Category: Culture

Once more today, the first of the year, I try to write this text which has occupied me nearly exclusively for a week, but each day the difficulty of finding the words, of constructing sentences, of arriving at a whole becomes greater. Yesterday I sobbed with rage before the total deficiency of my means of expression, before those synoptic sentences, without weight and saying not at all what I want. Yet I must try and have done with it.

Alberto Giacometti’s lines, so direct, are also kitschy. Suspicion: if I copied out some lines randomly from the Book of Disquiet, mightn’t I find the same? My Beloved laughed at the lines by various Pessoan heteronymns at the museum in Lisbon; how could I defend them, I wondered. They’re heteronyms, I said; they each have a different character, that quote, for example, is from a poet of nature. He’s not a real poet, but a fiction. A fiction: and wasn’t that clearest of all? That such poetry could and should not be written now (Pessoa, for me, occupies our ‘now’ – but isn’t this the most laughable idea. ‘Our’ ‘now’ … how pompous!) is clear from the first. But he is a fiction, you see, and that is everything. Pessoa did not hide behind masks, he was them, and one can say of him what Deleuze notes of Godard: that his is the most populous of solitudes, that it contains not so much ‘dreams, fantasies and projects’ but ‘acts, things, people even’. Thus the lines and philosophical essays he attributed to himself (many of them rather bad) also belong to a heteronym.

We know all this. But Giacometti’s lines? Too raw, too indulgent. He sobbed, imagine. A grown man, sobbing over some piece of prose. How laughable! There’s nothing more laughable, more indulged! And in the end, more kitschy. He belongs to a different time, doesn’t he? He’s far away from us, isn’t he? ‘I sobbed with rage …’; Beckett’s pronouncements on his work were altogether more sober. More than sober. And Van Velde’s … and Bela Tarr’s (I must collect more quotations from him) …  Finer than the work itself, I sometimes think (but only because I am the greatest kind of fool).

As if what was greatest about these artists (and there are others – Duras, say) is a kind of asceticism that leads them through their art as though it preceded it; as though writing (or painting, of filmmaking) was only a means, just as Zen can combine with both the art of archery and that of flower arranging. A kind of asceticism, a great sobriety that can lead a right-wing monarchist Catholic like Blanchot, young and privileged, very far from himself. Who is he, become writer? Who does he become?

Vague questions poorly posed. But I wonder in my foolishness whether there is not a kind of ethics in writing, in filmmaking, in painting … an art of life and from the perspective of which (from its great heights) that one would not laugh at Giacometti’s prose. This question, though: are we (this ‘we’ again – how laughable!) not too late for that, too late altogether? That asceticism must also be combine with a terrible self-mockery, an unsparing suspicion as the importance of writing, of painting, of filmmaking disappears altogether (only an idiot would call himself a poet; only a fool an artist. And who could call themselves a philosopher? Laughable, all laughable).

Blanchot lived in a society where literature was important (and by this I mean that it could be new, that new writing was important; everyone (the middle class?) would have to address themselves to it). Important, prestigious … and not simply as cultural monuments to a dead past. And now? Today? Giacometti seems impossibly indulgent. I despise him even as I quote him, though I love him even in that hatred. Would I like to be able to write in that way? It is impossible, quite impossible.

Quote to set those lines on fire. Quote to sacrifice them, to let them burn right up. What heteronyms could a contemporary Pessoa find? There are none. A computer programmer in Bracknell? A management consultant in Staines? A strategic analyst in Winnersh Triangle? Laughter: there is no ‘we’, no one to deem literature important or unimportant (and even that word, literature – what pretension!). It really does not matter; nothing matters. It was all kitsch and this is a world without an art of life.

How is it possible to live except in corners and cellars? And in a corner of ourself, in a cellar under ourselves where the laughter – our own laughter does not reach. Because I am an idiot, I dream of a new kind of criticism, which begins with the total impossibility of anything like criticism. There’s no perspective, no high place, reading is an activity among others, and a poor one. Which begins from that, to lead – where? To wreck itself – where?

Stab yourself in the neck, drink until you fall over. Copy out Giacometti’s lines on the walls of your padded cell. Laughter, endless laughter: literature has a fever and is burning up. I have a fever and I’m burning up. And I’m dream of literature, of literature on fire, of a literature of those flames, written laughter, voices turned on themselves and at war, great, stupid battlefields that have long since torn us apart.

1. A quick paraphrase of a post by Sinthome. Why do we become open to this or that artist, this or that thinker? Why does the course of one particular oeuvre become fateful for us rather than another? It is not that there is ever the whole body of oeuvres before us, such that we could make a choice between this or that artist as with Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum’ in which all the artworks that ever were are reproduced before us.

A selection has already taken place such that those oeuvres can come into appearance as what they are. The reader, the viewer, the listener makes what Sinthome calls, ‘a slice within chaos’, and adds ‘it must be chaos as it is bubbling with an infinite number of potential qualities’.

Those qualities – to adapt and extend his argument – are themselves constituted by the reader, the listener as she has emerged, to the extent that artworks, oeuvres are never there, present to hand and available, all at once. Her taste has already been formed; artworks and oeuvres have already been organised; a selection has occurred within the chaos.

Does this imply a simple relativism, taste reflecting merely an individual propensity? But the individual is co-formed with what she constitutes; she becomes with what draws her to some qualities and not others. She is constituted as listener, viewer or reader along with those works and oeuvres to which she is drawn; what she listens to, views or reads also determines what she can listen to, view, or read. (Insert here accounts of the cultures and subcultures to which she might belong, of distinction (Bourdieu) and cultural literacy.)

Then taste emerges out of her becoming, the way she is drawn through art, through music, through literature, and draws them together in her passage. And this, in turn, will depend upon those around her – her friends, teachers and those she teaches, that milieu in which influence is bound up with a sense of what is worthwhile, what should be listened to, read, etc.

Emerging out of this context – ever-changing, and ever-present, extending through critical discourse, the media, etc. – is the biography of her experience of works and oeuvres. A life with art, and with others with art – all of that, the whole mess, this chaos out of which she makes a slice.

And I think here of the image Deleuze takes from Lawrence’s essays on the novel, where to write is to make an umbrella against chaos. And perhaps to read, too. That umbrella is also made of chaos, but chaos hardened, thickened, doubled up. Such that a shelter can be formed and something made – just as a shelter is also formed by listening this or reading that. A shelter that makes a home in chaos, that allows us to spend time with this and not that. That allows this oeuvre, or this artist to become fateful for us.

Then the cultural space emerges on the basis of those prior selections that organise artworks and oeuvres, and what counts as art and what counts as an oeuvre. Appeals to teleology and simple progressivist accounts of art pass over what Sinthome calls that ‘selection and salience’ – that continual negotiation through which the cultural space is opened.

2. Remarks that can be extended easily to our relationship to thinkers. Here is the complete text of a short story ‘Affinity’ by Lydia Davies (collected here):

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.

Perhaps adjoining our discourses on the thinkers that interest us, we might also provide a bellelettristic narrative of what drew them to us, and of what they allowed us to become. ‘Boring stuff about me’, as the traditional blog category is named (at I Cite, for example, or Larval Subjects). That secret biography that would trace your own emergence as thinkers (is that what we are?).

An interesting task especially in the context of theory and continental philosophy, which are so strongly marked by the allegiance to particular thinkers. How might this be thought in dialogue with Bloom’s account of the anxiety of influence? How, with respect to artists, might it contextualise our notions of the avant-garde?

We need an ontology supple enough to allow us to attend to practices of listening, viewing, reading etc. as they emerge from chaos as it is sliced in various ways. What are the general laws that govern the conditions of emergence of the listener, the viewer, the reader? How can we take account of the larger context of which listening, viewing and reading are a part?

Beyond belletrism (‘boring stuff about me’), the necessity of a philosophical investigation into the life of broader structures. But which philosophy will best allow us to understand the relationship between chaos and the umbrella (itself only a perturbation on the surface of chaos)?

[Sinthome responds here. I respond in turn here.]

The Age of the Epic

The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. But the hero’s name depends upon the song in which he is celebrated. After the feast, the bard comes forward to sing; in the song, the hero lives. Didn’t the heroes of the wars of Homer’s poem know their fate? Hector says that before he dies he will accomplish something great ‘whereof even men yet to be born shall hear’. Agamemnon says ‘even men yet to be born shall hear’ of the shame of the Achaeans’ retreat from Troy. The heroes know their reward lies in posterity; their names will resound after they die.

Thus, the hero owes his existence to the telling, the song, to the language in which his deeds are repeated. True, the hero is unique – he has a name, and a unique glory as the bearer of this name that is sung in the great hall. A uniqueness born of the splendour of an act that his name substantialises, and this is the miracle, the surprise of heroism: a name can attach itself to such great deeds.

A human being can be marvellous: this is what the epic celebrates as it repeats the name of the hero, begining the tale again, over and again, embellishing it, transforming it even as it is yet the same tale. Sing of the Pandavas in the forest again! Sing the story of the Rama one more time! Tell us of Krishna’s deeds! It is true, Rama, Krishna, and the Pandava brothers name avatars, or men who can claim divine descent. Perhaps one should think of Heracles and Achilles instead – of Roland and Cid….

The epic is a tale without beginning or end. But the epic ends as a genre as history begins (‘and then darkness fell over India …). The hero does not belong to history. His time has passed – who now is capable of a deed which flashes out through heaven and earth? Who can lend his acts to the memory of the epic? Yet the hero exists in the tale and this is the condition of his existence: he is alive in the retelling of the tale – alive in the presence he has for the listener in the great hall.

Some say the Trojan and Theban wars were caused by Zeus in order to end the Heroic Age. In the Odyssey, it already seems the Trojan wars already belong to another era. All, even Ulysses, are keen to hear songs of Troy. And isn’t it knowledge of Troy that the Sirens promise to bestow? It is already, with the Odyssey, a time for song. Soon, the hero’s name will be eclipsed by the name of the singer. The bard steps out of obscurity and anonymity to lay claim to Achilles.

Now the act belongs to the bard (the author). Literature begins. Does the singer become a hero in turn? Is it necessary, now, to write rather than act – or to act and then write, recording one’s exploits? Must one create one’s own legend? The novel is on the horizon. Don Quixote and Pancho Santa are about to set off …

The Age of Humanism

For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.

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

Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would be able to secure the origin of inspiration? This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world.

God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God.

What, though would it mean for God to be returned to the darkness and forgetting that he has been made to veil? Now comes another turning point in the history of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Isn’t it Hölderlin who understands that the absence of the gods must be experienced, and that this experience is itself holy? And isn’t it he who understands that poetry, writing, must answer to that experience?

The time of distress, he calls it. Our time, says Hölderlin, bears witness to the absence of the gods, to the ruins of the temple, that Hölderlin develops his invented mythology, which is to say, his construction of an imaginary Europe in line with Herder’s palingenesis. Hölderlin pretends that this Europe exists and that he, the poet, speaks for its community. In so doing, he pretends there is a relationship between poet and audience of the sort he believed Pindar to have enjoyed even as he knows this relationship is impossible.

At the same time, as Constantine comments, this does not constitute an act of deception, since the ‘mythology’ itself is palpably mythological. The appeals for community, for the return of the gods and for a communicable myth are themselves mythological figures. Hölderlin’s mythical Europe is a way of marking its distress; to elect himself as the poet who is bound to its phantasmic community is another way of indicating the way in which we belong to a time of distress.

Itis not, with Hölderlin, that God has been delimited, but the contrary. God is unlimited all the way to dissolution … God has been torn apart across the sky. ‘Is God the unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This rather I believe …’

But then, another phase. God is forgotten, and so is the forgetting of God. The holy recedes into an indifferent sky. The great era of humanism also recedes. What remains? Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: these innocuous statements reflect the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of inspiration in one’s own name.

Is it the time of distress? Rather, the time without distress, where writing is part of the bustle of the world, where novelist, audience and characters occupy the same consensual reality. A final twist: in modernism as the eternally new, that comes at the end only to show there is no end, and that to have nothing to say and no means to say it is the beginning of writing and not the end. Writing is impossible, and for that reason, necessary. Impossible, and carrying with it the test of the impossibility that awaits the uncommon reader.

The Impossibility of Writing

Kafka wrote in bursts, in breaks. For long periods, he knew he could write nothing. So when it came, what he experienced as inspiration, he had to write as much as he could. Then the hours he sets aside for writing every night are not filled with activity. Kafka waits – he spends days and weeks waiting, and then …?

Some days it is possible to write, but on others … desolation; non-writing. And it is the same even when he has several books behind him. Nothing is sure for the writer, and the vocation of writing the least sure of all. What does it mean to want to write? Is it to subject writing to your will? Certainly that is part of it. But also, too, to be receptive. To have to wait upon inspiration. To wait for waiting to release you just enough for you to write …

Wait for the beginning – and when it comes, write as much as you can. Follow the story across the days and nights. For it is too easy to fall from writing! Too easy, and that is the risk! But even when you finish a story, what do you have? Are you a writer yet? Are you still a writer? In a sense, to write is always to be in lieu of writing.

And when you have written? How can you judge the worth of what you have done? There are no stories like The Judgement, none like Josephine; The Trial and The Castle are without precedents. In a sense, what he has written is also an obstacle to Kafka. For how can he gauge his own talent, his competence? True his work is admired by his friends; there is at least that. But compare Kafka’s calm prose with theirs; compare the sobriety of Metamorphosis with the gaudily covered review in which it was published. To write without prior criteria, with the great models of writing collapsed – how can Kafka experience his own work except as a failure?

There is no common field that brings together poet, audience and characters within the poems; no Sittlichkeit of which they are part. And so Kafka can write only as he runs up against the impossibility of writing, where the impossible does not name a limit beyond which it would not be possible to act; or the limit itself has become experiencable, and now Kafka is able to write along its edge, writing with a sense of the absolute precariousness of writing, which is why he attempts to complete his stories at one stroke.

The Hemiplegic

First of all, the attempt to find the time to write, to set nights aside. Then there is the waiting in those quiet hours, open to indifferent skies. Then, all too rarely, the merciful excess which grants the strength to begin to write. A sentence set down on the page gives way to another; by a surprising strength, writing is possible. But then, such writing depends upon a prior experience of failure, a sense of have exhausted every means. Until the beginning – that moment when the power to write is granted – must be understood to drag behind it a terrible weight. Or it is an attempt to push that weight just a little ahead of itself, to open a clearing …

To write is never simply to begin, to cast off into clear waters. The beginning runs up against the past, the eternal return of uncertainty. To begin is only to have pushed the rock, like Sisyphus, to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. The beginning must perpetually be regained; the surplus of strength, with its mercy must rediscover itself in the writer.

Then to writing there belongs a peculiar temporality – a moment of initiative, with everything before it, collapses into weariness. This step forward was no step at all, but the return to the same interval in which nothing can begin. Or it is that the writer moves forward like a hemiplegic – moves and falls, both at once, until movement is indistinguishable from falling.

Absolute Failure

It is not only the ‘I’ who is the locus of writing. That the ‘I’, as Blanchot says, becomes ‘il’, becomes ‘it’ – that the first person gives way to the impersonal; that the ‘there is’ of ‘there is writing’ is like the dummy subject in the phrase ‘it is raining.’ There’s no ‘it’ to rain; no ‘I’ to write. There is writing – suffering, dying without subject. There is writing – but who writes in the absence of a writer?

In the active sense of the word (that is, as writing names an activity like any other) a writer does indeed write. There are words on the page. But would the writer be a writer (a literary writer, a modern writer) without the prior experience of absolute failure? An experience that blooms into a beginning, to be sure – but one that is also furled in what is written after that beginning.

Then it is that the ‘I’ and the ‘il’ are joined – that the writer who writes (writing as activity) is joined to writing as passion, as silent unaccomplishment (writing as passivity). To write is also to fail to write – how absurd! But to bear this absurdity as writing, and not only as its content. To bear it through every element of writing – through plot and character, through the details of the story and the rhythms of the prose. As though all of writing were magnetised by what it cannot say – not the ineffable, it is not that simple; nor silence, unless this names the thunder that rolls within a writing that endures the test of impossibility … Cannot say, but cannot not say, as the ‘common field’ that unites poet, audience and culture gives away to the uncommon experience of the impossible.

Writing, Reading

There is writing. But now that ‘there is’ redoubled, thickened, as though writing also spoke of itself – as though it lifted itself from that semblance of the world it was supposed to resemble. Or as though that power of resemblance had failed – that the possibility of reference had collapsed, and writing had fallen into itself, lost from all worlds. And this even as words lie on the page, and on page after page. This not despite those pages – the physical evidence of the book, as it substantialises an author – but through them, across them. The trace of the ‘il’ never substantialised. Of the writer as writer, which is to say, as no one yet.

Who writes? Who reads? In a sense, nothing is lighter than reading. To be born along by a story, to follow the lines on the page – all this answers to the most ordinary of human capacities. Reading is easy, even when the book is difficult, for at least that difficulty has a measure; at least it is judged according to the measure of the possible, instead of carrying the possible away with it. But isn’t there a reading that is the correlate of the ‘other’ writing? Isn’t the reader, too, reached as the ‘il’, as the one without measure?

Perhaps it is possible to say that the reader, too, undergoes a test. Perhaps there is a trial of reading just as there is a trial of writing. This time, the correlate of the author – the writer proud of the work that has made him as real as any other worker – is the cultured reader; the reader who will add the book to the great pile of finished books, who knows nothing of the need to reread, to begin over. This is the reader substantialised by reading, for whom culture is that sacrosanct realm of great names and great books.

But hasn’t the reader, too, been lost? Aren’t there books which so carry forward the impossibility of writing that it surges forward into the receptive reader? The opposite of resuscitation: not a breathing mouth clamped to your own, but a mouth that sucks out your breath. To read, to die: infinitives detached from substantives. The ‘there is reading’ that doubles up reading, that lets it wander in itself.

Of course it is always possible to put a book down. To forgo the reading, to leave it behind. But the possible, here, is measured by the ‘I can’ of the reader. An impossible reading is compelling, fascinating, for it is without an ‘I can’. Reading becomes a fate, just as writing that endures and answers to the test of the impossible is also fateful. A fate that is also a trial, a test.

Is this why it is necessary to reread some books and not others – as though by doing so one might come closer to the narrative voice that makes the whole fiction a cluster of indices pointing in the same direction. It is why the books of certain authors seem immeasurably more important than others, as though they bear upon the essential – as though, by following book after book, it becomes clear that they are pressing yet further into the peculiarly fascinating realm when writing gives voice to the impossibility of writing.

This is why the lives of certain authors are likewise fascinating – not simply the books they write, but their correspondence, their notebooks, and in fact the very way they pass from day to day. Nothing is negligible, nothing inconsequential; writing also involves an attitude, an ethos. Writing is not a profession like others. Or rather, if it is treated as such – if the writer consents to appear to the world as an author, resting in the power and glory of his renown, this is to betray the risk that writing also is; the fact that the writer as writer depends on that passivity in which the ‘il’ takes the place of the ‘I’, and reveals all subject positions to be usurpations.

The Age of Capital

Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more.

But beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers.

True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with the impossible in writing, in reading, in life …

In a small town such as the one where I grew up, there are unless you are especially gifted, few opportunities to be engaged by learning, by culture, all that – what a marvellous sight for us, and rare, to see a whole bookshelf full of books, with titles familiar and unfamiliar, where one book would lead you on to another, one after another, until strand is joined to strand in a great luminous web.

Wondrous diwali – wonderful those feasts of light that burned in those houses where full bookshelves were found, or low rows of albums – of jazz and classical music, for we were able to negotiate the worlds of popular music by ourselves. Culture there and all at once – spines turned outward to your look, album sleeves pulloutable and inspectable: lucky those who lived in the worlds of books, or music, and who knew their way in that foreign country.

Curious to visit houses were they were taken for granted, those worlds, and were nothing special to remark upon: yes, there are books, albums, all this …Visiting relatives in the old country, I remember a friend of theirs inviting me to his flat as they had never been invited, to inspect the great rows of books, of albums, and to let me look through them.

Ravel’s songs, I remember them. Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc; Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis. And a book about Greenland – photographs of wintry expanse, and samples of Greenlandish writing – long words, very long, and not, to the eye, like Danish. And wasn’t I taken by a percussionist to watch the orchestra rehearse at Tivoli? He showed me the branches he used to perform one symphony or another by Nielsen.

And I think it must have been that summer when, walking around Humlebaek I listened to Sibelius on my personal stereo – taped from an album given to me by another friend whose flats were lined with books, with albums …

Culture, that world, books and music and ideas – conversations that were linear, and were not scattered in all directions. Witty conversations, too. And moments when, all of a sudden, attention would turn to you and you were to shine, as though you were the repository of all hope.

For they were older than me and felt themselves to belong to a vanishing world? Wasn’t I to continue what their sons and daughter would not? And so I became an heir of sorts, and there was shone on me the whole light of their attention. Now I could let them speak of the great decline they felt was taking place around them. Weren’t their books and records shored against a world which I did not quite occupy?

Much later, an old friend of mine from those times (from those circles) found herself living in the big house of a professor, a teacher and their family. She was a guest there, and for some months (a year? how long?). And she told me, in her room, sitting on the round-backed whicker chair that she felt she’d cheated her way into another world.

Wasn’t she happy there? She was – the new daughter in a house where there were only sons. A daughter – they redecorated a room for her, and I was allowed to stay, now and again, a favoured guest for they thought, the parents, that I was part of a world to which they should convey their houseguest.

For how long was she there? I remember conversations around the great table in the dining room, where each would have a turn to speak, and each, in that turn, would have to shine somehow. I was glad to have read some popular accounts of physics, for that was one topic at the table that night – and wasn’t I congratulated for drawing the father, who never said much, into animated conversation (a beachball tossed between us)?

I think it was on that visit, or was it the next one, that I was deemed a suitable son-in-law for the new daughter, and weren’t we sad, my friend and I that that could never be! The evening – either that night or another – tore itself apart. It was not our world, or the price of its admittance was too high.

She, for her part, was not attracted to men: didn’t they know that? They knew, but perhaps they hoped for something else. Hope for her, for the life to which I was to convey her. It was a benign hope, a loving hope, but that evening was torn down the middle, she leaving the table suddenly to go up to her room, and I, who had noticed that (where else was the centre of my attention? Nowhere else, not ever) spoke on, to deny there was a tear.

Not long after, she left, but not before, one afternoon, we watched Mirror together, she wrapped in her duvet, and then after, took me round the garden of that vast house, with its iron gates, its lawn. The mother, we remembered later, wanted her sons to be creative – everyone must create, that was the imperative. This was beautiful, but they were rich, or so they seemed to us – rich and their lives had begun to flower in the 60s, when there were jobs for those with degrees, and large houses to be bought by them for little.

And who were we, who hardly belonged to that world, and had to make our own way in dimmer times? I think I dreamt of finding conversation as I would read of it in books – light, airy, where each, confidently, let what they said lift into the air – where everyone kept the conversation buoyant, bouncing it wittily between them like a beachball.

And in the meantime? There were at least books in which such conversation bounced. And didn’t I come to prefer zipping my fleece up to the top and going around like anyone else, speaking to say little, giving nothing in particular away and only falling back occasionally into the world that seemed to announce itself then, when I was young and full of hope?

It is true I resist them now, what friends of that time are still alive because they cannot be like anyone else, their great peacock tails fanned out: culture: their entitlement: it is marvellous, but these are different times, and who can speak of creativity now? You need a big house for that, and iron gates to keep the world away.

Meantime – and there is only the meantime, the time between – there is the sober business of living amidst the great collapse, knowing the world went mad some years ago. Isn’t it enough to find a few hours of the day to set against that madness, and friends to laugh at it with?

Reading Bourdieu much later I realised that what we found then in books, in music was a mark of distinction – a cultural capital was necessary to make of our retreat from a world we disliked a kind of jewelled cave. All the jewels of culture should be stowed there, shining. We knew we were in retreat, but it was a marvellous one. Books around you – albums –

Nowadays my flat is bare, or nearly so, and I got rid of those thousands of collected jewels. Happiness, but this is perhaps because I did find my way eventually into a world where such jewels are alive between us, that it is even ordinary to speak, if not of what was once regarded as canonical, then of the world they were once deemed to occupy.

A vanished world, an empty cupboard – I like this revenge we have taken on our youth and our youthful dreams; I like our new politicised realism. That world is torn, and wasn’t it always thus? We’re outside the iron gates, and in the world. Now and again, a peacock’s feather will remind you of those who seemed once to belong to a vanishing world – of the heirs we were, that we might have been.

Somewhere, I know hundreds and hundreds of books will be left to me. Hardbacked collected works – literature, in English, from all ages, stacked in a flat whose walls are shelves, and where in the lounge, there is even a smaller set of shelves, until there are only two seats on which to sit, right at the centre, but only if you lift the books from them first.

When I visit I turn the pages of the new books he has found. It is marvellous, always marvellous. But the arms of the clock in that same room have not moved for many years. Once, there were held mock concerts there, LP recordings of old 78s, so you could hear Sibelius conducting Sibelius, and mock programme notes and even an interval, with drinks – Aqua libra on a metal tray.

You were to listen in silence. I was a school leaver, lost in the world. Here, in a teacher’s flat was still something to learn, great bookshelves reaching into the sky, box sets of operas lined up alphabetically, new books piled all around. Wasn’t it there I was read The Man With The Blue Guitar – read, and the whole thing: that was welcome. And Sunday Morning! And The Emperor of Ice Cream!

There was an edition of Steven’s letters to look through. A few hardbacked Ivy Compton Burnetts. The old world, the marvellous world as in a spread wide peacock’s tail. Curious, years later to stay on a farm were the peacocks were pests, coming begging for breakfast, with their tiny heads and massive, scaly feet. Not suited for the world, not really.

And was I? Were we, because there were always a few of us gathered at this house or that, back then in our small town. Wanting – what? To share in a life that was moving away – did we sense it? Or perhaps, as I sometimes feel, it has moved nowhere, and it was that the likes of us were to be excluded.

We were admitted for a time – a golden summer – and then, I think, the door was closed. Or was it, for a whole period, the 60s, the 70s, the door was open wider than it would be again, and they, too, our hosts, found their way into the enchanted kingdom?

I will say for myself that I never felt entitled to that kingdom, not really – and that I do not today. I was not permitted that identification; I was never given body and soul as I imagine, or hosts were. Or perhaps this, too, is a phantasm, that I speak as one committed as they never were and never had to be, they for whom culture and art was the aether in which they moved as if through clouds of perfume.

Did they need to make the slightest effort? Were they not always natural heirs to a kingdom that will be forever theirs? But now there bubbles up in me a kind of dull resentment: why isn’t it mine what was theirs? And isn’t it my resentful kind who will inherit the kingdom, smashing their way through the museums and shouting in the concert halls?

But resentment is just a petty dependency on what one affects to despise. Perhaps the peacocks still stalk about untouched; perhaps there are less of them now, and growing fewer, and soon there will only be one, dragging its tail, disconsolate.

Finishing Henry Green’s Pack My Bag, I know I should never like to write of that uncertain time when the gates seemed to open and full bookshelves made me full of hope. One never likes to have been naive. With whose dreams was I burning? Whose lit torch was I?

Perhaps Bourdieu would say it was to separate myself from others that I went through those gates – to render myself distinct, gathering feathers for my own peacock’s tail. And no doubt for others I was a peacock as those hosts had been for me, and still am, although I vow to give books to those who want them rather than let them stand tall on bookshelves, rearing up as the whole of Culture rears in them, a thousand horses.

Nowadays we all wear zipped up fleeces, and our books lie in careless piles, and none of us are experts, and none of us is young. How I have loved to read Green and Woolf and Lawrence! How it was that those books seemed, by their very existence, to fan out a miracle! Wasn’t that always my excuse for my unwillingness to judge: that it was enough that there were books and that there were writers: that this already was enough?

Years ago, I lent you Mirror and you lost it, my treasured tape, and then forgot I even lent it. Then, years later, but still years ago, you gave me a bought copy and not one taped from the TV one enchanted Valentine’s Day when we wanted to feel that you liked men. We met on a deserted campus – do you remember? No: I am the one who was given to remember, I am the archivist in whose memory there are still peacocks and a house with iron gates and your redecorated room with a high round-backed whicker chair.

I am always weak enough that the style in the novel I’m reading seems to unfold itself in my own, or perhaps it is that I have no style, and am only the nobody who is always swept along by a gust that is not his own.

Ill in bed for the last few days, it’s Pack My Bag that I read, and my thoughts turn weakly to the times I passed through the social world which Henry Green remembers. ‘I passed’, but that suggests agency too great – wasn’t it rather that I was always being taken up by one group or another, and that, by a kind of elevation, because I was blank enough that others could project on me desires of their own and recognise me thus, I was caught into the whirl of a social set?

I remember being pinned down by my arms on a bed in a country house by a girl with a double barrelled first name and a double barrelled second name – only for a moment, and part of another drama – that of making her boyfriend jealous, whose family also owned a country house like the one in which I found myself.

The girl had felt slighted, so she had come upstairs to find me, and what was I doing there? She was too young to have asked herself that; I was simply there, and to be drawn into her drama. Of course her boyfriend – was he her boyfriend? – noticed nothing, and had long since retreated with his friend to play snooker.

The house was all full of terrible knick-knacks, and in the snooker room, books had been bought by the yard to fill the shelves. The girl (another one) who had invited me there – and I had no idea that her house was different to any other, and was amazed to be told, as the taxi driver took us up the hill, that what appeared a small village of old houses was in fact part of the one estate, hers, or her family’s, my host – did so from a sense that I would add something to the drama.

Did I disappoint her? I remember, the first night, entering one of the largest rooms I have ever been in, with thirty foot ceilings and great high glass doors and great curtains pulled across them, there to find some men – boys – in dinner jackets, cooking for us. I was taken up to my room, and was to change. I had only a jacket I bought at a jumble sale, with a rip in the back.

Down I came, and it was dinner. We all drank a great deal, our hostess became ill, and slowly the intrigues began to unfold. Three men and two women – girls, all of us younger than 20. So this really was a weekend in a country house! And these really were a ‘set’! But of course they were not; our hostess’ family were new money, and had bought the estate all at once, and filled it with knick-knacks and books bought by the yard.

The real aristocrat amongst us said nothing of this, it was rather one of the girls, very snobbish since she hardly belonged to this world, who laughed at the unkempt maze in the gardens and at the ragged lawns. She was unimpressed. But the aristocrat, for whom her remarks were intended, was involved with the other girl. It seemed a complicated affair. Of course they were both very young.

Sometimes, later on, he would visit me in my room in the halls at university, and I would play him CDs as he looked through my books. I always thought he should be given things, he who gave so much to everyone else – true, he could afford it, but I always felt he was ashamed of his forced generosity, and wished someone could reciprocate in turn, and in their own way.

But this never lasted long; one girl or another would always come to find him, and if he always invited me on trips in his old car, which he used to drive the length of England to visit one old friend or another, it was the girls who always charmed their way in, taking all he bought them and demanding more. He disappeared back into his own circles, in the end, leaving his girlfriend behind (but she was never really his girlfriend).

On another occasion, found one day photocopying, I was taken up by another girl, who thought to involve me in her group – jaded, urbane Londoners with boyfriends much older than themselves, and who already tired of what they felt life had to offer them. Every night, for a time, I would be visited and they would speak of those minute social manoeuvers – perceived slights and insults they had borne or dealt to others around us.

Social climbers again – but this time measuring themselves by the cool, by a kind of reserve. They’d seen everything! They’d travelled everywhere! And where had I been, compared to them? And what was my connection to this or that London set? In the end, happily enough, I was dropped; they stopped visiting me: I was going out with someone they thought beneath me; I was snubbed in nightclubs, and this made me laugh.

I had been caught in an intrigue; I had disappointed them – or was it that I had moved from a diffuse set of possibilities – who was I? who was I to go out with? – that they might allow to be realised in various ways, to a person attracted to that kind of girl (the wrong kind)?

But that romance soon ended, and I was on my own again, to be picked up by the Young Conservatives, with whom I watched the General Election in 1992, laughing on my own when Chris Patten lost his seat. I was told the Young Conservatives thought me someone worth getting to know.

To be worth knowing – why not? – I was bored and romanceless, so I let them come round and smoke cigars in my room. How passive I have always been! Still, it was interesting to find out later what became of them all – one retired by 30, the other working in an off license, and to be caught up in speculation as to why one person succeeded and another did not.

For my part, of course, I had no hope of succeeding; I was a disaster, and I so depressed my poor university friends that I told them I was going abroad to teach for a year, when really I returned to the country after less than a week, having failed to find work and even the desire to find anything at all. Back – and to unemployment – but at least free for a few years from my friends who, in those years of recession, were doing much better, I thought, than me.

But wasn’t I, always, for them, some kind of absence, an open space of possibilities, occupying a position into which they could imagine occupying themselves? I was usually treated as one of their kind, whatever kind they might be.

Much later, returning to study, there was another period of being taken up, another crowd who desired that I was one of them and that I desire as they did. Once, ill, they came round to tend me like nurses; I was grateful for that.

I was figured as an older brother, I think – they were undergraduates, and I a postgraduate, and deemed wiser and older for that reason. And didn’t I belong to the world of the Arts? of Culture? That was my passport to their world, after I was 20 and had read a little, and to all the sets. Art and Culture, which still had a value in their world.

But of course, I fell away from that last set, too, when for a few months I was ill with some vague, unspecified malady. Days in bed – weeks lolling in the summer sun – and gradually a return to the world no longer populated by them, the posh and the would-be posh, to whose world I would not have to return for another ten years.

Arts and Culture: I began to read, before turning 20, under the influence of another, bohemian set who, I think, gave me the push to read by seeming so well informed themselves. Didn’t one know Samuel Beckett (‘Sam’ as she called him; he died at this time)? Hadn’t another lived a few weeks in the backrooms of Shakespeare & Co.?

That was a time marvellous until I they told me how young they felt they were, how their tastes would change, and that our tastes now were not to be trusted. They were too young and I was too young, I think they decided, and though we were all to live together in a big house, I pulled out, thinking I wouldn’t care for that moment, of which I already saw signs, in which they would pull away from Arts and Culture into another life.

Wasn’t it then I met one of their brothers, and knew? Wasn’t it then I saw that Arts and Culture was around them as they were raised, that they breathed in the dust of old civilisation with such ease because they hadn’t pushed their way into them like explorers unhappy with this world, but as they’d been taken there by their parents, university dons and artists? Taken there as to the tropical houses at Kew Gardens to be acclimatised and to know their way around, but only as they’d been shown in advance, only as it was their birthright.

When one of them left a note on my door in the halls to which I’d moved instead of living with them, I ripped it down, no doubt resentfully, and I think I regret doing that still, and that we all fell out of contact. But I thought I had to find my own way into the hothouse. Hadn’t one of them, the most generous, the one I remember the most tenderly, said she would rather I read whatever I pleased, that I follow my own course? And so I did, stumblingly, and over many years.

I think it was my 20th birthday I passed with her in the park. She’d remembered it, and bought me a gift – I can’t remember what it was, though a few months earlier, she’d got me the Notebooks of Malte Lauridds Brigge in an edition I still have. I even wrote to her once, when I found her name online, one lonely night a few years ago. What happened to her? But what happened to me, by the same token, or to any of us, who are growing older as part of a generation for whom things seem less sure than previously, though no doubt this is what every generation thinks?

The Young Conservatives used to buy books from me, which I sold to buy more books. I lived on pancakes, which I supplemented with what I found in fridges in other parts of the hall. I put brown paper all over my walls and wrote formulae on them to help me in my exams. I threw my mattress out and slept on the hard surface beneath.

I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs with the curtains drawn against the sun, and dreamt of escape. When I heard my name called outside and a knock at the door, I didn’t answer. The bureau was open, and I took notes from Musil and from Proust as I read. I bought a creamy-covered copy of Finnegan’s Wake, and read it alongside a book that promised to be its key.

I think it was then I found a translation of Ungaretti’s poems – and Quasimodo’s. And I’m sure it was then that Stirrings Still came out, soon after Beckett’s death. ‘What Is The Word?’: the last poem, printed in very large type in one Sunday supplement or another.

Arts and Culture: weren’t those my heydays, with the university library open before me? But all I remember are the brown-papered walls and the hard bed and a kind of mania as the examinations approached. And when we left university, I knew some of us would fall from those circles of which we were part; it was a recession; what chance was there?

Didn’t I meet other ghosts at jobfairs, queuing to find out about PGCEs? Ghosts – former students – the more ghostly for that they appeared, now, without context. Some of us were adrift, and wasn’t it unbearable to see one’s own drifting in another, as in a mirror?

Meanwhile, others were busy becoming doctors and lawyers and accountants; other had disappeared into the City, until there were only a few of us left, blown hither and yon by what training courses were available to us or were not, by job applications and failed interviews.

A different life, a fallen one, and now the privileged were very far above us, and moving further away like the stars that, astronomers say, are moving away from us at half the speed of light. To have fallen, and have found oneself at the bottom – now books became truer company, and I read them as I thought the rich could not.

That is, I reread instead of read, and went over again books in the Quartet Encounters series – Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet amongst them – and then over again the volumes in the handsome Princeton collected Kierkegaard – and then again over Rilke, and Ungaretti and Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva. No doubt fantastical, distorted readings.

Bernhard was being translated then, and Henry Green republished, in too expensive-to-buy Harvill editions. Arts and Culture – but now on the side of the poor, not the rich. And wasn’t I making my own path? Difficult, then, before the internet. Difficult, great lulls, then frantic activity, say, for example, buying up all of Mishima after seeing the film that I caught by chance on Channel 4.

But now again I was no one at all. Back in my parent’s house in the back bedroom that looked over the fence to the large houses opposite. Back and my dad retired very early and unemployment all around me, that great wave of recession that finally caught the middle classes, I was absent to my friends who thought I was away.

I had returned almost as soon as I’d gone, having met the Mediterranean sun for the first time and thought it too hot. Gone, and returned, secretly, even as my friends thought I had gone elsewhere to weather the recession.

Sometimes, later, we saw each other again. To whom did I lend Troyat’s Tolstoy? I remember; I suppose she has it still. How many years has it been? I know she works for Glaxo, and drives up and down the motorway. Perhaps she’s married now, and has found her way into the Chelsea set as she wanted. But I think she is unmarried and on the edges still as she was then.

Whatever happened to that big biography, and to the copy of The Thief’s Journal I made her buy, and was surprised – infinitely surprised – that she read it at once, and even liked the same passage as me, when he sees the little genet flowers as he crosses the border from one country to another? And didn’t she remember, too, the line, ‘I wandered through that region of myself I called Spain?’

I remember repeating that line to another friend, in whose house I convalesced as I crossed the border separating a life on the fringes of sets and groups, and another life, in which I think I still live now. How many people I’ve known! Through how many sets I’ve passed!: two exclamations as I wonder at how very long life is.

Of course there are no flowers with my name, but it does seem I cross a hill similar to the one Genet describes, only this time there is no end to the crossing, which passes across a plateau joined to the borders of every country. Where will end? When will I descend to the valleys, or is this life, up here on the plateau, where life always seems never to have begun?

Was I ever drawn to literature for literary reasons? I always envied those I thought drawn to literature in purity, in simplicity, who could speak easily of the plays of Dryden, or of Wilder’s latinate prose. I think of my friend’s flat, whose small living room is ringed inside by two sets of bookshelves, until there are only two chairs on which to sit, and your knees almost touch.

Books – thousands of them, and in the finest editions. An original Johnson Dictionary; a complete Dickens in one edition, a complete Trollope in another. But more – much more, for he had records, too. Didn’t I owe to him my introduction to classical music – to Sibelius, to whom we listened conducting his own fifth symphony? And how he could speak (he still can) of music, of literature – of Keats, of Donne, of any composer you can name!

He spoke; he speaks, and what can I say? The books I like seem shells of books, the music, blasted music.  Sometimes he’ll buy books I recommend, and I know they are lost there among the others he owns. Less imposing, less weighty – it is not that my friend is blind to modernity; far from it. He is not closed minded. Read Gardner on Eliot, he pressed. And so I did, finding my own edition (he never lent out books). Have you read Stevens?, he said, and read The Man With the Blue Guitar out loud – and I saved up and bought the Collected Poems.

Why was it different for me? Periods of unemployment, periods of illness, I could say (but illness and unemployment were one) in suburbs adrift from the streaming of life, from like-minded friends, from official culture. And no money – don’t forget that. Too skint for the theatre, for the out-of-town gallery, too skint for the cinema and the taxi home from the cinema (the suburbs are too dispersed; you need a car, but I didn’t learn to drive, not then). Dependent, for a long time, on the kindness of others: a cheap room in a house, in exchange for keeping an eye on the alcoholics and drug addicts who lived there.

Yes, all of that, but broader than that: a comprehensive school education, seven years of poor schooling. Taught literature by kindhearted incompetents who would ask you to draw what you felt about Iris Murdoch’s The Bell or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. He would disappear to smoke and then photocopy our drawings into a booklet: that was our English lesson; that was how we were supposed to learn.

No different for the other subjects. Teachers in the sciences did not mark our work. ‘Swap books’ – but we marked our own. What high marks we achieved! Until it came to the examinations, but happily, they, by this time, were easy enough for us all to pass, and pass comfortably. And then, in the sixth form (what a mistake to have gone on to the sixth form), ‘free periods’, tracts of the day when nothing happened – no teaching, just time for boredom and flirting and mischief and wandering.

Rebellion: I ordered Stephen King’s It for my school English prize. But against what was there to rebel? No official culture among our hippie teachers. No sense of constraint. Absurd to miss it, of course – that constraint. And even when it came, in the shape of my cultured, much older friend – himself a schoolteacher – I thought I must have some deficiency of taste. I was not ready, in my first, dreary job in a warehouse, for Jane Austen.

Happily, a television series by Malcolm Bradbury dramatised scenes from Crime and Punishment one week and, I think, The Magic Mountain the next. I ordered the latter from the local bookshop and awaited it excitedly. Eight pounds: had I ever spent that much? I read Mann as summer turned to Autumn – hundreds of pages, sometimes dull in the reading, but the whole, the expanse of the book, the way Castorp fell from his position as a visitor to a friend in a sanatorium to a patient himself. Fell until not months passed, but whole years – he was a bad case and then, when released, he left for the war. And wasn’t I, too, falling?

I became unemployed, and then found my way to university. I shut myself in my room, barely attending my course, and read. Again, happy and unhappy encounters with those happy in book culture. You must read Anna Karenina – and The Heart of Darkness – and Huckleberry Finn. Whole days reading. The first third of Proust. Musil. Rilke’s Malte. Pessoa’s Disquiet. And gradually, out of all of this, a taste was forming. But was it taste?

No one would be so simple as to think literature is the mirror of the world. But nor is it escape. Whatever the connection between the book and the world, it must pass through a life, a particular life. In my case, what had I experienced? The retreat of culture, and all intellectual life, it seemed, to a few remote islands – my friend’s flat, some lecturers at university. And yet a disappointment at that same culture, that same intellectual life. It was a relic, and my friend’s flat a reliquary. But nor did I want the books I read to be contemporary – or racy. What then did I want?

It seems laughable now to read what I inscribed on the inside cover of Bataille’s Inner Experience: ‘the book of books. What I was waiting for.’ Absurd – but it was as though not only my present had changed as a result of that encounter, but my past, too. It had been leading up to this point, preparing me. In the same year, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, and, later, The Step Not Beyond, and The One Who …

There’s a certain point in his letters to Felice when Kafka suddenly uses the word, literature. Suddenly – and momentously. I am nothing but literature. I am made of literature – this reacting against Felice’s phrase – what was it? – ‘literary interests.’ Kafka was made of literature, but of what was he made? I learnt from Blanchot of Holderlin, for whom the gods had departed – and of the madness that touched him as he tried to write in the absence of God, thickening that absence, knowing it as the indeterminable that had to come to form in the poems.

I learnt of Rilke’s search for a proper death, and that death was never proper – that we must die, in our modern world like flies. But in the wake of God, and after propriety, wasn’t it possible to sense what they had both concealed? Not the existentialist pathos of a life man must make for himself – virile man, resolutely braced against others, preserving his relationship to death, the most sacred, but that doubling of the world that resonates when the words of a poem thicken and grow sonorous, when rhythm becomes important and words search for a way to indicate what they cannot reach.

Or when a work of prose text no longer mirrors a world replete and substantial in itself, a world of certainty, and populated by characters with a commendable psychological realism, and events that reproduce so wonderfully what might occur on the other side of the page. Not the plausible – but not the fantastical either; not the retreat to an altered world, even as it is still our world.

I learned from Blanchot – and then from others to whom he referred, explictly and implicitly, in The Space of Literature, of a kind of doubling – the difference between things and what they are, and that difference a differentiation, an anorganic life. To think the becoming of being – wasn’t this to allow that the world might be different – that it might become differently and there might be a way of joining it in becoming? Another life; the relinquishment of a personal life. A life – an impersonal streaming that passes through the well-upholstered rooms of the nineteenth century novel. Dickens knew it, Hardy – but Egdon Heath only wears through into the novel Tess, it does not alter its form, and Rider’s death is only an incident.

Lawrence calls it a ‘metaphysic’, that bundle of ideas he required in order to begin writing his novels. Doesn’t a reader, too, need a metaphysic of sorts? Until that point, I would say I was lost, lost in my reading. I read this, and then that, without know why it was to a cluster of authors and books to which I continually returned. Beckett and Heidegger had only a few books in their workrooms, I learned, but according to what principle could I pare them down?

A metaphysic. Isn’t this what literature students receive when they come to Theory? In the wake of culture, of the reliquary of the canon, there’s too much confusion. I used to read Leavis with envy: what certainty! But there is can be certainty in philosophy, and in that philosophy co-opted into what came to be called Theory.

Still, I am glad I came to philosophy by myself, and through literature. Glad, that is, I had read Rilke and Kafka before The Space of Literature, that I had already discerned what I thought were common concerns in my favourite writers. And also glad – more distantly – that I had lived somewhat before I read philosophy. Lived – and had therefore a kind of metaphysic to sort my philosophical reading.

And in those days, too, I wrote – just for myself, and found certain themes coalescing that began to resonate with what I read in literature and in philosophy. I had a metaphysic at last, a heuristic; now I was not a dabbler, reading this and then that. I knew the next task must be to sharpen this instrument, to will that my own past, my education, my unemployment occurred exactly as it did.

I made another friend, another cultured man, more expansive than the first, with a house and not a flat. As he drove me from the station, I told him I would like to say, after Genet, ‘I wandered through that part of myself I called Manchester.’ As though Manchester were folded within me; as though there was nothing but my life, even as it had become impersonal, even as it seemed to stream without subject. But philosophy broke that ‘I’ apart still further. Now a dawning sense of ethics, of politics, and not in any formulated sense.

What was literature? Whatever it was, it was also a passion, a way of indicating that nothingness, that virtuality in which the world turns. And didn’t it point to a task, to a way of living, of folding what the world was not into the world? What it was not, what it was – but now in a sense more expansive than the world which seemed absolute as I was growing up. For hadn’t I learnt, and almost from the first, of the impossiblity of politics – of politics fallen into managerialism, into administration?

By literature, by philosophy – and by that metaphysic that held both together, turning in one another – I retrieved, and by way of my repetition of the past (Kierkegaard’s gjentagelse) a sense of the contingency of the world in which I grew up. Things could have been otherwise; it was possible to live another way. No need to sigh after another life, to mourn the death of culture, or its retreat to the university – tendencies I still had, and were not burnt from me for many years.

For a long time, the local library would give me old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. For years, I used to read it at night when I could sleep with a mixed fascination. Culture, intellectual life – all this was marvellous. But I was disturbed by the steadiness of its tone and the tranquility of its judgements. So, at least, it seemed to me then. Gradually, I saw in it an old enemy: culture itself, the old culture, whose conservatism was clear when it came to reviewing works of philosophy. My judgement was simplistic, unsubtle, but one day I took hundreds of editions of the TLS to the dump and felt lifted.

What was it I disliked? Simply that a metaphysic was not allowed to lift itself from literature. Or that the approach to literature was in some way obvious, or transparent, and that judgements could be made. But I asked myself – I still ask – whether this is because I lack something, something quality of judgement; that I am not far enough from what I read – and that, perhaps, others like me also lack. But then I also asked – and ask today – whether those who seek from literature a clue as to how to live, how to act, how to experience the contingency of the world, can only ever be too close to what they are compelled to love.

Compelled – I use this word deliberately. Sometimes I close my eyes and dream again of the ambition of the great avant-gardes to unite art and life into a blazing whole. Or to annul art, or to lift it, by letting it become life, and nothing other than life. How to live, and collectively, what vouchsafes itself in Rimbaud, in Lautreamont? This is a dream that steered me through what I tried to write elsewhere.

But let me put those thoughts aside. I began this post to speculate as to why I reacted with disquiet  to Josipovici’s review of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in the TLS when I reread it yesterday. That is, I wanted to surf the affects that review awakened: on the one hand, a sense that I must be wrong, and Disquiet is a rag bag that takes second place to the poems, that it is, as Josipovici say unconvincingly the work of Bernardo Soares, who is too close to Pessoa himself.

And on the other? That the work is instructive because Soares is worn away to become not Pessoa, but Pessoa, too worn away: that its disquiet is what condemns it sprawl, as though it was the whole of a tradition that was spilling out like a river into the ocean. Spilling out into the vast indifference of Pessoa’s twentieth century and our twenty first. Literature is finished; literature is lost – and the only literature is that which knows it began with loss, that its inception coincides with the collapse of the world that could give it place.

In that case, I tell myself it must always reach us from without, and even despite itself. That it might be missed, and reading is a welcoming excavation that must pore over a text, reading it along its grain and against it, looking for its metaphysic, or even tearing its declared metaphysic from the itself. But that is only to say, I love the work for that it embodies a metaphysic, that it lives it and trembles with it; that it comes to embody a philosophy or a counter-philosophy: embody it and not merely state it, the spirit of the text being its density, its thickness, the way the details it recounts seem to point beyond themselves to that reserve literature seems peculiarly able to mark (but then it is, after all, made of language).

Is this a betrayal? Is it to read philosophically what demands to be approached by other, gentler means? Or is it to know literature as research – that the extra-literary is part of literature, and that it is also a summons to live as though the world could be different?

Admiration for those who can sustain a strong affect over the course of an artwork. Syd Barrett’s song ‘Opel’ is the work of one who has seen everything – or for whom everything has been seen as it is given in a single, streaming affect. Who has been called forward to sing? Who called forward to play? When I hear this song, I am frightened. ‘I’m living, I’m giving, I’m trying’, each verb stretched and attenuated as if what he was singing was ‘I’m dying’; as if he sang from the crucible wherein everything boils itself down to its essence and in which he, too, is boiled down to his essence.

What had he lived in order to sing like that? What had he seen? He is dying; he is living in dying. That is the authority of his song, and what carries it in its raggedness. Syd Barrett and guitar; a song unreleased, but when it reached me, in the late 80s, I think, I knew what I know now: these are those who can endure a region we cannot – those who endure and make art in that endurance, and bear the whole work of art there where we could not bear to be. How hard it is to bear a strong affect! How hard to live and die in the event!

Last night, I let Newsnight run on into The Culture Show. How foolish! I admit I was curious to see Houellebecq talk; I was not disappointed. His skin is grey. He speaks slowly, as one who has seen everything must talk. I have read one of his books, and am in no doubt: respect is due to one whose work is a block of extraordinary despair. A ragged book, Atomised, and no matter – that raggedness is a sign of the affect and its ravages. It turns, slow whirlwind, in the pages of the book. It is there and unmistakeable.

I read the copy W. lent me in a single sitting. I thought: Houellebecq is a man who has lived and died in the event. I saw it on his skin last night, the same waxen grey as that of Mark E. Smith, whom I saw with the Fall a couple of weeks back. These are half-destroyed men, very different it is true, but those who are able to carry themselves in a zone most of us will not know and most will not bear. These are the late men, the ones who come after the world, those who have seen everything and know everything.

Of course Mark E. Smith is not a man of despair, but a man of fervour. Only a cold, insectoid fervour, like that of Francis Wyndham. The song is fractured with Mark E. Smith; lyrics, sung by no one, speak from no position. Mark E. Smith is the conduit, the medium. The phrases come; they are sung from no centre, but from the dispersal of the centre. They belong to the shattering of the world and come from all directions.

How hunched he is! How wizened! How tiny! How waxen and grey his skin! But he has already lived several lifetimes! He’s already used them up, nine lifetimes in a row! When did he die first? After the year of Hex Enduction Hour and Room to Live? After the year of Perverted by Language? He has died many times since. Dead man, it is fervour which binds him to himself. What power of will and ferocity! He reminds me of another Francis – Francis Bacon, who drank away each evening, champagne and oysters, and rose, hungover to paint like an insect. Vision from the other end of the world!

Did I see the same in the Frieda Kahlo exhibition at the Tate? Was it there too, in the waves of extraordinary pain she set forward in painting? She depicts herself riveted, stamped by pain. Never melodrama. But pain is here – pain which is the whole world and a life. Pain that reveals the whole and sings the whole. Unimaginable torment! Death throes without cease! And she depicts herself, animal caught in a trap, trapped animal who is only pain and waves of pain. In truth, it is time she experiences – the nakedness of time detached from tasks and projects. Time that insists in the measurelessness of pain. Pain without measure, time without measure: Kahlo is riveted to what destroys her body. Promethea bound. Promethea to whom the vultures come each day again to devour her liver.

On came the academics last night’s interview with Houellebecq, to defend him and to praise him. What horror! What have they felt or lived? They are fleas and fleas of fleas: busy nothingness, the hopping of those who are too alive. Where is death in them? Where is dying? They have felt nothing and lived nothing; there are books behind them in their offices; we see them, the books – but what do we see? Nothing worse than a bookshelf full of books. Nothing worse than the conservers and mummifiers for whom oeuvres are to be pored over with magnifying glasses. Do they know nothing of awe? What of that sacred pause before affect? What of the pause and the silence before the magnificent strength of affect? I dislike them with their books. Set fire to your books! Better that they are charred and useless than they are processed by the introducers and paraphrasers!

I was sickened; I knew I could save myself only by listening to another who sustains an extraordinary affect. No surprise that when Bill Callahan releases songs, it is always as part of a suite. A River Ain’t Too Much Too Love is a block of … what? And this is the sign of an artist of affect: no words will do; all words are synonyms. There is only intensity, and one without form or limit. Only the block of affect that is the molten lava over which words congeal and are melted away.

And isn’t this why we go to see an artist like Chan Marshall, even as we know how erratic a performer she can be? She is the crow who has broken herself against heaven. That breaking is there in the songs, in their frailty. Always a suite of songs, always songs bound together with so much strength! Always the are strewn across the night! When she records, she discards songs she has written and writes new ones then and there. She discards the long-worked-on songs, and writes new ones in the moment. This is because she knows the fragility of the moment, and has the strength to let herself be broken in the moment.

Fragility’s demand: she must sing along, with a piano, with a guitar, crudely played. There is no room for talent here. No room for musicians. She begins; she rewrites – songs (The Covers Album) are broken from their choruses. What has ‘Satisfaction’ become? And ‘A Salty Dog’? The reversed image through which darkness shines. The reversed image like the night window, through which what is seen reflected, the room in which you are sitting, is filled with night.

On come the academics, and always too late. On they come, the academics, when the life they celebrate or dismiss is like the shadow blasted on the wall of one caught in Hiroshima. Do they know what it is to have been blasted out of existence? Do they know, latecomes, assessors and judgers of work, what it is to have died and left a shadowy trace for a life? Somewhere Houellebecq is drinking. Night and day he is drinking and his teeth are rotting. Somewhere Mark E. Smith is drinking and his teeth have dropped out. The academics are gathering. The academics are coming to assess and to judge. Look at the fleas! Look at them hop! Fleas on fleas, commenters on commentary.

Daniel Green is disquieted by the comments on various blogs which seem to dismiss the importance of blogging about books in the wake of Bush’s victory. Isn’t the status of reading the question you face as soon as you set aside time to read? Time says: couldn’t you do something better with me? Progress says: isn’t it more important to keep up with current affairs, or with developments in science and technology?

The old humanist insists that literature is spiritually uplifting and morally improving. The cultural critic asks: But is it really a question of putting culture together again? Or was the unity of culture, that pantheon of books and works, already a lie? The critic says calmy, dispassionately:  reading is a cultural practice like any other; through reading you amass a cultural capital, you profit from your fine education; you can show off.

Come now, I reply, the books I like never had any place in culture; they were base, disgraceful, their authors untrustworthy or wierd. The cultural critic turns to me and says: you like obscure works – but why is this surprising? True, you like narratives where characters seem to evaporate, in which nothing happens, in which events cannot come to completion. Nothing entertaining happens; nothing suspenseful. And there is nothing useful, either; nothing of relevance to understanding the world. But wasn’t this, the critic continues, since Kant, always the sign of art, of high art as it belonged to what is called high culture? Isn’t this the defining feature of what is no more than a marker of cultural capital?

I sigh and remember what Josipovici said in a recent interview:

As Bacon said, what he felt when reading Eliot was the immediacy of the poetry and he wanted in his paintings to get some of that immediacy, to break down the polite distance between canvas and viewer. I want to do the same in my work, to break down the polite intimacy that is the norm in fiction of a story being told to you, of a storyteller who knows the outcome telling the reader who doesn’t know, the reader following respectfully behind[….] Of course one can’t get that immediacy simply by using raw language, for raw language is still language, one has to come to it by indirection, seduce the reader into going along one track and then suddenly surprise him or her. And that surprise is the goal of the story or novel. 

The appeal to immediacy is not a call to the development of new fangled artistic techniques so much as to the newness inherent in a particular style, in the singular timbre of this voice or that, in the heaviness of a word or the sonorousness of a sentence. I would like to say that to read literature is not simply to imbibe improving values as the cultural conservative would have it; but nor, too, is it merely to confirm the superiority of one’s taste. What matters is shock or rawness; what matters is the materiality of the artwork, its darkness, its obscurity.

‘Culture has collapsed’, say conservatives of the left and right. But it is the idea of culture that has collapsed and this is our opportunity. An immense field has opened: that rich domain of works supposedly too ‘low’ for critical attention. Claw them back, these works and remember too those charred books which were always marginalised: Bataille’s Inner Experience, Klosswski’s The Bath of Diana, Duras’s India Song. Claw them back and attend to the transformation of the media as it opens itself to those who call themselves artists and many who do not. Let reading join that unnamed practice of attending to affects, to the great stirring of the world. Rebuild aesthetics as the science of this whirl of affects, always surprising, always raw.

I hear the great lament about the death of culture from those around me. But I know that Bataille has more in common with A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology than with Beryl Bainbridge …

Once, it was verse that was the highest mark of literature; prose was humdrum, servile, but poetry was so lofty it had to be protected by rules and codes which made of it a monument. The novel, modest beast, was a device to render worlds, to reflect the world back to itself: no longer, like the poem, was it a mantic work, a work of divine inspiration, but a genre which answered the measure of the human being. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I wanted to express my experience of…’ Sober, industrious, the labour to produce a novel is analogous to that of producing things in the world: novelist as craftsworker – and if the novel has been compared to a loose, baggy monster, it is a domesticated beast, which works alongside us in making a world.

To make a world – to confirm an order – to raise great edifices on the earth: without doubt, the novel is a virtuoso’s genre: there are so many ways to celebrate our civilisation and the principles that underlie it. But the world opens itself as against a resisting force: call it earth, this movement of self-occlusion, this withdrawal within the things of which you would write and within writing itself.

Rilke: ‘Earth, is this not what you want, to be reborn invisible in us?’; Char: ‘shifting earth, horrible, exquisite’; Van Gogh: ‘I am attached to the earth’. A difficult thought: a writing which is no longer born of power, be it the power to express oneself, or to articulate a world. A weak writing if the word ‘weak’ didn’t suggest that one measure its non-power according to the measure of power. It is as though the words were made of the clay of the field or the surf on the water – of obdurate rock and the broad sky. But these are only ways of writing about a withdrawal or reserve which can in no way be understood in terms of what we call nature.

Perhaps, then, ‘earth’ is the wrong name for this reserve, suggesting an easy paganism: the sacred groves and wood-nymphs which belong to a seductive archaism. Still, it provides a useful analogy in suggesting what happens when language no longer offers itself as a medium through which the world might be represented: for it is possible to write that language becomes heavy and resistant, that words themselves become like the great blocks of granite which were assembled to make ancient monuments. But the power to utter these great, block-like words fails our writer, and even the power to write.

The power to write? Yes – the freedom to say anything and to say it in any way at all; to say everything and to say it in every way. But what is this anything and everything when compared to the experience I am trying to sketch here? Anything, everything: it is as though the author was the master of the infinite, the demiurge who can make a world. But then, by the same stroke which opens the world to him as what can be rendered on the page, the author is deposed and made to wander the same world as a stranger.

Master of the infinite? The author, now, is a wanderer in an infinite space without abode. But is it the earth in which the author is exiled – the natural realm in which he can still draw joy from the beauty of the foliage, from the birds, beasts and flowers and the great vault of the sky? But our author isn’t even the mad, blind King Lear on the moor. Space without place, time without initiative: what is left to the one who is delivered over to what we cannot call the earth?

I have already written about the fascination which can lay claim to the literary author. Today I imagine it as a half-frozen sea across which great icebergs drift. Only those icebergs are great, frozen words, as simple as ‘and’ or ‘but’, but which are hardened into a grand immensity. Simple words frozen in the distance between the writer and the work and against which the ship of meaning is wrecked and dragged under.

But even this image is too comforting. Think instead of the husks of an exploded star – of the dark, infinitely dense mass which collapses into the black hole into which all sense disappears: the secret centre of the work that unravels from within. Then the sentences of the novel are infinitely stretched as they disappear across the event horizon as one by one they fall into the darkness wherein all light disappears. And the novelist? He is strewn with his sentences like darkness across darkness, a galaxy of dark points upon darkness.

How is it, as a post at Dan Green’s The Reading Experience points out, that the literary industry (the publicity industry) almost always abuses and marginalises the best literary authors? Perhaps the desire of such authors to publish has nothing to do with money or reputation. Write! says the story to Kafka. Paint! says the painting to Cezanne. ‘My entire work is only an exercise’ wrote Kafka; an exercise: but to what end? There was no end – only endless work, the endless desire to work which unravels all works. Begin again, and again, and again, but you will get nowhere.

Fascination is perhaps one name for the movement towards the curious space the work opens. But fascination – which leads to what the world can only call failure – is difficult to bear. Who will console the Rilke before he was able to write the Dunio Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Rilke who struggles for ten years to complete Malte? Who understands the terrible privation which prevents Pessoa from gathering his Book of Disquiet into publishable form? And what of Kafka, who begins stories only to leave them half-completed, not revising them, but beginning new stories each time with a fresh creative gesture? Ah, but perhaps they do not need consolation, these writers of fragments! Because they do not experience fascination as a loss – because it is reaffirmed in the different editions of the Book of Disquiet, in the profusion of Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, and in the letters through which Rilke maintains his prolific correspondence, as the joy of the work. Strange joy which is also failure! Strange persistence which entails failure! I know they are working out there, lots of them, our secret companions, burrowing like moles …

But what does it mean to celebrate the fragmentary? After all, the Sonnets to Orpheus are perfectly formed, well rounded – and isn’t Metamorphosis the most satisfying of stories? Ah, but they are fragmentary, these works, because they present themselves to us in the manner of a flashing indication, pointing to what they cannot seize, making manifest what cannot be frozen into something dead and finished. It is in this sense that they are broken and break us, their readers, from the false consolation that we are reading something edifying, something that will add to the great movement of culture. Fascination: yes, they fascinate us, too. For myself, I am afraid of Woolf’s The Waves – and I cannot read Sarraute unless I am prevented from sleep. On those insomniac nights I read Woolf, Sarraute, Duras because it is only then I overcome my fear of fascination …

But there is, as you would expect, a counterforce – a movement against fascination: the great cultural movement against the indeterminability of the work. Wander the pages of Sarraute’s Childhood and you may well be lost forever. And Beckett’s Unnameable? You will come apart as the sentences unfurl. But the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life?

It is a question, in each case, of a redundant humanism – of the desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being – a humanism which understands what it might mean that the works we take to be great are fractured from within; that the fragmentation welcomed by Rilke or Kafka leaves its mark upon the most imposing monuments of our age.

But if fascination does summon a certain kind of the artist it does not permit her to transform its vanishing ‘object’ into a completed artwork. It is a kind of a ghost of the work, or a ghost of completion, forbidding the artist from recognising herself in her accomplishments. A ghost? Perhaps something still more mysterious: a darkness without contour, a reserve which surpasses every cultural form. Is it the earth from which the ghost of Hamlet’s father arises, the old mole? But it is the same earth against which the world of publicity affirms itself. Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more (but they do not exist …)

There are no shadows and ghosts in the daylight of publicity; the self-withdrawal of the old mole’s earth, the way it presents itself by hiding itself, like the God who showed only his hindparts to the prophet, seems to leave no traces. But is this really the case? Has the era of a certain kind of literature disappeared altogether? Or are there books, paintings, works which would point beyond themselves to the reserve which plunges into darkness – which would present themselves as avatars of the unattainable ‘object’ of fascination?

Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters: the reading which greets the literary work, the novel, the poem; the viewing which welcomes the television drama or the exhibition. The horror is that the space for these encounters slowly withdraws – chance, for example, will not lead you to a film by Tarkovsky on a terrestrial television station on a weeknight.

What does that mean? That the world appears complete, perfected, finished and I believe, as a reader, a viewer, but primarily as one who is alive, that I am aberrant if I cannot disappear into a world which I imagine to be full of the public I read about in magazines, or whom I think I encounter through reality TV. There is a great misery and loneliness, but then, within that, isn’t there also a kind of refusal of the forces which determine what we want to watch or to read? A refusal beyond cynicism; a simple horror at what seems a vast conspiracy to close every channel of creativity and innovation. And isn’t this the greatest objection to a unified Europe? To the common market which raises its walls against poorer countries? To a movement which may see the old Europe transformed into something streamlined and efficient? Refusal of the denumerable and measurable; refusal of the market and of marketeers; refusal of the great engines of publicity, and the lies of our politicians. Refusal of the system of values which holds our culture together, communicating with itself as it passes through us.

The danger: that refusal fails to recognize its political potential, is ungrasped as a legitimate disgust with our world. Because isn’t it this same refusal which is treated by antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy? I think here of Todd Haynes’ film Safe, where, in the closing scene, Julianne Moore, after renouncing much of the paraphernalia of modern life which brought about a protracted illness, speaks directly into a mirror: I love you. Who does she love? Who is ‘safe’? In the mirror she sees the one who refuses, the bare life which has not vanished into the ‘public’. And here the parallel with Kafka, with Cezanne is perhaps apt: has she not glimpsed, in the mirror, what fascinates her and draws her towards it? The one who is not yet – the darkness through which the old mole burrows and ghosts wander. As if she confronted the ghost of herself who said: I am refusal. I am the one who refuses. Now she can begin the work she cannot complete in which she is held into the darkness in which she is unravelled.

An oblique response to Steve’s post over at In Writing.

The commentator, you think to yourself, is the ape of the artwork, grotesquely supplementing something that is already sufficient unto itself. It is as though that self-sufficiency is intolerable – that the commentator is envious of what keeps the work closed from the world. But what about the work itself? The work arrives out of nowhere, spinning itself from matter, from words or from sonorities, from colours and tones, from marble or even particles of information. It does not clothe itself in matter as though it were a pure idea.

One might think it is like the dresser crab who seizes the ephemera from the ocean floor that would normally disappear into usefulness in order better to vanish amidst other things. It is this ephemera, the matter that is made to stand out and makes the addressees of the work stand out (ecstasis) is the ‘substance’ of the work. Or rather, it joins substance to an intedeterminable reserve, a chaos which refuses form and presence. That is to say, the artwork imitates nothing. It is not a representation of the real; it is not the concept which allow us to grasp singularities as particulars, ready to submit them under the universal. It imitates nothing. Might one say the work resembles nothing but itself – that it is undone or unmade according to this resemblance?

The work submits what is useful to a detour. The moment the dresser crab encrusts a pearl in its carapace, that pearl is no longer an object. What of the commentator? The commentator binds the work to the world, showing how the deterritorialisation of matter, its becoming, refers back to the ordinary objects we find around us. The commentator folds back the peculiar self-resembling of the work to show that it is, in the end, a work like other works; it is not unique.

But doesn’t this moment of commentary happen in the work itself? Isn’t what I have called commentary part of the very movement of the work? After all, the pearl on the carapace is still a pearl, whatever else it is; the marble of the state is still marble, even if the sculpture allows it to obtrude into a form. The work is already joined to the world – it is, in this sense, a commentary upon itself. It is its own ape, its own buffoon because it shows the work of art is nothing but a nudity, an affirmation without content, which seeks to clothe itself in order to give itself what is ultimately only the illusion of substance. But this is wrong, too – for the work is not an idea in the artist’s mind, sheer form. It is a piece of the world deterritorialised from the world, a becoming that has not settled into being, an existence that, as it were, seeks to refer to itself without existents. It is true, this is possible only the intervention of the artist. But if the event of the work consists of a deterritorialisation which is repeated whenever the audience encounters the work, then the artist is already a commentator, perpetually joining the work of art to the world.

But this is not right, because the artist is not there every time the work is there. The work is not the expression of a feeling. The work itself is its own commentary, reaching its audience through the contentless repetition that it ‘is’. This means that although the artist is the occasion of the work, the work of art is never expressive, never autobiographical. Think of Tarkovsky’s raindrop, Giacometti’s glass: these indicate something about everything in the world, about the deterritorialisation of the object. The work does not have an angelic function, joining worlds. But it unjoins the world – to invert a Heideggerian formulation, it is the unworlding of the world. And it does so by repeating and as it were commenting upon itself, giving itself to be encountered singularly, each time. This formulation is misleading, because it threatens to substantialise the ‘it’ of the ‘it gives’. Better, then: the work is a dissemination without determinable origin. A happening which repeats itself without determinable content. An ongoing reaffirmation. Commentary, autocommentary, ‘is’ this repetition.

The possibility of commentary is the possibility of a work. The work is not simply what gives itself to be repeated, it is to the extent that it is in this repetition. It is not only the aircrash which kills everyone on board, but the black box recorder which survives the crash. It is not only the nova, the star exploding, but the nova’s husk. Tarkovsky’s raindrop, Giacometti’s glass: the artist makes a more general claim about every object. In the microcosm is the macrocosm; in this glass, there is not only every possible glass, but every possible object. What is discernible in the work? The repetition which is the chance of a world’s coming-to-appear – the iteration upon which the presence of everything depends. What happens as the work? The unjoining of the opening of the world – a difference and a repetition – a difference that happens in and as repetition as things give themselves to be experienced. What is staged in the encounter with the work? The way in which the concept is never adequate to the world and the singular can never become a particular. But does this spell the impossibility of thought, of philosophy? No – it indicates the material conditions of thinking, of philosophising so far as they outstrip the adequation and conceptualisation.

The commentator is not the ape of the work, but marks the work’s apishness, its buffoonery, the way it has already tumbled from the tightrope. But this is also the repetition that allows it to become differently: the chance of the work as it belongs to the secret of its origin. What do I hear in this becoming, this differential repetition? What Steve calls, following Blanchot, the ‘space of resonance’.

What did I mean yesterday when I tried drunkenly and incompetently to write of the rarefaction of style that occurs in the later work of some artists? I suppose I am thinking of those who are criticised because the worlds they construct become hermetic and self-enclosed. The books seem only issue from an understanding of the world that has already formed, rather than one which is to be fought for anew. Here I think of the later books of Duras, or the last films by Tarkovsky. But I suppose it would be plausible to claim that this self-enclosure was present in the films, say, of Hal Hartley from the start. What I love – and this is what I wanted to say – is the artifice as it presents itself in its very artificiality, when it no longer hides the fact that it is a sham. At this moment, it is as though the mask knows that it is a mask, and that art, in some sense, is only a play of masks over the void.

What does it mean to invoke the void here? I have tried to write of this before, but failed miserably. I suppose it is the affirmation of a kind of matter or materiality: the heaviness of the word, the timbre of the tone, the nuance of colour. The artwork affirms its own heaviness or bulk – its unwieldiness. It does so by allowing it to be present in the very lightness and deftness of the artist’s touch. Just as the old calligrapher learns to create his work in a single stroke, a few elements are sufficient for the Durasian universe to be brought into creation, a few notes are all Smog needs to make a song. But the extraordinary grace through which a book as tiny as ‘The Slut of the North Atlantic Coast’, or ‘The Man Sitting in the Corridor’, or a song as self-effacing as ‘Rain on Lens’ or ‘Floating’, also brings us into contact with what I like to call fate, which is to say, the way things are and will be. I even like to think of this as ‘truth’, remembering the role Nietzsche assigns to art when he claims that its dignity lies in beautifying the ugly, in making truth endurable.