Author: Lars Iyer

Alongside Bob Dylan, Fred Neil and a local folk singer called Bob Gibson, Callier was discovering John Coltrane, who had just released his free jazz album A Love Supreme. "He was playing at a little club called McKees, and I got there early to see Elvin Jones nailing his drum kit to the floor. Then the quartet rocks on stage, and I wasn't prepared for the intensity with which these guys threw themselves into the music – I had never seen men do that before in my life and it frightened me. It made me realise that everything in life was in this music: the beautiful and the ugly, the godly and ungodly. Not everybody wants to touch those places because there are things we have to forget in order to live with ourselves, and that music didn't let you have any secrets.

Terry Callier, interviewed

There is no doubt that Jesus was crucified in about the seven hundred and seventieth year after the foundation of Rome; there is no doubt that the Lamb of God is being crucified each day, and will be until the end of the world. Yet it is as if now the crucifixion has at last become fully a historical reality. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being rejected by everything – I mean literally everything – and in every area of man’s endeavours: his thinking, his willing, his undertakings, his building of his world, his consumption, etc. It is in our day that Jesus is being, in the fullest and most radical sense, humiliated: simply left aside as possessing no interest or significance in comparison with what man discovers for himself and bestows upon himself. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being put to death, since none of his words or actions or miracles have any relevance for Eros-inspired man.

As long as the crucifixion of Jesus was the focus of men’s interests and eyes and thoughts, he was not truly crucified. In our day, the means man has acquired have made him turn his eyes and thoughts and consciousness away from the cross; the cross is good for nothing now but to mark men’s graves. Now Jesus has truly been crucified, in the fullest sense that the word ‘crucifixion’ can have as the sign and symbol of scorn, derision, unimportance, failure, abandonment. But think what this entails. It means that God has been conquered and eliminate from the society to which he once issued his challenge. The cross of Jesus, which was meant to be the sign of God’s unconquerable love, has now become purely and simply the sign of his failure. Eros has triumphed through technical and political advances. God has fallen silent.

The silence is the great silence that the evangelists tell us descended at the moment of the crucifixion and which had such tragic meaning for Jesus. It is the great silence that the Apocalypse tells us fell upon creation as the Lamb broken open the seventh seal. It is the silence of God, who is Word yet has now withdrawn into speechlessness. The God of the Word no longer reveals himself, no longer makes himself heard. We cannot say that the noise of the world and the words exalted by the mass-communications media have drowned out the Word of God. No, it is simply that God no longer speaks.

Here, it sems to me, we have a new challenge issued by God to this world. The man of the modern age wanted to slay the father; now, by eliminating the Son as he has, he has in effect slain the Father. He wanted to substitute his own power for the supposed or revealed power of God. He has worked miracles which seem divine (like the Pharoah’s magicians, who were as powerful as Moses and worked the same miracles as he did: the whole hermeneutical problem was already posed at that moment). He has mastered creation and has no further need of providence. He sees within his grasp the fulfilment of the age-old dreams he used to tell God about in his prayers. He knows there is no need of forgiveness for sin, because sin is just a sickness. He need not look to God for truth, because he has taken the path of ‘research and development’, and this path will lead him to all the answers. Salvation is no longer from the Jews or from God; man saves himself through his sciences and his technical skill.

Indeed, we may ask, what could God still have to say to man? What could he possibly still mean to man? The God who was once revealed in his self-humiliation is still being revealed in his present humiliation, and only in this humiliation! It is nothing but a monstrous show of human pride to extend the humiliation that God deliberately accepted and experienced in Jesus, to all suffering, unfortunate, humiliated, and exploited human beings. The theologians who assert that only in the persons of the por do we encounter Jesus and tat the poor alone are god’s image (the famous ‘horizontal relationship’) are simply theologians of Eros and human pride. They are inspired by the spirit of the world and are contributing to the accomplishment of man’s purpose, which is to strip God of his work and his very identity, to strip him of what he chose to be.

These theologians are today’s chief priests and members of the Sanhedrin who rend their garments at the scandal of Jesus declaring himself God. They are today’s Pharisees, far more so than the priests and pastors of another day with their attachments to institutions, who are now lost in the shadows of a history that is over and done with. By thus stripping God in the realm of theology, these theologians are finishing the work western man has done in other areas. And by so doing, they are effectively humiliating God and crucifying Jesus. Like Jesus before Pilate, God remains silent in the face of the insulting accusation; in what may well be the final combat, God remains silent.

God’s silence means that the world that wanted to be left alone is now indeed alone. It is left to its own dereliction. In writing these words, I am not proposing a hypothesis or a personal interpretation. I am simply repeating what the entire Bible tells us, namely, that God adapts himself to man, walks with man along the paths man chooses, and enters into a relationship with man in which God is the Wholly Other and yet is also inexpressibly close to man.

God’s silence also means that an event has occurred that is of capital importance for the history of the West. If, as I have tried to show, the history of the West is constituted by the tension and conflict between Eros and Agape, between man’s ambition to be completely dominant and the humility of God among us; if this history is the ever renewed result of the reciprocal challenges of man and God; if the meaning of man’s undertaking’s springs precisely from this relationship that was established by the Word of God: then the silence of God entails the disappearance of the very meaning of western history; that history is now annulled and rendered impossible. The paradox that is the West exists no longer.

From now on, all that is left as a drab, insipid unfolding of implications, an interplay of forces and mechanisms. There will be structures and systems, but we shall no longer be able to speak of ‘history’. Man is now seeing the very purpose of his struggling being removed from him, as well as very opportunity for a more intense life; he may continue to ‘fight’, but his fists will encounter only empty air and unbounded darkness. God’s absence means the abandonment of the world, but in this world man will discover that he himself is likewise absent. When the West claims a monopoly of the truth and seeks to proclaim it to others, it will arouse only anger and hatred. The West is dying because it has won out over God.

Jacques Ellul, Betrayal of the West

I see Europe marching with giant steps to its end: not for economic or technical or political reasons, not because it is being overwhelmed by the third world (which is in fact impotent), not because it is also being challenged by China, but simply because it has decided to commit suicide. All the behaviour (and I mean literally all of it) of the technicians, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and, at bottom (despite appearances), the philosophers, the film-makers, and the scientists is suicidal. Everything of a positive character that may be found is immediately turned inside out, distorted, and stood on its head so as to become a new source of accusation or a new means of destruction. The Left has triumphantly joined the Right in this race toward death, while Christianity celebrates its marriage with Marxism and proceeds to slay the old, impotent flesh that was once the glory of the world.

[…] The first movement is that of blind negation, a retreat into unqualified negation of all the West has been and can yet be. Some of its embodiments: the frenzied pleasure in destroying and rejecting, in playing the man without a future or the artist without culture; the sadism of the intellectual who tears language – his own language – to pieces, and who does not want to say anything further, because in fact there is nothing to say; the explosion of words, because there is no more communication; the mockeries that are regarded as work of art; and finally, the suicides, physical among the writers, painters and musicians. All this is happening because these people regard the ‘system’ as utterly frightful, and see it immediately absorbing and rationalising every project whatsoever. They feel caught by an inescapable dilemma, since even their irrationalities serve as compensation for the system and thus become part of it (although it never becomes clear in what precisely the famous ‘system’ consists).

[…] Lacan, Derrida, and all their second-rate imitators who think that absolute incomprehensibility offers a way out, when in fact we have shut the door on all possibilities and hopes, and have sunk into a resignation that knows no future. There is no longer anything to live for: that is what these intellectuals are saying without realizing it; the blinding light they shed is that of a sun on the point of sinking into the sea. Virtuosity has never been a substitute for truth. Withdrawal into curiosity of this kind shows only that for these intellectuals, the last Cardinal Eminences of the western world, there is no longer any such thing as truth.

[…] We are content to die of dancing. Our generation is not even capable of cynicism. It takes a kind of terrible greatness to say, ‘After me, the deluge’. No one says that today; on the contrary, everyone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.

[…] The intellectuals caught up in this directionless movement take the lids off bottomless wells; they lean over them and fall in.

[…] The nihilistic revolution has succeeded. Today’s political activists who still claim to be revolutionaries have nothing to put in nihilism’s place. Movement for movement’s sake, thorough study for the study’s sake, the revolution for the revolution’s sake: that, they say, is the only way to escape the system. It is a remarkable thing, however, that this system renders mad not only those who are part of it but those who reject it as well. The system is now the God who makes men mad, but it is a God we have created with our own minds.

[…] Yet once we strip away the illusionist’s veil of pseudo-scientific language or the layer of obscurity caused by a fragmented discourse, and look at what our sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Marxists, historians, novelists, and poets are trying to say, we are appalled at the emptiness, inanity, and incoherence of their thought. We realise that there is only a vast repetitiveness. Everything they say I completely familiar and has long since become commonplace.

[…] Today it is the myths of death, and they alone, that speak to us in our madness. The West is at its end – but that does not necessarily mean the end of the world.

Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West

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'The Love of Fate': a talk I gave to students at the European Graduate School. Pierre Hadot – Marcus Aurelius – Nietzsche. Edited down from a 4 hour session.

As the narrator of The Cheap-eaters says:

Life or existence was nothing other than the unceasing and actually uninterrupted and hopeless attempt to extricate oneself from everything in every possible department and drag oneself into the future, a future that time and again had nothing to offer but the renewal of this selfsame lethal process.

This is why all of Bernhard’s internal wrangling with form, with displacement, with beginning, is so important for the works as literature. The Cheap-Eaters demonstrates that the process by which the novel is written, however futile, is not simply a stylistic feature but co-determinate and co-determining with the activity of life.

Rather than enabling us to forget the debility of language and allowing us to revel in its constructions, Bernhard’s self-questioning in The Cheap-eaters shows us that it is paradoxically by resisting literature’s act of creation that one remains closest to life. The reason for doing so is not merely to demonstrate the incapacity of literature, to reveal the wizard behind the curtain for its own sake. Rather, it is that making literature in this way reveals something fundamental about what it is to be human, about our human condition. In order for the world to mean something, we have to reach reduce it, whilst attempting to reach across, to make our reduction always more than what it is. To speak, to name, to narrate, to write: the ways we interpret and understand the world, all do violence against its richness and potentiality. Bernhard is a writer who reveals this in his self-appointed role as a story-destroyer not because he simply removes a traditional plot structure from his work, but because he attacks the conditions of possibility for that structure in the first place. He goes against the story that literature tells itself. Writing in and through such a catastrophe, what is there left to say? Well, for Bernhard at least:

There’s the non-existent conversation with the past, which itself no longer exists, which will never exist again. There’s the conversation with long, non-existent sentences. There’s the dialogue with non-existent nature, intercourse with concepts that are non-concepts, that never could be concepts. Intercourse with conceptlessness, cluelessness. There’s intercourse with a subject-matter that is unremittingly imperfect. The conversation with material that doesn’t answer back. There’s the absolute soundlessness that ruins everything, the absolute despair from which you can no longer extricate yourself. There’s the imaginary prospect that you have built for yourself in order to be able to keep only imagining it. There’s the attempt to brush up against objects that dissolve the moment you think you could have touched them. There’s intercourse with actualities that turn out to be shams. There’s the attempt to piece back together a period of time that was never unified. There’s always the same groping in your imagination towards a representation of things that by its very nature must prove false. There’s your identification with things that have emerged out of sentences, and you know neither anything about sentences nor anything about things, and time and again you know pretty much nothing at all.

Daniel Fraser

Another recent series of novels about the sad decline of academia also trades in apocalyptic thinking. The books are Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012), and Exodus (2012), by British philosophy don Lars Iyer. The novels center on a series of conversations between two philosophers, men steeped in belatedness (they contrast themselves regularly with Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Rosenzweig), pessimism, and bewilderment. At one point in the first book, they agree: “These are the end times… . It’s enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We’ll be rounded up and shot, W. says. It’s only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out” (Iyer, Spurious 40–41). Another of their recurrent feelings is self-disgust: “What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – You. You are a sign of the End, says W. Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won’t have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer” (41).

The apocalypse mostly threatens W., in Dogma: “There are rumours in the corridors, he says. There are murmurings in the quadrangle. Compulsory redundancies … the restructuring of the college … the closure of whole departments, whole faculties … It’s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says” (8–9). Later the rumour is that “they’re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialize in sports instead. They’ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says… . They’ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He’ll probably be teaching shot put metaphysics” (97). Things go from bad to (at least symbolic) worse:

W.’s college has become a vale of tears, he says… . Chaos everywhere. Petty vandalism. Dead bodies, face down in the quadrangle, with knives in their backs. It’ll go up in flames, soon, the college, W. says. There’ll be black smoke rising from the lecture halls. And after that, who knows? Cannibalism, probably. Human sacrifice. (144–45)

As the third instalment, Exodus, begins, things have not gone quite so far, but W. now teaches only sports science students, humanities having been abolished at his college; and he predicts that all humanities departments in the country will follow. Not because the government has anything against philosophy or the humanities. No, “they’re simply going to marketise education, W. says. They’re simply going to turn the university over to the free market, just as they are turning all sectors of the public services over to the free market. They’re going to submit philosophy to the forces of capitalism” (Exodus 15). The forces of capitalism, that is, similar to those acknowledged in Australia, where higher education has become “seen by government as an export service industry in which Australia could find comparative advantage, the cultural equivalent of iron ore” (Connell)

There can be few more uncompromising accounts of a destroyed university system than the one that W. and Lars share. The fullest obituary reads:

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water, that’s what I always tell him, W. says. We’re poking it with sticks. None of us can believe it. Is it really dead, the university?, W. asks me. Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it really is dead, and there it is, floating, face down, I tell him. There’s no point pretending otherwise, not anymore. The university is dead, and there is its corpse. O, there are signs of life in the university, I tell W. It seems that it’s alive. But that life is the life of maggots, I tell W., devouring the substance of the university from the inside, living on its rotting. (Exodus, 11)

To insist, now, that reading Lars Iyer’s novels is a rich and fascinating experience even for a fellow humanities professor, that reading them is exhilarating, and that it is almost irresistible to begin rereading them immediately after finishing, begins to touch on the paradoxical, indeed ironic, nature of the academic novel. These books testify to some real and terrible changes in higher education. But knowing this does not deprive these books that embody those truths of their appeal, their value. One can read about the destruction of the humanities, even when one is employed in and committed to the humanities, read even about universities dissolving into cannibalism and human sacrifice and – while hating every bit of the process that led us to where we are today – enjoy reading it, as Lars Iyer probably enjoyed writing it, even though his story is dire.

From Merritt Moseley's 'Smaller World: The Academic Novel as Canary in the Coal Mine of Modern Higher Education', published in The Campus Novel: Regional or Global?, ed. Dieter Fucchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski editor. 2019, pps. 20-26.

Nietzsche and the Burbs, in Italian translation. 

Review: PDE

At the public school in Wokingham it is time for the Old Mole, the economics professor with her inevitable graphs on government bonds, the performance of the stock exchanges, the real estate bubble. What do they mean? she asks, smiling grimly. Art, Paula, Merv, Chandra, apocalyptic last year students, put forward their catastrophic interpretations: hyperinflation, stagflation, financial despotism, resource destruction, and then fascism, trade wars, real wars… The Old Mole continues to grin. And what can be done? The newcomer raises his hand. He comes from Trafalgar College. Serious stuff, elegant buildings, elegant gardens, elegantly fenced to keep the proletarians out. Stuff a whole continent away from Wokingham and its suburban school. He looks like someone who has charisma, the new, indeed one who is not interested in having charisma and who, precisely for this reason, has charisma. Nothing, he says, that everything goes down the drain, the economy is the problem, the economy devalues ​​everything that matters. 

This is how the most apocalyptic of all of them announces himself to the small group of apocalyptic protagonists of these pages: Nietzsche the nihilist, the boy whose primary need is not to be dead and not to carry the corpse of a world that, according to him, is in irreparable ruin. It is a fateful meeting for Art, Paula, Merv and Chandra. They are not like the insatiable and inert losers who are always checking the phone, always gorging themselves, consuming; they want to lift the stones, question everything, leaving nothing intact. They have a band and they would like to do something new, play the end of things, the music of the ashes, the music after the music. This is why they would like to become philosophers, suburban philosophers, philosophers of Wokingham and the Thames valley! Could Nietzsche be their man, who came to open the heart of the nihilistic storm?

Publisher's blurb

Gellen's essay takes encouragement from Susan Sontag's critique of critical distance by questioning her own attachment to Bernhard's work: "why am I so drawn to him? And why, in turn, am I drawn to writers who are explicitly and implicitly drawn to him, too?". Her answer is that Bernhard and those drawn to his example offer a way out of the purely negative model of failing to write. When I asked myself this question, I realised that my attempts to write something about the chance events in Bernhard's work had always failed to begin because it isn't what had long fascinated me at all. It was that the chance events always happened at the beginning of a prose-text. Beginning is what had long fascinated me, or, rather, how Bernhard's novels continue to begin and don't stop beginning until they end.

It appears to be because twists in the tale, that a staple of storytelling, always appear at the beginning of Bernhard's work, with walking playing a role in them all. He began his adult life by refusing to return to the TB clinic for life-saving treatment. He walked in the opposite direction to what was wise and never went back, and began his life as a writer by going in the opposite direction to singing. He explains in the film monologue Drei Tage that:

the thing I find most terrifying is writing prose…it’s pretty much the most difficult thing for me…And the moment I realized this and became conscious of it, I swore to myself that from then on I would do nothing but write prose.

There is nothing wise in Thomas Bernhard's life and work: he caught tuberculosis also by going in the opposite direction. In the third part of his autobiography, he says that as a fifteen-year-old he chose to work in a bitterly cold grocery store in "the roughest and most dangerous district" of Salzburg after rejecting all the jobs in the safer, wealthier areas, telling the official he "wanted to go in the opposition direction". He uses the phrase thirteen times over two pages: "she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction", I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction".

I kept on telling her this, but she was not to be put off and went on taking what she regarded as good addresses out of her card-index. I was unable to explain to her what I meant by the opposite direction.   (Tr. David McLintock)

He must have known at some level. It may well be a physical equivalent of Paul Celan's Gegenwort, the "counterword" he spoke about in his Meridian speech, which Dowden compares to in literary terms to Bernhard's "speaking against: against exhausted narrative ploys and forms" and "against Austria's complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century". And given that Celan's example of a counterword is spoken before an execution, Bernhard's life decisions might be compared to the Persian woman's answer to the narrator's question at the end of Yes, or perhaps Roithamer's self-destruction in the forest clearing: in Celan's own words the counterword is "an act of freedom. It is a step."

From Steve Mitchelmore's 'The Opposite Direction'

I could also say, it’s one of my favourite platitudes, I am the unanointed chronicler of a period in which high culture has permanently disappeared. There are still such old folk – myself included – teetering in the queue, paying no heed to their age, ridiculously shaking their medically prescribed walking sticks in the air, furiously wailing that there was such a thing as high culture once, but the bystanders don’t bat an eyelid, they don’t even understand what this man is croaking on about, why he’s holding up the queue in the pharmacy, or at the till in Tesco. The point isn’t that high culture is losing, or is in danger, but that we’ve arrived in a new era, when an area of culture that can’t be infected by the market, or is unable to adapt to its laws, and thus rendered useless, is simply wiped off the map, and all that remains in its place is what we once called mass culture, and we now call culture. That’s what can be found now in the last pages/minutes of the media, where it states which will be the bestseller, or which will catch the attention of those wanting to be entertained. To cut to the chase: today there’s nothing to compare to, to have to say mass culture. Nothing else exists. Homer is a comic, Shakespeare is a so-called difficult question in an idiotic television quiz, and Bach in a board game.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

In their repetitions, their eddies of obsession, their personal entanglements and subtle variations, each monologist can resemble a comedian delivering seemingly off-the-cuff material, which is in reality highly practiced and refined. Callbacks serve to broaden and deepen the effect of each rant. Positions are taken, qualified, reversed. There is a dimensionality to these attacks, as if an idea has accumulated physical mass. Take Koller, for instance, on “the masses”:

Ninety-nine percent of all people sold out to the masses at the very moment of their birth, so he said. But any person of the mind was obliged to take up the struggle against the masses, to take a stand against them, to declare his opposition to them, at the very moment of his birth; that alone legitimated him as a person of the mind. Anybody who yielded to these masses, be it even on a single point, had forfeited his chance to be a person of the mind and was a mindless person. That every person of the mind naturally always had the masses and hence, to put it dramatically, the whole of humankind ineluctably against him as a matter of course, was transparently clear. . . . Everybody, even those who struggled against these masses and hence against feeblemindedness, ultimately hailed from these masses, and it was only logical and natural at the same time that they were gobbled back up by these masses.

Bernhard offers a formal attentiveness to refrain worthy of the villanelle or the roundel. These furious assaults contain a chorus-like center, an idea or judgment brought round again and again in habituating action; the original position is exhaustively established only to be abandoned after every possible reinforcement has already been made. But the patterning of Koller’s phrasing is as much structural as it is musical. Each recurrence of “the masses” is like a nail driven down at the edge of a billowing tent. It fastens the passage to the page amid great storms of extemporizing. Modification (“person of the mind,” “mindless person,” “feeblemindedness”) and exaggeration (“at the very moment,” “that alone,” “be it even on a single point,” “the whole of human kind”) prolong the attack or position it beyond retort. The final feint at rationality—“it was only logical and natural”—cheekily suggests the whole thing would have occurred to anyone had they only considered the matter more carefully. Bernhard is always extending these invitations to complicity. 

From 'OldMaster', Dustin Illingworth on Berhard in The Baffler.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

 Charles Baudelaire, Be Drunk

He writes that ‘the sick are inevitably condemned to protracted illness and eventual death. Doctors are victims of either megalomania or helplessness; in either case they can only harm the patient unless he himself takes the initiative.’ It is possible that one may only truly appreciate Bernhard if one has suffered a long illness oneself. One may derive pleasure from him, one may even enjoy him, but one can only love Bernhard if one has spent months lying on one’s back helpless to do anything else, if one has seen the spectre of death toiling beneath one’s own skin, or heard it rattle in one’s chest, fearing that there is no cure. This is the root of his appeal: he makes us laugh precisely when he insists most outrageously that there is no cure, not for sickness or anything else. To again quote E.M. Cioran, whose statement about Beckett applies equally to Bernhard: ‘He is a destroyer who adds to existence — who enriches by undermining it.’ […]

At around the age of 32, he wrote that ‘Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness . . . There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.’ Of Strauch, the painter whose endless rants fill his first novel, Frost, the narrator says: ‘He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet are continually driven to say everything.’ As Gombrowicz puts it: ‘One can be all the more human the more one is inhuman.’

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, we glimpse him in certain pictures — wearing a snowball on top of his head, carousing on a hillside in his underwear, eating an ice cream cone, sitting on a park bench surrounded by children, or wearing lederhosen and cracking a joke among friends — and we say to ourselves: this could not have been a serious man. And we are right, in the sense that only an unserious man could have so splendidly dynamited so many façades, so delectably destroyed so many illusions. When we read of his final joke — simultaneously a last excoriation — the prohibition in his will of ever having any of his works published, performed, or even quoted aloud in his home country — we cannot help cackling. Such impertinence delights us. It makes us want to weep with joy that there ever was such a person amongst us as him. For as long as we continue to read him, he will continue to strip away what is stupid, false, and illusory in our own selves; we suspect that his work — that schoolroom in an abattoir, that devil where there would only be God — will never lose its urgency, nor we our need for it.

From Nate Knapp's 'We Earn Nothing But Chaos: Some Notes on Thomas Bernhard'.

This, in part what makes me return to Thomas Bernhard: the ability to risk literature itself in the creation of literature. It is writing that shows that failure, not success, is what goes beyond. The narrator of The Loser suggests that what Wertheimer was unable to grasp which could have saved him from suicide was that:

Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time

Literature and art are the only things capable of revealing such a thing to us, but, in doing so they must reject that very statement by creating something other: a shadow, a veil, something dead. The impulse toward art leads toward despair and failure because it denies the recognition of life by seeking to go beyond it. This is why any such work must always be uncertain, stumbling, collapsing, risking its own destruction; because it is the only way to even attempt to get closer toward that very thing from which writing moves away: life. The double shadow of writing cast by Bernhard’s work shows up literature as a frail and fragile thing, a thin pretence. It will not save you. And yet, despite this, indeed because of this, it just might.

from Daniel Fraser's 'A Double Shadow: Re-Reading Thomas Bernhard'

Repetition was the group’s first watchword; it became a declaration of intent in the song of that name, which was widely taken as a manifesto. But the lyrics of ‘Repetition’, released as the B-side of The Fall’s debut single ‘Bingo Master’s Break-out’ (1978), make no case for repetition – ‘the three Rs’ – other than the fact that ‘we dig’ it. The explanation Smith offers for the song in his (ghost-written) autobiography, Renegade (2009) – that it is about the ‘hell’ of living in a flat in Kingswood Road, Prestwich, with his first bandmates – is wholly unconvincing. The Fall’s hymn to repetition was no satire but a profoundly ambiguous statement: both a petition to ‘all you daughters and sons who are sick of fancy music’ and – in the same breath – a refusal to be their spokesperson. The song ends with a sudden shift from the four-note musical motif and accompanying verbal incantation into punk rock chords and direct mockery of lesser artists, such as Richard Hell, who would channel the discontent into some egoistic chant (‘I belong to the blank generation’). The paradox – in which it is impossible to distinguish the inflections of irony from those of earnestness within the same phrase – would come to define Smith’s most characteristic writing.

The same relation to paradox was pioneered in the pseudonymous works of a writer whom Smith never mentions: Kierkegaard, the first great thinker of repetition. Kierkegaard begins his philosophical novella Repetition (1843) with an enigmatic line: ‘Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.’ Repetition does not mean mimesis or representation. Such words are its antitheses, because they imply the self-identity of everything that has taken place, the finished-with nature of the past. Repetition is possible for precisely opposite reasons: nothing that happens is over; everything, including ourselves, is always other than it is. Thus ‘the individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself’. While ‘Greek philosophy’, says Kierkegaard (meaning Plato), taught that all knowing is recollection, modern philosophy ‘will teach that all life is a repetition’. […]

Smith gave many interviews; but only in the first year or two was he unguarded enough to reveal details of his compositional methods or ambitions for the group. One of the most illuminating was a 1979 article by Tony Fletcher in the magazine Jamming!, in which Smith articulates a long-term objective that, for obvious reasons, has been much cited since his death: ‘That’s my fucking aim in life, to keep it going as long as I can.’ More typical was the public conversation at the London Literature Festival held at the South Bank Centre in 2008 to mark the publication of Renegade, at which the interviewer (Ian Harrison, Associate Editor of Mojo) attempted to pin successive categories or images from Smith’s writing onto Smith himself: ‘Are you not appreciated, do you feel that?’ Smith is riled by the line of questioning and brings the interview to a halt. But this reluctance to talk about his personal life is not only a desire for privacy but a principled refusal of the autobiographical gesture. As he says in Renegade, ‘People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads. Instead of going with it, gambling on an idea or a feeling, they check themselves and play it safe or consult their old university buddies.’ This observation, tucked into a paragraph on his hatred of nostalgia, is as close to an explanation of Smith’s worldview as we get anywhere. The extraordinary implication – although so far behind Smith’s vision are we that the idea is barely thinkable – is that the personality of Mark E. Smith was precisely as necessary, or dispensable, to the success of The Fall as that of any one of the sixty-six members who passed through the group’s ranks during its 40-year existence.

from Timothy Bewes's obituary for Mark E. Smith

First interview I ever did, from 2011, with Colin Marshall, newly up on YouTube. 1 hour long.

I will be running a workshop for the European Graduate School on August 25th. Philosophy / creative arts. The Stoics, Nietzsche, Amor Fati, Eternal Recurrence, etc. 

More details to follow.

I have always felt that my characters all belong to the same family, whether they be fictional or non-fictional. They have no shadows, they are without pasts, they all emerge from the darkness. I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years.

The characters in this huge story are all desperate and solitary rebels with no language with which to communicate. Inevitably they suffer because of this. They know their rebellion is doomed to failure but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance. […]

There is nothing eccentric about my films; it’s everything else that’s eccentric. I never felt that Kaspar Hauser, for example, was an outsider. He might have been continually forced to the sidelines, he might have stood apart from everyone, but he’s at the true heart of things. Everyone around him, with their deformed souls, transformed into domesticated pigs and members of bourgeois society, they are the bizarre ones. Aguirre, Fini Straubinger and Stroszek all fit into this pattern. So do Walter Steiner, Hias in Heart of Glass, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, the Aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream and the desert people of Fata Morgana.

Look at Reinhold Messner, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Nosferatu, and even Kinski himself, or Vladimir Kokol, the young deaf and blind man in Land of Silence and Darkness who connects with the world only by bouncing a ball off his head and clutching a radio to his chest, much like Kaspar, who plays with his wooden horse.

None of these people are pathologically mad. It’s the society they find themselves in that’s demented. Whether dwarfs, hallucinating soldiers or indigenous peoples, these individuals are not freaks. … I have a great deal of sympathy for these people, to the point where Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein joked that I should play everyone in my films myself. I function pretty well as an actor and in several of my films could have played the leading character if necessary.

I could never make a film—fiction or non-fiction— about someone for whom I have no empathy, who fails to arouse some level of appreciation and curiosity. In fact, when it comes to Fini Straubinger in Land of Silence and Darkness, Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser or Dieter Dengler, these people are points of reference not just for my work, but also my life. I learnt so much from my time with them. The radical dignity they radiate is clearly visible in the films. There is something of what constitutes them inside me.

Herzog, on his characters

From Andy Wimbush's 'The wisdom of Surrender':

The mystic paradox is pithily expressed in a maxim of the French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort, translated and versified by Beckett:

Hope is a knave befools us evermore
Which till I lost no happiness was mine.
I strike from hell’s to grave on heaven’s door
All hope abandon ye who enter in.

Beckett would often inscribe the maxim in copies of his play Endgame (1957) for his friends. Chamfort’s words, Beckett said, were the perfect rejoinder to all those readers and audiences who had, erroneously, found ‘affirmations of expressions of hope’ in his work. It is worth noting, however, that hope is the only casualty of Chamfort’s erasure and re-engraving. Happiness and even heaven are, remarkably, left intact. Chamfort’s point was merely that, in order to reach happiness or heaven, we must abandon hope for them through resignation and giving up. Or put another way, resignation of hope is the only happiness and heaven we are likely to attain.

Beckett’s own embrace of such an attitude can be seen in a beautiful letter he wrote in 1968 to Barbara Bray, a BBC producer he met while working on his radio plays who became a close confidante and companion. Bray’s husband had died in an accident and she had written to Beckett to share the news. He replied:

Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing.

After some careful disclaimers about his lack of useful wisdom, Beckett makes the astonishing suggestion that Bray should move towards ‘the heart of the gales of grief’, since it is there that these gales have ‘already … blown themselves out’. His description suggests a place of stillness and peace in the midst of suffering, perhaps like the eye of a hurricane. Beckett’s solution is paradoxically both an escape – as suggested by the word ‘fly’ – and also a courageous refusal to turn away from pain. He suggests that the movement out of pain is one that flies right into it, that embraces it whole-heartedly, that resigns itself and surrenders to it. Salvation is found, oddly enough, in a place of weakness, humility and lowliness, right in the midst of suffering. This is Beckett’s mystic paradox.

And so, Vladimir, interminably waiting for Mr Godot, needn’t have weighed the odds of salvation quite so anxiously. For the quietist, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, weal and woe, suffering and its end, are not distant poles, but perhaps two sides of the same coin. As Thomas à Kempis put it, in that phrase that Beckett confessed was made for him: ‘he that can well suffer shall find the most peace’.

Bernhard Drax's interview with me for the Second Life Bookclub:

 

There's a slightly longer podcast version of the event, with more photos / info.

Photos from the night:

'Life Lessons From Literature': Josh Cohen and I in conversation:

At a certain point – a point that is usually only discernible retrospectively – cultures shunt off into the sidings, cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. Theydon't die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving, like Baudrillard's deceased cyclist, only by the weight of inertia. Cultures have vibrancy, piquancy only for a while. Lyric poetry, the novel, opera, jazz had their time; there is no question of these cultures dying, they survive, but with their will-to-power diminished, their capacity to define a time lost. No longer historic or existential, they become historical and aesthetic – lifestyle options not ways of life.

Mark Fisher, Is Pop Undead, K-Punk

New long written interview with me by Evan Lavender-Smith at HTML Giant. 

Video of my lecture, 'Nietzsche, Music and the Burbs' as part of the BASF Webinar Lecture Series on Anglo-German Matters, Queen Mary’s. Chaired by Professor Rüdiger Görner.

Guest post by Sinead Murphy:

Don’t Be Fooled By The ‘Easing’ Of Restrictions 

The UK government’s grip on our physical lives is now, at last, to be ‘eased,’ at least in the sporting arena. It is announced that fans will be allowed back into stadiums, though in limited numbers – no more than four thousand at any event.  

Even those of us sceptical of Covid measures might be tempted to welcome this return, as a first loosening of the government’s stranglehold on our bodies. But we should not be fooled. ‘Easing’ is an old trick, and not at all what it seems.  

Anyone raised in the Catholic tradition will know this trick very well. It consists in allowing that which is to be curtailed to run freer, so that it may be more elaborately curtailed than it could possibly be if it were simply, straightforwardly, suppressed.  

When I was growing up, attending daily Mass and a Sisters of Mercy convent school, the flesh – as it is tantalizingly coded by men and women of the cloth – was the site of all evil; sin was of the flesh. So the flesh was hidden – right? Silenced? Nowhere to be seen or heard? Wrong. Nothing was spoken of more frequently. Nothing was dressed up more showily. Nothing was brought through such an elaborate round of beautiful contortions and cantations, like a slow-motion routine on Strictly.  

If something is suppressed, then you cannot constantly and with great inventiveness and to great effect suppress it.  

Mrs. Doyle in Father Ted captures this trick to perfection, when she condemns the racy writings of a novelist visiting Craggy Island, not by shushing all talk of them but by detailing in loud and lewd language their scandalous and contemptibly fleshy contents, luxuriating in the sins that she rejects. Nothing is so effective in the condemnation of the flesh as the constant and eloquent articulation of it as that which is reviled.  

This is suppression, not by silence but by talk, not by invisibility but by high visibility. You show in order to conceal the more elaborately. You say in order to hush the more successfully.  

The Victorians too performed this trick, carefully and intricately dressing even the legs of the piano so that they were, not hidden but hidden in plain sight, exposed as the thing that was to be concealed. Women, most guilty of the flesh, were attired in the infamous ‘crinoline,’ which caged their buttocks by way of emphasizing them and emphasized them by way of caging them. At the height of its trickery, the Victorian contour was dominated by the bustle, a bone-and-horse-hair exaggeration of women’s posterior that makes Kim Kardashian’s silhouette seem streamline: all by way of heightening condemnation of the flesh, provoking and foregrounding those urges most subject to censure. 

And now this old trick is to be performed on us; the sins of our flesh are to be multiplied and detailed and paraded for all to see, all the better to be pilloried. When the few thousand fans return to the stadiums, it will not be an easing of restrictions on physical life, but a new level of elaboration of those restrictions. The fans will be admitted on condition that they maintain a studied distance from one another. That they turn their masked faces away, in particular from those climbing the stairs and therefore exhaling more forcibly. That they do not stand. Or shout. Or sing. The whole event will be a deliberately choreographed denouncement of their physical life, much more intense than if they had simply remained at home. Will they also take the knee with the players and the officials, like those congregations in the churches of my youth? 

The trick will work too on those of us who remain at home. We have spent the last eight months with no crowd to hear or see, only a fake crowd, piped on the loudspeaker and printed on the banners. Now there will be a real crowd to hear and see, but it will be a silenced crowd, a submissive crowd. And we will partake in its mortification by being cast as its witness.  

Sins of the flesh: no longer staying home out of hearing and out of sight but ritually enacted before our eyes and ears. Not an easing of the attack on our physical lives, but a new and potent intensification of it.   

Here's a 4 hour class I taught for the European Graduate School on Creative Writing. It's called, 'Without Authority: the Solitude of Writing'. I begin by discussing arguments from Josipovici's On Trust, before moving on to a short 'chronicle' by Lispector, and then exploring Blanchot's 'primal scene', with reference to psychoanalysis. I'll be back at the European Graduate School in the summer.

Barbara Rose: In all your imagery, there is no death. … It’s interesting that in all your years of producing new directions in your art, you have never gotten into death imagery. Is that something you ever think about?

Robert Rauschenberg: Not often. I have always said that life has nothing to do with death. They’re two separate things, and that’s the way it ought to be. If that’s innocent, so be it. Innocence is not like virginity. Virginity you can only have once. Innocence you have to nourish every day.

Rauschenberg, interviewed (cited here)

Writing for a newspaper is not so demanding. It is light. It must be light, even superficial. Those who read newspapers have neither the will not time to read in depth.

But to write something intended for a book often demands more strength than one seems to possess.

Especially if it means devising one’s own writing habits, as in my case. When I consciously decided in my early teens that I wanted to become a writer, I immediately found myself in a void. And there was no one to help or advise me.

I had to emerge from that void, to try and understand myself, and to forge, as it were, my own truth. I made a start, but not even at the beginning. The sheets of paper began piling up – nothing I wrote seemed to make sense, my frustration as I struggled to write something worthwhile became one more obstacle in the path of success. What a pity I destroyed the interminable narrative I then started writing under the influence of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I tore it up, contemptuous of my almost superhuman efforts to master the craft of writing and come to terms with myself. And no one knew my secret. I did not tell a soul. I lived through that sorrow alone. One thing, however, did occur to me. It was important to carry on writing without waiting for the right moment, because the right moment never comes. Writing has never been easy for me. I knew from the outset this was my vocation. Having a vocation is not the same as having talent. One can have a vocation and no talent – in other words, feel compelled to write without knowing where to start.

Clarice Lispector, a 'chronicle' for the Jornal do Brasil, 2nd May 1970

Note: Benjamin Moser partially translate the chronicle in his biography of Lispector as follows:

When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write – I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. […] Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go. 

Who in that age [the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – LI] could be strong enough to refrain from murder? Who didn’t know that the worst was inevitable? Here and there someone whose glance had during the day met the savoring glance of his murderer, would be overwhelmed by a strange foreboding. . . . The eyes of the dogs, as they looked up at him, were filled with doubt, and they grew less and less sure of his commands. From the motto that had served him all his life, a secondary meaning quietly emerged. Many long-established customs appeared antiquated, but there didn’t seem to be any substitutes to take their place. . . . And then, before the late supper, this pensiveness over the hands in the silver washbasin. Your own hands. Could any coherence be brought into what they did? any order or continuity in their grasping and releasing? No. All men attempted both the thing and its opposite. All men canceled themselves out; there was no such thing as action.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge