any possible world.

This is what Hegel understood when he proclaimed that art could no longer answer the highest form of Absolute Spirit: Romantic art is deprived of itself, in lieu of itself. But this is the point: by that stroke, a change of epoch has occurred: art becomes merely an object of aesthetic, literary critical contemplation. Art, literature become what they are, attaining themselves at the moment what is called art no longer belongs to a particular world but to the whole ‘behind’ every world. Art has died, but art lives from its death; it is dead, but its dying will become its sole content, understood as what resists, in art, every attempt to secure its meaning and its future.

Lightness

Read a weblog every day and you’ll see blogs that disappear as well as those which are transformed into new forms. I enjoyed seeing a blog disappear from Red Thread(s); another has appeared in its place, but I remember the first, and I can see it beneath the new one like a psalimpsest. And there was another appearance/disappearance at Poetics of Decay. In both cases, it was a matter of referring beyond the blog to a work of some kind – a grander project, a story …

Was the trouble that a weblog is in some sense closed upon itself, that it is troubling to point to a writing beyond the writing of the weblog? To me, this weblog records the traces of a work much larger and ambitious than anything I do here. Larger, ambitious, but this is also to say riskier – there is the great risk of botching the work in progress. Writing here, by contrast, is lightness itself, a kind of alibi, a trace left to prove to myself that it was worth spending another day in the office.

Meanwhile R. M. lies on what she calls the ‘floor of dread’ contemplating her impending deadline. ‘It’s the weather’, I tell her, when we note that we’ve spent 72 hours in the office over the past 6 days and produced, for all that, very little. The weather … well it’s clearing up, I think, though clouds are amassing once again. R. M. and I have taken up tennis and play in the rain until the balls get soggy. Sharapova is our heroine.

Writing, Events

Bad faith: you say yourself: I write to try and catch up with yourself, to render accounts with respect to events, to say: here I am, I survived, I learned, I mastered my experiences, I brought it all back home. But you know that what happens refuses this mastery. That each event eludes you now, today, tomorrow, echoing what eludes you in every other event, in everything that happens.

Zero Summer

Why keep a weblog at all? In order to feel that, at the end of the day, something was accomplished. A little flourish, some not-yet-thinking, some verbal pyrotechnics … something at least to show for another day in the office or a day in the flat. And when even that is impossible, when days turn upon themselves and nothing asks to be written? You can at least leave a record of failure, a blog to say: nothing was possible today. And in this summer where nothing is possible? This zero-summer where every rainy, humid day was exactly like the previous one? In Spurious, this weblog, summer watches itself spinning in the void …

The World Unwoven

Not-yet-thinking: a thought not formed, a thinking which is not determining or identifying. It is not the ‘thing itself’ long sought by philosophy unless this designates what ‘in’ the thing which does not let be claimed or identified as the thing. It is a claim, an appropriation which cannot be appropriated in turn – cannot be grasped, that is, by a determinative thinking. Not-yet-thinking: a thinking which has yet to find its term, yet to allow itself to be enfolded by the concept. But what is it which allows this unfolding to unfold? What enfolds such a thinking so that it unfolds itself and the claim of the concept?

Not-yet-thinking attends to the coming-into-presence of the thing. But it is also that which sets itself back before what can be identified in the thing: it is a kind of residue, a stubbornness which belongs to the singularity of the thing, its unique occurrence. If it is not, here, a question of mediation, it is not one of immediacy either. The suspension of mediation, its incompletion. Think of it in terms of the coming-into-presence of things before they are identified or grasped as things. Of the way what gives gives itself and lays claim to experience.

Not-yet-thinking is non-wilful; it is a thinking that is implicated, unfolded by what there is to think. Unfolded, magnetised, drawn out of the power which is proper to it. Called out of itself, displaced with respect to itself and hence deferred with respect to its goal. Not an abdication of thought, giving up before the unthinkable and standing guard over the ineffable, but thought’s suspension – a detour of a thinking-on-the-way-itself – a non-developed thought or thought as interruption which is taken in by what, in things, turns away from their identification, their determination.

Not-yet-thinking is a name for life lived, for that opening to the world in which everything touches me before I assemble them into identities. Everything: it is a matter of the world, of that contexture of things and persons, of everything that is woven by me into a contexture. Is it this to which the opening passages of Woolf’s The Waves attends? When the child-narrators have not gathered what they experience into a world? When it is only this patch of blazing colour, this tremulous sound, this atom of sensation which awakens them?

"Birds are singing up and down and in and out of all around us," said Susan.

True, Woolf’s infants speak what they cannot speak – they indicate with words what words cannot find. But as they speak they also give voice to a speech which resounds in the pages of that literary writing which is claimed by a reserve that is not yet thought and not yet woven. They speak what literature speaks as it unweaves our world – as it tends towards that living fire which reaches us only in our most distant youth. Only children read, only children write.

Intimacy

Some moving lines from a manuscript I am reading:

Our private lives have become so invaded by economic necessity that we no longer any idea what love might or could be. Our intimacies might be nothing more than a flight from reality, a flight whose condition is the very world it flees.