Author: Lars Iyer

Now she can go around in circles in her books. She has put into place a sufficient number of motifs, reverberating among one another, so many schoes, already, that there remains nothing for her to do but to weave the Work, like one of the Fates, rewriting the books, converting them for the stage, imagining new possibilities, new variations for them. For one book to the next, from one dramatic scene to the next, she draws from writing the song of exile that goes out in all directions, droning it pell-mell: there is ther mother, love, the seaside, especially the cries, the waiting, the pain.

Alain Vircondelet, writing about Duras

PHILIPPEAU: Peace is in God.

DANTON: In nothingness. What offers more peace, more oblivion, than nothingness? And if ultimate peace is God, then doesn't that mean that God is nothingness? But I'm an atheist! How I curse the dictum that 'something can't become nothing'! And I am something, that's the misery of it!

Creation's so rank and rampant that no void is left, there's seething and swarming wherever you turn.

Nothing has killed itself, creation is its wound, we are the drops of its blood, the world the grave in which it slowly rots.

Buechner, Danton's Death

I’m fortunate enough to not have instilled in me an aversion to Christianity, and to Christian terms and concepts. It’s sort of easy for me to translate any religious or Christian term or concept into a language I understand in a heartbeat. 

Will Oldham, new interview

My general argument is that the traditional leftist narrative, which was quite serviceable in its day as a critique of education as exploitation, is simply a Kantian critique, which is that education was treating people as means and not ends, so is an affront to human dignity — not to mention it’s bad for you physically and has these deleterious effects on all levels of the person, like what Marx talked about in terms of factory work. The great Marxist critiques of education in the English speaking world — Bowles and Gintis, Daniel Liston, a lot of the critical pedagogy school — is that education is exploitation, it’s excessively vocational and narrowed down in an artificial way to service the needs of capital accumulation and not to service a broader conception of human needs.

My argument is that this critique was serviceable for its day, but I think capitalism has moved beyond that and made that critique almost quaint. Anyone of a certain age in the US and Western Europe realizes that being exploited may even be good, “please, find a capitalist to exploit me, at least that means I have a job.” If I could boil it down to one quote that inspired me to think about this it would be from Joan Robinson, who is an English economist, and she said something to the effect that for the worker “there’s only one thing worse than the capitalist exploiting you, and that is not being exploited by the capitalist within a capitalist economy.” So you are placed outside the loop of production in this precarious, disposable position, and I think that’s because capitalism itself has shifted.

In the book I say that that traditional leftist critique of education was appropriate for what I call the “all hands on deck” phase of capitalism, which coincides with the advent of universal schooling. […]

Due to an intensification of automation, technology, etc., I think that capitalism has advanced beyond that and it’s not the case that quantitatively more and more workers are functional and useful for profit accumulation, for the system. We’ve reached a point where we’ve out-produced ourselves, where productivity has increased so that simply not as many workers are needed. From the cold logic of capitalist accumulation, this increasingly youthful, educated group is kind of just surplus, they are more of a management and political stability problem — which we see inklings of in the Arab spring, or occupy movements, or London, or Greece, where there are huge levels of youth under-employment, or here where people with massive student debt are working for minimum wage at Starbucks.

David Blacker, interviewed

A saying from the Zohar: On the sixth day, having created man, God said to him: I have worked heretofore, now you shall continue.

A saying: Cain's true punishment? He unlearned the meaning of Shabbat.

The return of the scouts, discouraged and discouraging, provoked such distress among the tribes that Moses decided to commmemorate it every year. At every anniversary Moses ordered the Jews to dig graves for themselves and to lie in them overnight. The next morning heralds ran between the trenches, shouting: Let the living separate from the dead, let the living detach themselves from the dead!  On the fortieth anniversary all rose, for by that time all of them belonged to the new generation; they were worthy of entering the Promised Land, for to them, bondage was no longer a temptation.

Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God

Many attempted in vain to say the most joyful things joyfully; here, finally, they are expressed in mourning.

Hoelderlin

You ask what I mean by the 'nothingness' of revelation? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the prfocess of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak.

Scholem in a letter to Benjamin

Surely one of the things that make it so difficult to write about Sebald, to say anything genuinely new or revelatory about his work, is that he has done so much himself to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms for critical engagement with the work; his fiction already practices a rather efficient sort of autoexegesis that leaves the critic feeling a certain irrelevance (the posture of awestruck adoration that one finds in so much of the critical literature is, I think, one of the guises such irrelevance assumes). 

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life

… melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortune, has nothing in common with the wish to die. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so at the level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with rigid gaze [melancholy] goes over again just now things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical in their execution. The descriptino of misfortune includes within itself the possibility of its own overcoming.

Sebald, cited by Santner

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.

Rilke, Malte

Sitting before my little fire, I know, when the wind blows outside, moaning in the fieldstone chimmney I caused to be built for ornament, shrieking in the gutters and the ironwork and trim and trellises of the house, that this planet of America, turning round upon itself, stands only at the outside, only at the periphery, only at the edges, of an infinite galaxy, dizzingly circling. And that the stars that seem to ride our winds cause them. Sometimes I think to see huge faces bending between those stars to look through my two windows, faces golden and tenuous, touched with pity and wonder; and then I rise from my chair and limp to the flimsy door, and there is nothing; and then I take up the cruiser ax (Buntings Best, 2 lb. head, Hickory Handle) that stands beside the door and go out, and the wind sings and the trees lash themselves like flagellants and the stars show themselves between bars of racing cloud, but the sky between them is empty and blank.

Gene Wolfe, Peace

Nietzsche never seemed to lose sight of his own condition: he simulated Dionysus or the Crucified and took a certain delight in the enormity of his simulation. The madness consisted in this delight. No one will ever be able to judge to what degree this simulation was perfect and absolute; the sole criterion lies in the intensity with which Nietzsche experienced the simulation, to the point of ecstasy. […]

What he was conscious of was the fact that he had ceased to be Nietzsche. […]

In [eternal] return, everyday things abruptly receded into the distance: yesterday became today, the day before yesterday spilled over into tomorrow.

Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Almost everything I do now is a 'drawing-the-line under everything'. The vehemence of my inner oscillations has been terrifying, all through these past years; now that I must make the transition to a new and more intense form, I need, above all, a new estrangement, a still more intense depersonalization. So it is of greatest importance what and who still remain to me.

What age am I? I do not know – as little as I know how young I shall become…

Nietzsche, from the letter to Fuchs (14 December 1887)