Rather than, say, foregrounding the constructed and unstable nature of reality through unreliable narration and winking gestures toward the fictiveness of the text, Iyer’s self-deprecating presence in the story makes his prose more direct and his satire more poignantly pathetic.
Fascinating review of Spurious and Dogma by Saelan Twerdy at The New Inquiry.
Wittgenstein in those days often warned us against reading philosophical books. If we took a book seriously, he would say, it ought to puzzle us so much that we would throw it across the room and think about the problem for ourselves.
He had he said, only once been to high table at Trinity and the clever conversation of the dons had so horrified him that he had come out with both hands over his ears. The dons talked like that only to score: they did not even enjoy doing it. He said his own bedmaker’s conversation, about he private lives of her previous gentlemen and about her own family, was far preferable: at least he could understand why she talked that way and could believe she enjoyed it.
He liked the north of England, too: when he asked the bus conductor on a Newcastle bus where to get off for a certain cinema, the conductor at once told him it was a bad film there and he ought to go to another. And this started a heated argument on thus bus as to which film Wittgenstein ought to see and why. He liked that: it was the sort of thing that would have happened in Austria.
From Karl Britton's 'Portrait of a Philosopher', his memories of Wittgenstein
Do not think, he said, that you can understand what another philosopher is saying (and I believe he mentioned Spinoza as an illustration). The nearest you can get to it is this, ‘The landscape is familiar. I have been in this neighbourhood myself’.
I went on to ask why he had left his chair in 1947, and I think I can recall the words he used in his reply: ‘Because there are only two or three of my students about whom I can say, I do not know I have done them any harm’.
From Tranoey's reminiscences of Wittgenstein
Tiny Camels muses further on Dogma, the fragmentary, tweets, and other things.
How many misspellings can you count? Charlie McBride's short interview with me in the Galway Advertiser.
He remembers them well: my work years, W. says. My writing years. I used to sleep in my office, in my cupboard, didn’t I? I used to live in my office, showering in the gym, living on discounted sandwiches (as I still live on discounted sandwiches, W. says) …
How much I wrote! How much I published! I was like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, W. says, gone mad and deaf in my belfry, ringing out the bells of my stupidity …
Even he was inspired, W. says. Oh, not by what I wrote – it was complete rubbish, he says. But by my shamelessness in publishing it at all. One essay after another, one essay and then another in every kind of academic journal, W. says, across every discipline you could name.
It was pell-mell, W. says. Completely shameless. Completely opportunistic …
Ah, but my work years are long past. What do I do all day?, W. wonders. How do I occupy myself? Do I read? Write? Do I continue to refine my knowledge of Sanskrit? Of ancient Greek? Do I continue to try to understand mathematics, and keep up with the latest developments in the sciences?
Ah, he knows the answer, W. says. He knows how I live.
A hot day. Dundee's famous micro-climate. – 'You don't sweat much, do you?', W. says. 'It must be your Hindu genes'.
Indians have more sweat glands: haven't I told him that? You'd think that that would make you sweat more, W. says.
At the same time, I have the thick skin of a Scandinavian, W. says. Thick skin, to keep the Viking warm during the long winters.
And there's blubber under your skin, W. says. I'm as warm as a walrus, no matter how cold it is, he says. As warm as a sperm whale, diving beneath the Arctic ice. I am insulated by my fat, just as my head is insulated by my stupidity.
A fathead, that's what I am, W. says. But perhaps you need a fat head to dive into the depths of thought. Perhaps you need a kind of insulation, he says. Perhaps only the fat-head can think, W. says. Well, he'll dive with me, a whelk on the side of a whale.
At the conference. Why don't I ask questions anymore?, W. wonders. Why don't I intervene, after the presentations?
He remembers the questions I used to ask, W. says. After every presentation! My voice, booming out! My voice, resounding beneath the vaulted ceilings! For a time – a long time – no conference presentation was complete without one of my booming questions. There'd be no conference discussion in which I didn't have my say.
W. remembers the questions I asked in the warmest and stuffiest of lecture rooms. He remembers my interventions in the final hour of a long day of presentations. In the final minute! I cut through the fog. I broke through the torpor. It was marvellous, W. says. – 'Your lucidity. Your far-sightedness'.
Then what happened?, W. wonders. How did I end up so sullen and uncommunicative? I became silent. Surly. I sat with folded arms, and took no notes.
W. remembers the notes I used to take. Pages and pages of them! With diagrams! In different colours! He remembers the array of pencils and pens I used to line up beside my notepad. He remembers my underlinings and exclamation points. He remembers me writing No!, or Yes! beside my notes in capital letters.
What happened?, W. wonders. Do I still have questions in my head? Do questions still burn somewhere inside me? There's no sign of it, W. says. I sit, W. says. I slouch. I let it all wash over me – presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker. I let the waves break over me.
It means nothing to me now, does it, W. says. All thought, all philosophy. I am a mollusic on the shore, W. says. I am a pebble on the beach, simple and impermeable. I am lost in the single, as the waves break over me.
How did I become so passive, so inert?, W. wonders. When did I give up any effort to think? When did I stop externalising myself in questions and comments?
He knows the end of times suits me, in some way. He knows that it might allow me to come into my own.
It's as if the world were my nightmare, W. says. As if the whole would is nothing but a fever-dream of mine, in which he, W., has no real existence.
It's a kind of gnosticism, W. says. I'm the bad demi-urge, who made everything go wrong, and he's the divine principle which struggles for the good.
But in the end, W. knows that he's no match for me. The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction, and happening on my terms. And there I am laughing in the midst of the apocalypse. There I am, a little piece of it – a sample, like the tester pots of paint you can buy in B & Q.
This is what it's going to be like: that's what W. discovers in my company. The end times are going to be exactly like this.
How do I bear it, my day to day reality?, W. asks. But it's quite clear: I don't bear it. My life is in a state of collapse, anyone can see it. Lars is in the final act, W. always tells himself. It can't go on, can it? But it does go on, W. says. Empires have collapsed more slowly.
And there's my smile, W. says. My dreadful smile. It's as though I were enjoying some kjind of revenge, W. says. As though I was exacting a kind of revenge on myself, for what, he doesn't know.
'You have that look which says: everything's over, it's all finished', W. says. 'But it hasn't finished, has it? And it won't be finished until that dreadful smile, the mockery of the whole of existence, is wiped from my face.
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, W. says. But what when your friend is your enemy? What, when you friend is your saboteur and discourager?
W.'s question: 'Would you consider yourself a man of ambition, a man of persistence, a man who will leave a legacy?' And then, 'Are you a man who has honoured philosophy, or dishonoured it?' Are you a man of wisdom, or a man of folly? Are you a man of sound judgement and discrimination, or a man of foolishness and panic?'
And then: 'What do you think is your best feature: your wit? Your grace? Your elegance?'
W. is in a questioning mood. – 'Would you call yourself a moral man?', he asks. 'Would you call yourself a man of honour?' And then, 'Do other people look up to you? Are others moved by you, inspired by you?' And then, 'Do you think you've touched other people's lives – in a good way? Have your students changed the way they live because of you?' And then, 'Do you think you deserve the title, lecturer? Do you think you stand in the tradition of other great lecturers in the past?
More questions. – 'What do you think you've imparted to your students? What do you think they've taken from you?' And then, 'What does teaching mean to you?', he asks me. 'What is your method of teaching? Do you think they've learned from your example?' And then, 'Do you regard yourself as an inspiring presence, or an inhibiting presence? Have you been an open road, or a living obstacle? Have you pointed beyond yourself like a seer, like a prophet, or have you only ever pointed to yourself as a living warning?'
'Do you teach by example?', W. says. 'Do you tell your students about your life, about the way you've sought to exemplify the philosophical ideal?' He tells his students about my life, he says. He uses me as an example. Of the vices of thought. Of thought's compromise and destruction. Lars is where philosophy crashed and burned, he tells them. Lars is where philosophy shot itself in the head.
Tatiaana L. Laine reviews Dogma for The Brooklyn Rail.
Here in Turin I exercise a perfect fascination. Everybody glances at me as if I were a prince …, Everything comes easily to me, everything succeeds, although it is not likely that anyone has ever had such great things on his hands … there is a special satisfaction in the way doors are held open for me, meals set out.
Nietzsche
The last philosopher, I call myself, for I am the last human being. No one converses with me beside myself and my voice reaches me as the voice of one dying.
Nietzsche
A human being must live in such a state of anguish that if he were a pagan he would not hesitate to commit suicide. In that state, then, he must – live! Only in that state can he love God.
Kierkegaard
RM reviews Spurious at The Crack magazine.
I pick three 'guest books' for The Barnes and Noble Review (halfheartedly, and with flat prose.)
New long interview with me by Melissa Seley for Bomb (my answers: rushed, poorly considered)
Randy Boyagoda reviews Dogma for The Globe and Mail.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Dogma for 3:AM.
Susan Salter Reynolds reviews Dogma for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Sanjay Sipahimalani reviews Dogma for the Indian Express.
Cameron Martin reviews Dogma for the New York Times. It will appear in print on Sunday.
Even death eludes them: not only the "sweetness" of the white-bearded Bhishma's timely death, but also the resounding, heroic/anti-heroic death of an Ian Curtis or even one modelled on the bathos-ridden suicide of Bruno in Stroszek that we might have been expecting from the chicken à la Herzog that was proffered at the beginning of the book …
Being in Lieu reflects on Dogma.
… the pain is deeper now, the desperation more acute, the catastrophe more imminent.
Paul Bowes reviews Dogma at Amazon.co.uk.
Do not be deceived: this last lamp does not give more light – the dark has only become more absorbed in itself.
Our talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has foundered on the forehead of a drowned man.
A festival celebrating Robert Walser in Newcastle. All events free.
I am contributing to the following events:
Tues. 20/03 1– 2.30pm
BIOGRAPHY AND LEGACY on Culture Lab Radio
A radio discussion on the role of madness in art and artistic legacy, with Laura Cull, Tess Denman-Cleaver, Gabriele Heller and Lars Iyer.
Tune in at http://culturelabradio.ncl.ac.uk/
Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Grand Assembly Rooms, Kingʼs Walk, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, Tel: 0191 246 4607
Fri. 23/03 4.30-7pm
FERNE NÄHE / DISTANT CLOSENESS at Cuture Lab
A talk by Reto Sorg about Robert Frankʼs exhibition Ferne Nähe /Distant Closeness at the Robert Walser Zentrum, Bern March 2012.
Followed by a panel discussion with Jo Catling, Lars Iyer, Daniel Medin, Daniele Pantano, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about Walserʼs unique
legacy.
Notes from John Felstiner's Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. My comments in square brackets.
[Celan, speaking to Bonnefoy:] You are at home within your language, your reference points, among the books, the works you love. As for me, I am on the outside.
[Celan, writing to Petre Solomon, 1957:] I've become neither European nor Western. Friends – I have scarcely any. The 'praise' you speak of – you can safely put that in quotes.
… Adorno thought Celan the only authentic postwar writer to stand with Samuel Beckett and made copious notes in his copy of Celan's Sprachglitter (1959).
[From the Bremen address:]
For a poem is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time – through it, not above and beyond it.
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland, perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward someting.
He told an interviewer in Bremen, 'In my first book I was still transfiguring things – I'll never do that again'.
Celan writing to Gleb Struve, editor of Mandelshtam's works concerning his own translations from the Russian poet:
May I say even here, right away, that Osip Mandelshtam lies closest to my heart? … I know scarcely any other Russian poet of his generation who was in time like him, thought with and out of this time, thought it through to its end, in each of its moments, in its issues and happenings, in the words that faced issues and happenings and were to stand for them, at once open and hermetic. I'm simplifying – I know. Please just see in these lines … the impression of my encounter with Mandelshtam's poems: an impression of inalienable truth.
[Mandelshtam isn't someone who] wanted to make the Word 'thing-fast', so to speak – whether in that sense we may not often understand the Word under the sign of a 'last' thingliness. – But where in great poetry is it not a question of last things?
Celan's afterword to his Mandelshtam translations:
As for scarcely any of the poets who share his time and destiny in Russia […] for OSIP MANDELSHTAM, born in 1891, a poem is the place where what can be perceived and attained through language gathers around that core from which it gains form and truth: around this individual's very being, which challenges its own hour and the world's, his heartbeat and his aeon. All this is to say how much a Mandelshtam poem, a ruined man's poem now brought to light again out of its ruin, concerns us today.
[From Celan's radio broadcast on Mandelshtam:] Poems are sketches for existence: the poet lives up to them.
'I have a homeland': Nelly Sachs said this of Celan's Sprachgitter, when he sent it to her.
Celan also linked his faith in poetry to "Kafka's statement, 'The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world, takes away out hope and gives us certainty!' I've always read that as if it gave grounds for being here, living, breathing".
… Heidegger had a "curious wish", as Ingeborg Bachmann described it. "For a Festschrift on his seventieth birthday he requested his publisher to get a poem from Paul Celan and one from me. And we both said no".
From a letter to Sachs, from 1960, and thinking of recent neo-Nazi outbursts:
What can I say to you? Every day, baseness comes into my house, every day, believe me. What is in store for us Jews? And we have a child, Nelly Sachs, a child!
Celan, writing to Hans Bender, May 1960, reacting to accusations of plagiarism:
Craft – that is a matter of hands. And these hands belong in turn to one person only…. Only true hands write true poems. I see no basic distinction between a handshake and a poem. […] We live under dark skies, and – there are few human beings [Menschen]. This probably why there are so few poems'.
To Nelly Sachs, August 1960:
It's going well for us, Nelly, really well…. Yes, it's bright again – the net, the dark one, is pulled away – isn't that right, Nelly, you see it now, you see you're free, in the clear, with us, among friends? … And I even see the words waiting for you, Nelly, the words you give life to with your new brightnesses – to all our joy.
As part of her reply, she writes: 'I so long for my beloved dead', and Celan replies:
You still know, don't you, when we spoke about God a second time in my house, how the golden gleam stood on the wall? … Look, Nelly: the net is pulled away! … Look: it's getting light, you're breathing, you're breathing free!
[Sachs undergoes a nervous breakdown] Celan went by train to Stockholm during the first week of September 1960 and stood at the door of her room, but either she did not recognise him or else would not admit him.
[Celan] went to Buber's hotel on 13 September. He took copies of Buber's books to be signed and actually kneeled for a blessing from the eighty-two-year-old patriarch. But the homage miscarried. How had it felt (Celan wanted to know), after the catastrophe, to go on writing in German and publishing in Germany? Buber evidently demurred, saying it was natural to publish there and taking a pardoning stance toward Germany. Celan's vital need, to hear some echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp.
[After the plagiarism trouble began, he wrote to his editor:] The hopes I still have are not great: I shall try and hold onto what is left to me.
'Pallaksch. Pallaksch' [quoted at the end of one of Celan's poems]. A senseless term that Hoelderlin was given to uttering in his late years, sometimes it meant Yes, sometimes No.
Though he never made any religious profession, as did Franz Rosenzweig returning to Judaism after a Yom Kippur service, Celan's writing cut its own covenant.
From a letter to a Russian critic, from 1961:
Like almost no one else, you've recognised that to me, Mandelshatam means an encounter, an encounter such as one may seldom experience. He was, from quite far away, that which is brotherly …
Writing to Federmann in March 1962, Celan called himself 'an out-and-out Ashkenazi Jew', noting that 'I have – witness Blok, Mandelshtam, and Esenin – a Russian (read: Jewish) great-grandmother'.
[When Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, who had brought out his first two books, published a book of ballads which had thrived under Nazism, Velan switched to S. Fischer Verlag.]
[When he received the Buechner Prize, he said they had chosen him] so that, having gotten this alibi, they could all the better run me down.
[In 1962, he writes of] a psychological pressure, over the long run intolerable.
[In September 1962, he writes to Nelly Sachs] All things are unforgotten.
[He writes in 1963, looking back, of his severe depression around Xmas 1962.]
Early in January 1963, reading a book on the Bible, he put nine scorings next to the Law of the Stranger: 'The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as a hom-born, and thou shalt love him as thyself'. In the same year, Bonnefoy remembers how Celan burst into sobs when discussing the Goll plagiarism campaign.
[In (late?) 1963, he suffers a nervous breakdown.]
[In 1965, Adorno republished his essay in which he called it barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz. This essay was used against Celan by a journal – specifically, against 'Todesfuge', against 'despair turned "beautiful" through art …']
[Entered a psychiatric unit outside Paris for a few weeks in May 1965. Read Shakespeare's plays.] Whenever he lit on anything about madness, fools, betrayal, slander, or suicide, he underlined it and noted it in the back of the volume. […] he wrote about Lear 'Hewn into the brain'.
[Goes back to the clinic in December 1965, this time for seven months. Breaks with his publisher.]
[In 1966, Adorno writes 'Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it might have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.]
[Spring 1967, amidst drug and shock therapy, Celan is writing a poem a day.]
[1967. He and his wife decide to live apart. Petre Solomon, visiting him, says he found his old friend, at 46] profoundly altered, prematurely aged, taciturn, frowning … 'They're doing experiments on me', he said in a stifled voice, interrupted by sighs … Paul wasn't depressed all the time, sometimes he had moments of great joy – very brief, it's true, and punctuated by a nervous laugh, shrill and broken'.
[July 1967, visits Heidegger. Celan reads in Freiburg, with the philosopher attending, and refuses to have his photograph taken with him.]
[During May 1968, he turns to Kafka's diaries.]
[In 1969, in Jerusalem, he meets Aharon Appelfeld, born in the same street in Czernowitz where Celan lived from 1935 on.]
[Feb 1970, to Ilana Shmueli:] the doctors have much to answer for, for every day is a burden, what you call 'my own health' is probably never to be, the damage that reaches to the core of my existence…. They've healed me to pieces!
[April 1970. Celan commits suicide by drowning.]
Out today (e-book, 30th March). Buy from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.
I say we, because I believe I can speak for a handful of people inseparably linked by a bond of political friendship, who shared a common knot of problems as 'lived thought'. For us, the classic political friend/enemy distinction was not just a concept of the enemy, but a theory and practice of the friend as well. We became and have remained friends because we discovered, politically, a common enemy in front of us …
… the boys who stood outside the gates of the Mirafiori factory in Turin in the early morning went home at night to read the young Lukacs Soul and Form. Strong thought requires strong writing. A sense of the grandeur of the conflict awoke in us a passion for the Nietzschean style: to speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath.
… we brought together a fine old madhouse. During our meetings, we would spend half the time talking, the rest laughing.
… such selfless public interventions, free of all personal ambition; such a straightforward sense of commitment; and not least, such a disenchanted, self-ironising way of sharing collective work.
Mario Tronti, Our Operaismo
Lars Iyer's Blog 