Author: Lars Iyer

One cannot emphasise enough just how crucial was the mass domestication of the car, ensuring the transition from what might be called 'traditional solidarities' to the unprecedented unleashing of modern individualism. What does it matter if the car kills, pollutes, and often makes people into total jerks, its proliferation destroying every urban space worthy of the name, when what is at stake is to ensure the domestication of gigantic human masses, the forging of thousands of psychologies of average men on wheels, 'highway mentalities', aping day and night the fluidities and competition of the Great market, etching it into the landscape ….?

Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs

INTERVIEWER

This sounds very pessimistic and hopeless and seems at variance with your mystical and religious tendencies.

IONESCO

Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack. You know, the Cathars [a Christian sect of the later Middle Ages] believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world—which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it. That is why I prefer the phrase “theater of derision,” which Emmanuel Jacquart used for the title of his book on Beckett, Adamov, and myself, to “theater of the absurd.”

Ionesco, interviewed

To walk about London on a Sunday with nowhere to go – that will take the heart out of you.

Whatever you do, don't be gloomy, because that gets on people's nerves.

And don't write about anything you know, for then you get excited and say too much, and that gets under their skins too.

At lunch she drank a half-bottle of Burgundy and felt very hopeful.

I've had rather a rum life, but I was thinking the other day, would I go through it all again? I think not.

I like the man who wrote From Russia With Love… Ian Fleming. He's one who can take you away from everything if you're bored and sad.

No more pawings, no more pryings – leave me alone. …

I hate the whole bloody business. It’s cruel, it’s idiotic, it’s unspeakably horrible.

I didn't ask to be born; I didn't make the world as it is; I didn't make myself as I am; I am not one of the guilty ones.

One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out.

I was always happy in the morning, not always in the afternoon and never after sunset.

I'll bet my tears are ninety per cent gin.

I don't feel well. I don't feel up to it. My clothes are too shabby.

You know what you must do in your writing. You must tell the truth about them. You must tell the truth against their lies.

'Smile please,' the man said. 'Not quite so serious.'

When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem: I didn't know/ I didn't know/ I didn't know. Then I settled down to be miserable.

I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling.

Haven't touched a drop for a month. Won't it be fine when I do.

Yesterday at the cinema in the one and threes, watching the usual thing. Biff. Bang. Why, you dirty double-crossing. Bang. Biff.

Don't listen to what I say. Don't listen to me, I'll depress you.

I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes – a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it.

I wish I were old and the whole damned thing were finished; then I shouldn't get this depressed feeling for nothing at all.

Justice. I've heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie.

Let's have more drinks, honey.

Detestable world.

'Oh, shut up about being tired,' she would say. 'You were born tired. I'm tired too. We're all tired.'

Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants.

I'd never get into the sacred circle. I was always outside, shivering.

One is born either to go with or to go against.

'Obscene drawings on the tablecloth are not allowed here,' the waiter said as he approached.

Do you believe in God? I do not know. In human love? Yes. Still? Yes. In humanity? No.

There's very little invention in my books. What came first was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.

His name was Disastrous because his godmother thought it such a pretty word.

'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?'

I'm over eighty. Look at me. And what have I done? Nothing! Nothing! Mediocrity. Mediocre, that's what my work is.

The mean things they got away with – sailed away with – smirking.

The estate house had been empty for so long that a centipede fell out of a book when I opened it.

Oh, God, I'm only twenty and I'll have to go on living and living and living.

So many people think I don't exist that sometimes I ask myself if I do.

I am alive I think. Not at all sure sometimes, and waving not drowning.

I feel it's very tactless of me to be alive. No savoir faire. (Damn little savoir vivre either)

Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants.

I do believe that life's all laid out for one. One's choices don't matter much.

You'd pine to death if you hadn't someone to look down on and insult.

Oh God the stupidity, the ugliness, the darkness, the loneliness and the cruelty of this beastly little place.

Drama is catching, I find.

You look very perky, I hardly recognised you.

It's so cold in this damn place that I can't think of anything except how cold I am and cold in general and that cold is hell.

'Obscene drawings on the tablecloth are not allowed here,' the waiter said as he approached.

I am trying to stop hope growing again like the beanstalk.

I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me.

The trouble is I have plenty to say. Not only that but I am bound to say it.

Tears? There's not a tear in her.

The unutterably sweet peace of giving in.

It is cold and dark outside, and everything has gone out of me except misery.

I sat and I looked about and I thought: Why do I hate people? They're not hateful.

From Jean Rhys, various writings, various characters, via.

… under wage-labor, nihilism has entered production. It is no longer a question of modernization producing rootlessness, contingency, uncertainty, anomie as side effects of a rational core. Rather, productive activity uses those very effects as resources. “Nihilism, once hidden in the shadow of technical-productive power, becomes a fundamental ingredient of that power, a quality highly prized by the marketplace of labor.” (GM86) The result is the affective prevalence of opportunism and cynicism. The post-Fordist worker moves from one thing to another; negotiating rules of the game, responding to rules not facts. Money makes these things equivalent; the general intellect is always something else. It is a qualitative potential that forms the basis of all production.

McKenzie Wark on Paolo Virno

Direct self-observation is not necessarily sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves; indeed, we ourselves are nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continual flowing. Even here, when we want to step down into the flow of what appears to be our ownmost and most personal being, the dictum of Heraclitus is valid: one does not step twice into the same river.

Nietzsche, Human All Too Human

What you are seeking is a better age, a more beautiful world. It was this world that you embraced in your friends; with them you were this world…. It was not human beings that you wanted, believe me, you wanted a world. The loss of all golden centuries, as you felt them compressed into a single glorious moment, the spirit of all spirits of better ages, the power of all heroes’ powers: those were to be replaced for you by a single human being!

Diotima, in Hoelderlin's Hyperion

Strange! I am dominated at every moment by the thought that my history is not only a personal one, that I am doing something for many people when I live like this and work on and write about myself this way. It is always as if I were a multiplicity, which I address in intimate, serious, and comforting terms.

Nietzsche, unpublished note, 1880.

Discipline was Sun Ra's preachment – his major preachment. You know, Michael Ray told me, when they – you know, they practiced every day and they all lived in the same house, so they could get up – and I've seen them do it, when I did that interview in 1966 – and I was talking to Ra, he was sitting at the keyboard, it's about noon, and guys start appearing in this little three-room  apartment. I looked over there and here's a guy climbing out from under the grand piano, where he's been sleeping, and I look over there by the window and here's a guy coming off his mat on the window ledge, he's been sleeping there, and another guy's sleeping here, on the couch. They get up, you know, and walk in, have a bowl of cereal, and put on whatever they were putting on – a shirt, or whatever – and then they could come in and, as each came in, Sun Ra would tell them what they working on that day, and they would start working. And they did this every day.

Wayne Kramer, interviewed in Sun Ra: Interviews and Essays

My dear friend, I feel as though it has been ages since you wrote. Yet perhaps I deceive myself: the days are so long, I no longer know what I am supposed to do with them. All my 'interests' have gone missing. In the deepest part of me an immovable, black melancholy holds sway. Otherwise, weariness. Mostly in bed. Also it's the most rational thing to do for myself. I've lost a great deal of weight; people are amazed. Now I've found a good trattoria and will fatten myself up once more. However, the worst thing is this: I can no longer seize on any reason why I should live for another six months. I am deprived, and I suffer too much. Further, I've begun to grasp the imperfections, the mistakes, and the genuine calamities of my entire intellectual past, which are inconceivably vast. It is too late to make up for them; I won't be doing anything good anymore. why do anything at all! - 

Nietzsche, letter to Overbeck, March 22nd 1883

My existence is a terrible burden: I would have cast it off long ago if I hadn't been conducting the most instructive tests and experiments in the intellectual and ethical domains precisely during this period of illness and almost total deprivation – this joyfulness, thirsting after knowledge, brings me to heights where I triumph over all martyrdoms and all hopelessness. On the whole, I'm happier than ever before in my life. And yet! Constant pain, a feeling of being half-paralyzed, a condition closely related to seasickness, during which I find it difficult to speak – this feeling lasts several hours a day. For my diversion i have raging seizures (the most recent one forced me to vomit for three days and three nights; I thirsted after death). Can't read! Only seldom can I write! Can't deal with my follows! Can't listen to music!

Nietzsche, letter to Otto Eiser, January 1980

I am at the end of my thirty-fifth year; the 'middle of life' they have called it now for a millennium and a half. Dante had his vision during this period; he speaks of it in the opening lines of his poem. And now in the very midst of life I am so 'surrounded by death' that it could seize me at any hour. Given the nature of my illness, I am forced to think of a sudden death, due to convulsions (although I would a hundred times prefer a slow, lucid death, during which one could still speak to friends, even if it should be a more painful one). Thus I now feel like the most ancient of men, also in the sense that I have fulfilled my life's work. a good drop of oil has been pressed from me, I know, and they will not forget that about me … 

Nietzsche, letter to Koeslitz, September 11th 1879

I find it preposterous and, even more than that, myopic in you to have let several months pass without getting in touch with me.

On the other hand I am best off alone.

More and more I am coming to think of the firm as an anonymous, adversarial force.  Do something to enfeeble this impression.

Most of the time just thinking about Suhrkamp is enough to make me lose my temper.

Perhaps we should get together sometime.

Or perhaps not.

Indifference helps me across all the mountains of rubbish.

One cannot be enough of an adversary.

The water level of dimwittedness is rising.

[…] Respond to this sentence when you happen to be going through a phase when you have a sense of humor.

[…] I would be saying a lot if I were further to remark that it would be pointless to make a single further remark.

We are all standing on an ice sheet of misunderstanding.  And so we would do best not to make any sudden moves, lest we tumble into the water.

It would be fine by me if you replied immediately.

Take it all as you will

Thomas Bernhard to Siegfried Unseld, his editor at Suhrkamp, in a letter from 1972 (translated by Douglas Robertson)

Deleuze: 'Life will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life'. this amounts to a conversion or revolution in thought. the relevant insight is that the question of the meaning of life is a false problem, for it seeks to displace a living, breathing, thinking person in favour of a completed thought expressing a meaning or purpose. This would be to mistake the greater for the less, so that one attempts to regulate the greater by the lesser. it is the gesture of taking a perspective produced by life, nature and history as though it stood entirely outside. Rejecting such claims to know transcendent reality, the immanentist revolution consists in encountering life within thought, within the forces that count so much as how you think. For immanence means ethos: It is a way of thinking and dwelling …

Phaedrus, in Philip Goodchild's On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Five, six seconds and no more – then you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony. Man in his mortal frame cannot endure it; he must either physically transform himself or die. it is a lucid and ineffable feeling. You seem to be in contact with the whole of nature and you say: 'Yes, this is true!' God, when He created the world, said at the end of each day: 'Yes, it is true, it is good'. It is not emotion, it is joy. You forgive nothing because there's nothing to forgive. Nor do you really love anything – oh, this feeling  is higher than love! The most terrible thing is the horrific certainty with which it expresses itself and the joy with which it fills one. If it lasted longer the soul could not endure it, it would have to disappear. – In these five seconds I live the whole of human existence, I would give my life for it, the price would not be too high. I order to bear this any longer one would have to transform oneself physically.

Kirilov, in Dostoevsky's The Devils

In 1994, my mother had just died. I went to visit my father on Rue Michel-Ange. I found him on the telephone with Maurice Blanchot.

To my knowledge, this had almost never occurred.

In expressing their mourning, they said tu to one another. The words broke up over their first names: Maurice, Emmanuel. There was between the two of them an inexpressible connection that for thirty years had only been expressed through letters and the dedications of their books.

“Raissa is dead,” Blanchot was saying. The sentence hung there. It was not necessary to expand. “Raissa is dead.” What I heard there was like an echo from the forties. The voice of “broken and martyred France,” but the eternal France that my father had always loved.

Standing there next to my father, I then remembered June 1961. Maurice Blanchot was involved in the political battle of the time. June 1961 was the last encounter between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. I was present, a child hardly twelve years of age.

There had been a great event in my father’s life the previous evening. I was there, too.

It was the thesis defense of Emmanuel Levinas in the old Sorbonne. The Liard amphitheater was full. The French university was getting Totality and Infinity.

On the jury were Jean Wahl, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel, and Georges Blin. In the audience standing very discretely was Maurice, always the friend, the unique and brotherly interlocutor. It was the following morning that Maurice Blanchot came to visit Emmanuel Levinas at his home on 59 rue d’Auteuil. He had, it seems to me, been there several times since the war. This thesis defense of the previous evening marked the end of my father’s institutional isolation. Undoubtedly emotion dominated, too strong. Words were pointless.

What could they say to one another?

I was present for a strange and sublime “pas de deux” in that living room on Auteuil, where Totality and Infinity had been written in sorrow.

There was in this room a silent emotion interrupted by attempts at speaking.

The impossible words were fragmented like broken sobs.

There remained only the“tu”and their given names, Maurice, Emmanuel. They paradoxically helped to veil the extreme intensity of the connection, just as they would much later in 1994.

My father stood almost perfectly still in front of the fireplace while Maurice performed a series of scholarly and continuous circumvolutions in that living room.

To the child that I was at the time, Blanchot appeared immeasurably elongated and thin. He was very handsome. He walked with his chest slightly inclined like Giacometti’s L’Homme qui marche.

I felt the bond between the two men. It had been forged at the heart of the twentieth century’s great tragedies and nearly miraculous consolations: the Russian revolution, Nazism and its defeat, and the creation of the State of Israel.

But I could foresee at the moment of this last encounter that the forms of the connection uniting these two men were again going to be radicalized.

Why did this occur precisely on this morning of June 1961, the day after the defense of Totality and Infinity? I would not know exactly how to go about analyzing this.

The speech that carries within itself the inevitable memory of the profane and the dailiness of language became improper to use without betraying, for Maurice and Emmanuel, the infinite complexity of the values of life, of thought. It was a question of leaving intact everything that forged the connection between Blanchot and Levinas since Strasbourg in the 1920s.

That morning in June of 1961 they left one another to pursue this indissoluble connection in a proximity that was still greater for being further away, disengaged from all trivial orality.

They never again saw each other face to face. And that left room for a correspondence that so often was sublime and essential.

Michael Levinas, The Final Meeting between Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot [Technically, it wasn't their final meeting – Derrida recalls visiting Levinas with Blanchot in 1968]

The meetings of the college  [i.e., the Socratic College] took place after dinner every Tuesday (or Wednesday) in the rue de Lille, where Bataille was living. Their theme: Nietzsche. As well as Bataille, there were the five persons mentioned and, not seated like the others, studiously round the table, but sunk deep in an armchair, a seventh and for me mysterious individual whose voice was not heard in the banal exchange of greetings as people gradually arrived. I knew nothing about him. I did not ask him any questions. I did not seem him at Paulhan's, and encountered him only here, scarcely visible in the depths of the armchair. I had no difficulty persuading myself that he must never go out, so pale was his complexion, so white even his wrists. We were all quite thin, our waistlines under the control of a war-time diet. But even compared to us, Maurice Blanchot looked thin.

Bataille began with a brilliant presentation. After a while, you sensed that even the reader himself was perplexed. At first, this added a sort of anxious gravity to our attention. As it persisted, we began to exchange puzzled looks. your neighbours brow began to display a sort of shadow, a blur of doubt. Illumination was a long time coming. Bataille could feel it. Did he lose heart? His delivery became slower. He suddenly stopped.

In principle, the presentation was supposed to be followed by a discussion. But nobody knew how to begin. We stayed silent. Then, from deep in the armchair where he had virtually been forgotten about, Blanchot quiet uttered a few sentences of dazzling brilliance. They restored us to the joy of understanding. We breathed again. So marvellous was the moment that, in order not to spoilt it, we left it hanging by getting up and leaving.

Jean Lescure, cited by Michael Holland

– And how many new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the religious, that is to say, god-forming instinct, wants, from time to time, to come back to life, how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time! So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless meoments that fall into one's life as if from the moon, when one no longer has any idea how old one is or how young one will yet be – I should not doubt that there are many kinds of gods.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1038

Every inner and outer occurrence of lunar nights possesses the nature of the unrepeatable. Every occurrence possesses an enhanced nature. It has the nature of an unselfish liberality and dispensation. Every communication is a sharing without envy. Every giving is a receiving. Every reception inextricably interwoven in the excitements of the night. To be this way is our only way to know what is happening. For the 'I' does not retain for itself any elixir of its past possession, scarcely a memory; the enhanced self radiates outward into a boundless selflessness, and these nights are full of the senseless feeling that something will have to come to pass that has never come to pass before, something that the impoverished reasonableness of the day cannot even visualise. And it is not the mouth that gushes forth but all the body from head to foot, and the body above the darkness of the earth and beneath the light of the sky, the body that is yoked to an excitement that oscillates between two stars. And the whispers we share with our companion are pervaded by an utterly unfamiliar sensuality, which is not some person's sensuality, but the sensuality of the earth, of all that compels our sensibility, the suddenly unveiled tenderness of the world that touches all our senses and that all our senses touch.

Robert Musil, from a discarded draft of The Man Without Qualities

I have taken a truth drug and seen through all the lies I tell myself. I have laughed so long, so loud, so incurably at myself and all my pompous moralistic self-deceit that I almost died. Every single thought seemed so shallow, so weak so facile, so laughable. Every thought  hovered between affirmation and gelation, laughing at itself, laughing so hard at itself, laughing at the thought of laughing at itself, laughing at the thought that this laughter is all there is…

[…] Blasphemy, switching from God to not God and back again became my greatest joke, my original sin… this loneliness, this unattainable outside, meant that I had to die. I had to be crucified, to wake up on the other side in a resurrection.

Aristodemus, in Philip Goodchild's On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Car driving is a religion. Modernism as a whole resembles an arena, a self-contained circuit. That's why Formula One races are so important. They are the modern proof of what St Paul the Apostle wrote: the godless go round in circles. The circular rides in the circus contradict the elemental hope, the key theme of the modern age: the primacy of the journey out, opening up new spheres. If technology is the perfect control of sequences of movement, this leaves us with only one progressive function: braking.

[…]

… the culture of soul journeys begins with the observation that individuals can lose their souls. In depression some people become separated from the principle that animates them[…] Shamanism became important here because they know the art of looking for the depressed person's lost free soul somewhere at the edge of the world, and bringing it back to its owner. The early movement experiments and shamanic soul journeys were meant to revive the alliance between humans and their animators, that is, their companion spirits, the forces that help to arouse enthusiasm[…]

… the car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. The difference is that an external engine causes the movement. The car gives its driver additional power and reach. I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant[…] Two our of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside or on holiday, they go visiting, or they use the car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness.

Peter Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations

I cherish what Thomas Bernhard does, but in my view it isn’t literature.

Ah yes, Thomas Bernhard, the room-clearer of Austrian literature.  “His suggestive power consists in his ability to exploit and assemble prejudices.  It affects me like an article from Der Spiegel.  I often think he is our best Spiegel correspondent in Austria.  Because the things he writes don’t tackle problems of narrative or form at all, they seem to me to be having an almost detrimental effect on art.  I found his last few books to be almost criminal in their shoddiness.  Apart from his suggestive power, which of course is unique to him and always extremely effective, there was nothing there.  But in his new book, Extinction, I am suddenly seeing the rudiments of description, of enthusiastic description of locales and spaces, which for me is of course the most important thing in literature.  Otherwise it is of course difficult not think of this drama about the lord of a castle as [Ludwig Ganghofer’s 1895 novel] Castle Hubertus, only with a negative spin.  But I was cheered and relieved by those descriptions of the orangery or of the kitchen, because I was able to enjoy a feeling of parity.  Of course I wish I could approve of him; I have indeed revered him for 25 years as a kind of secular Austrian saint.

Handke on Bernhard, from an article in 1986 (letter 501 here)