Category: Quotes

August 19, 1960

My dear, good Nelly,

thanks, heartfelt thanks for your letter! You are still in such distress and you find, you dear, you still find words – no word-gifts for us!

Nelly, dear one! I can see that the net is still there, it can't be taken away by the wave of a hand… And yet: it can be removed, it can and should be removed, for the sake of all those to whom you know you are near, for the sake of nearness, of your living nearness! You have your hands, you have the hands of your poems, you have Gudrun's hands – take, please, take ours as well! And take whatever is a hand and wants to be helpful and remain helpful through you, through your being, through your being-there, and being-at-one-with-yourself and being-at-one-with-yourself-in-the-open, take it, please, let it be there, by virtue of this being-able-to-come-to-you-today-and-tomorrow-and-for-a-long-time!

I think of you, Nelly, always, we are always thinking of you and the life you have bestowed! Do you still remember, when we spoke for the second time of God, in our house, the one that is yours, that awaits you, how a golden light shimmered on the wall? Through you, through your nearness, such things become visible, there is need of you, need of your being-here and being-among-people, there is need of you for a long time yet, your gaze is sought after -: send it, this gaze, back into the open, send your true, freedom-loving words with it, entrust yourself to it, entrust that gaze to us, who also live, who live-with-you, let us who are already free be the freest of all, the ones standing-with-you-in-the-light!

Look, Nelly: the net is being drawn away! Look, Nelly: there is Gudrun's hand, she has helped, she is helping! Look, there are other hands helping! Look, yours is helping too! Look: It is getting light, you are breathing, you are breathing freely. You will not be lost to us, I know it, you will not be lost to us, we know it: with all that is near to you, with all that is near from so far away, you are there and here and at home and with us!

With deepest, heartfelt thanks,

your grateful Paul

Paul Celan, letter to Nelly Sachs

You studied law, but all your philosophy seeks, in a sense, to free itself from law.

Leaving secondary school, I had just one desire – to write. But what does that mean? To write – what? This was, I believe, a desire for possibility in my life. What I wanted was not to 'write', but to 'be able to' write. It is an unconscious philosophical gesture: the search for possibility in your life, which is a good definition of philosophy. Law is, apparently, the contrary: it is a question of necessity, not of possibility. But when I studied law, it was because I could not, of course, have been able to access the possible without passing the test of the necessary. In any case, my law studies came to be very useful for me. Power has dropped political concepts in favour of juridical ones. The juridical sphere never stops expanding: they make laws on everything, in domains where it would once have been inconceivable. This proliferation of law is dangers: in our democratic societies, there is nothing that is not regulated. Arab jurists taught me something that I liked very much. They represent law as a sort of tree, with at one extreme what is forbidden and, at the other, what is obligatory. For them, the jurist's role is situated between these two extremes: that is, addressing everything that one can do without juridical sanction. This zone of freedom never stops narrowing, whereas it ought to be expanded. 

Agamben, interviewed

With very few exceptions, there are no longer any philosophers. There are extremely erudite commentators and very knowledgeable historians of philosophy, but hardly any new creation. The only experience with which philosophy tries to deal, henceforth, is the philosophy of its own history. It is condemned to feed on itself, to devour its own flesh.

Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable

The ancient Greeks hoped for nothing, nothing, nothing, and, in my opinion, that is why they were so free in their creation. The tragedies already said, 'you're going to die'. The famous choir of Oedipus said that the best thing is not to be born; and second in quality is, once one is born, to die as soon as possible. That is not hope.

Castoriadis contra Bloch, interviewed in Postscript on Insignificance

There is really something quite mad about speaking and writing: the proper conversation is a mere play on words. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous mistake that people make when they believe that they are speaking about things. Nobody knows the greatest hallmark of language: that it is concerned only with itself. That is why it is such a wonderful and prolific secret: that when one simply speaks for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid and original truths. But if one wishes to speak of something particular, the capriciousness of language lets one say the most ridiculous and perverted things.

It is from out of this that a hatred of language grows in some serious people. They notice its playfulness, but they do not notice that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If one could only make people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language – they constitute a world for themselves – they only play with themselves, express nothing other than their own wonderful nature, and precisely for that reason they are so expressive – and that it is precisely for this reason that the strange play of relationships of things mirrors itself in them. Only through their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free motion does the spirit of the world epxress itself and make them the delicate measure and pattern of things. 

The same is true of language: one who has a fine feeling for its application, its tempo, its musical spirit, one who has perceived the delicate operations of its innermost nature and follows them through the movements of her tongue or her hand, such a person will be a prophet. Conversely, one who knows this, but does not have enough of an ear or sense to write truths such as these, will be mocked by language itself and by derided by me, as Cassandra was by the Trojans. 

If I believe I have shown in the clearest manner the essence and office of poetry, I nonetheless know that no one will be able to understand me, and I will have said something completely foolish precisely because I wanted to say it at all, and so no poetry comes into being. But what if I had to speak? And what if this impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of languag, of the effectiveness of language in me? and what if my will only wanted what I had to do? could this not then, in the end, be poetry without my knowledge or my conviction, and so make a secret of language understandable? And would I then be a writer who was called, for a writer is only someone who is possessed by language?

Novalis, Monologue (complete text)

… we're the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody's authority. We're on the side of those who don't offer final answers of transcendent truths[…]

There are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other[…] Only our cooperation can ensure the continuity of Heraclitus's vision: "This world has always been and will always be a pulsing fire, flaring up accordingly, and dying down accordingly, with the cycling of the eternal world breath"'.

[…] a person does a lot more doubting than a plucked cock does. And these are the people I love – the Dionysians, the unmediated ones, those drawn to what's different and new, seeking movement and inspiration over dogmas and immutable statutes. The innocents, in other words, the speakers of truth.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, from her letters to Zizek

Drugs are a medium for overcoming cultural mediation in order to reach immediate experience. Drugs are the mediation of the immediate. The inebriated man reaches, thanks to alcohol, hashish, and LSD, the concrete experience of the immediate, which is veiled for the sober man by the barrier of culture. He reaches, thanks to such media, the 'unio mystica', through which he dissolves into the concrete. He dives, thanks to such artifices, into the ineffable.

[…] People on drugs refuse to participate in the public space and they withdraw into the private space. To take drugs is a gesture that pushes away the republic, or that rejects it. […] it is an antipolitical gesture. 

There is no doubt that art is a drug. That it is a medium in order to propriate immediate experience. that it is an instrument in order to escape the unbearable ambivalence of cultural mediation and to emigrate toward a 'better realm', as Schubert sings in the Lied An die Musik, art sings. 

[…] However, in art there is an aspect that is missing in other drugs. Art, having mediated between man and immediate experience, inverts this mediation and makes it so that the immediate becomes 'articulated', that is: mediatized toward culture. Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible. In it, the retreat of culture becomes an advance toward culture. The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it. 

Flusser, Post-History

Mass society, that which entertains itself, is characterized precisely by its lack of memory, by its incapacity to digest that has been eaten[….] there is no memory, no interiority, where there is no 'I'. Mass society is not a digestive apparatus, but a channel through which sensations flow, in order to be eliminated without being digested. What characterizes mass culture is not consumption, but its opposite: the refuse or trash.

Entertainment is the accumulation of sensations to be eliminated undigested. Once 'world' and 'I' are put into parentheses, sensation passes without obstacles. There is neither someithng to be digested not an interiority to digest it. There is neither intenstine nor the necessity of an intenstine. What are left are mouths to swallow the sensation and anuses to eliminate it. Mass society is a society of channels that are more primitive than worms: in worms there are digestive functions. The'worm-like' feeling, by which we are sometimes taken over, is an optimistic sensation. Concrete sensationalism is more primitive than worms.

[Despite all this], there still persists in us some remains of interiorit. These mainfest themselves in two forms. one is the interest that the refuse awakens in us: the awareness that we are being fed shit. The other is our tendency to stir the shit.

[…] Nothing is being taken seriously, everything entertains us. Not only the programs aimed explictly at entertainment. We devour everything with sensationalist attitude. Art, philosophy, science, politics, including the events that relate to our concrete experience: hunger, sickness, and oppression. Our work entertains us. Our human relations entertain us. We are incapable of seriousness […]

Flusser, Post-History 

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

Cesare Pavese, from his journals

What you say about our artificially prolonged childhood – about immaturity – bewilders me somewhat. Rather, it seems to me that this kind of art, the kind which is so dear to my heart, is precisely a regression, a return to childhood. Were it possible to turn back development, achieve a second childhood by some circuitous road, once again to have its fullness and immensity – that would be the incarnation of an “age of genius,” “messianic times” which are promised and pledged to us by all mythologies. My goal is to “mature” into a childhood. This really would be a true maturity.

Bruno Schultz, in a letter, 1936.

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

Sebald, untranslated foreword to a volume of his own essays

The true fight against oneself is against one's heaviness, one's gravity.

Susan Sontag, writing on Bresson

Steven Schwarzschild: Ethics means to have an alternative to reality.

The etymological root of the English 'happiness' is the Middle English 'hap', which means luck, fortune or chance[…] [A] happy mode of being is one in which I am able to receive the fact of the world – its happening – in the right way: the happy are those who live this fact as something lucky or fortuitous, as something that could have been otherwise, but (happily) was not.

'Hap' can also mean 'absence of design or intent in relation to a particular event': what haps does so for no reason; it is literally graceful. The happiness in question is the happiness of living the fact that existence is unnecessary or gratuitous: not (empirical) happiness at the occurrence of this or that thing, but (transcendental) happiness at their happening.

[…]

My existing, my absolutely particular response to the groundlessness of existence, cannot be exchanged. It is non-relational and therefore in a sense it is entirely private, unique to me alone. Yet so is yours, and that of any other living being. What is common, in other words, is our singularity in the face of the fact of the world; we are absolutely substitutable right where and when we are most unique.

This is another way of understanding this idea of happiness: it is a happiness that singularises the self, but that does not exist except in common; it is the happiness, then, of the sharing of singularity, the happiness of our common exposure to the grace of the world. […] Living in proper response to it would invovle the common appropriation of belonging itself: not any particular condition of belonging, but the fact of our being in common.

From Matthew Abbott's The Figure of This World

Living cheaply. – The cheapest and most inoffensive way of living is that of the thinker; for, to get at once to the main point, the things he needs most are precisely those which others despise and throw away -. Then: he is easily pelased and has no expensive pleasures; his work is not hard but as it were southerly; his days and nights are not spoiled by pangs of conscience; he moves about, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his mind grows ever calmer, stronger and brighter; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to be afraid of it; he has no need of company, except now and then so as afterwards to embrace his solitude the more tenderly; as a substitute for the living he has the dead, and even for friends he has a substitute: namely the best who have ever lived. – Consider whether it is not the opposite desires and habits that make the life of men expensive and consequently arduous and often insupportable. – In another sense, to be sure, the life of the thinker is the most expensive – nothing is too good for him; and to be deprived of the best would here be an unendurable deprivation.

Nietzsche, Daybreak

Bad books. – A book ought to long for pen, ink and writing-desk: but as a rule pen, ink and writing desk long for a book. That is why books are nowadays of so little account.

Impossible company. – The ship of your thoughts moves too deep for you to be able to sail it on the waters of these decent, friendly, amicable people. There are too many shallows and sandbanks there: you would have to turn and twist and would be in constant embarrassment, and soon they too would be in embarrassment – over your embarrassment, whose cause they cannot divine.

Revenge for empty nets. – One should beware of anyone who is filled with the embitterment of the fisherman who after a hard day's work returns home in the evening with empty nets.

There are no educators. – As a thinker one should speak only of self-education[…] – One day, when one has long since been educated as the world understands it, one discovers oneself: here begins the task of the thinker; now the time has come to call on him for assistance – not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and who thus knows how it is done.

Against the shortsighted. – Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?

Quiet fruitfulness. – The born aristocrats of the spirit are not too zealous: their creations appear and fall from the tree on a quiet autumn evening unprecipitately, in due time, not quickly pushed aside by something new. The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything – and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the 'productive man' a yet higher species.

The best author. – The best author will be he who is ashamed to become a writer.

Thinkers as stylists. – Most thinkers write badly because they communicate to us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts.

Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human

Art dangerous to the artist. - When art seizes violently on an individual it draws him back to the conceptions of those ages in which art florished most mightily, and then it effects a retrogression in him. The artist acquires increasing reverence for sudden excitations, believes in gods and demons, instils a soul into nature, hates the sciences, becomes changeable of mood as were the men of antiquity and longs for an overthrowing of everything unfavourable to art, and he does this with all the vehemence and unreasonableness of a child. The artist is in himself already a retarded being, inasmuch as he has halted at games that pertain to youth and childhood: to this there is now added  his gradual retrogression to earlier times. Thus there at last arises a violent antagonism between him and men of his period, of his own age, and his end is gloomy; just as, according to the tales told in antiquity, Homer and Aeschylus at last lived and died in melancholia.

From Nietzsche's Human All Too Human

Belief in inspiration. – Artists have an interest in the existence of a belief in the sudden occurrence of ideas, in so-called inspirations; as though the idea of a work of art, a poem, the basic proposition of a philosophy flashed down from heaven like a ray of divine grace. In reality, the imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgement, sharpened and practised to the highest degree, rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven's notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled out of many beginnings. He who selects less rigorously and likes to give himself up to his imitative memory can, under the right circumstances, become a greater improviser; but artistic improvisation is something very inferior in relation to the serious and carefully fashioned artistic idea. All great artists have been great workers, inexhaustible not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human

As a child I once fell ill

From fear and hunger. I'd pick

Hard skin from my lips, and lick them;

I still remember the cool, salty taste.

And all the time I'd walk and walk and walk,

Sit on the stairs in the hall to warm up,

Walk light-headed [As if led by the rat-catcher's pipe 

Towards the river, sit down

On the stairs to warm up; and shiver every which way.

And mother stands and beckons, she seems 

So close – but I can't reach her:

I start towards her then she's seven steps away,

Beckons me to come, I start again – and she's seven 

Steps away, and beckons me.]

                                        I felt too hot,

Undid my top buttong and lay down - 

Then trumpets blared out, lights beat

On my eyelids, [horses were galloping,]

Mother flying above the roadway, she beckoned me to come - 

And flew away…

                        And now I dream

Of a white hospital, and apple trees,

[A white sheet at my chin

A white doctor looking down at me

A white nurse standing at my feet,

Her wings stirring. And there they stayed.

But mother came and beckoned me to come - 

And flew away …]

Arsenni Tarkovsky, 'As a child I once fell ill', as read in his son's Nostalghia. Omitted lines in square brackets.

Abū Nuwās asked Khalaf for permission to compose poetry, and Khalaf said: ‘I refuse to let you make a poem until you memorize a thousand passages of ancient poetry, including chants, odes, and occasional lines’. So Abū Nuwās disappeared; and after a good long while, he came back and said, ‘I’ve done it’.

‘Recite them’, said Khalaf.

So Abū Nuwās began, and got through the bulk of the verses over a period of several days. Then he asked again for permission to compose poetry. Said Khalaf, ‘I refuse, unless you forget all one thousand lines as completely as if you had never learned them’.

‘That’s too difficult’, said Abū Nuwās. ‘I’ve memorized them quite thoroughly!’

‘I refuse to let you compose until you forget them’, said Khalaf.

So Abū Nuwās disappeared into a monastery and remained in solitude for a period of time until he forgot the lines. He went back to Khalaf and said, ‘I’ve forgotten them so thoroughly that it’s as if I never memorized anything at all’.

Khalaf then said, ‘Now go compose!’

Ibn Manẓūr, in Tales of Abū Nuwās, via Heller-Roazen’s Echolalias.

In Bolano, literature is a helpless, undignified, and not especially pleasant compulsion, like smoking. At one point you started and now you can't stop; it's become a habit and an identity. Nothing is so consistent across Bolano's work as the suspicion that literature is chiefly bullshit, rationalizing the misery, delusions, and/or narcissism of various careerists, flakes and losers. Yet Bolano somehow also treats literature as his and characters' sole excuse for exisitng. This basic Bolano aporia – literature is all that matters, literature doesn't matter at all – can be a glib paradox for others. He seems to have meant it sincerely, even desperately, something one would feel without knowing the irst thing about his life.

Anonymous, N+1

It can be said that any art is avant-garde is it permits the reconstruction of the real-life circumstances from which it emerged. While the conventional work of art thematizes cause and effect and thereby gives the hallucinatory impression of sealing itself off, the avant-garde work remains open to the conditions of its existence.

Aira, Varamo (thanks, A.)

… the material of experience is not the material of expression and I think the distress you feel, as a writer, comes from a tendency on your part to assimilate the two. The issue is roughly that raised by Proust in his campaign against naturalism and the distinction he made between the “real” of the human predicament and the artist’s “ideal real” remains certainly valid for me and indeed badly in of revival. I understand, I think no one better, the flight from experience to expression and I understand the necessary failure of both. But it is the flight from one order or disorder to an order or disorder of a different nature and the two failures are essentially dissimilar in kind. Thus failure in life can hardly be anything but dismal at the best, whereas there is nothing more exciting for the writer, or richer in unexploited expressive possibilities, than the failure to express.

Beckett writing to Matti Megged, November 1960 (Via)

We tend to think that student debt was a problem only since the economic problems of 2008 and Occupy, but it arose with deregulation and other policies in the 1980s. I’ve detailed the facts and figures in several essays, but I’ve especially thought about how student debt is an experience not unlike indenture, and it leaves lasting scars. It teaches lessons in civics — rather than a social good, higher ed is an individual good, atomizing us instead of democratizing us. It teaches lessons in economics — rather than a public obligation that we all contribute to and benefit from (I’d like my neighbors’ children to get an education), it’s a private concession, and a majority of students become instruments of the world of finance almost automatically at 18. It also teaches career choices — forget about being a schoolteacher; you want to go into finance. And it teaches a mode of feeling — of personal self-interest and of anxiety, or worse.

Jeffrey J Williams, interviewed

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

All the world's not a stage. – use for Witt Jr on theatre

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.

Thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

Adorno, from various sources

We have been corrupted by novels. For through them the sacred has ceased to be sacred, while the purest, most human, most innocent happiness is degraded to a daydream.

For art, as you well see, there has never been a favourable time; it has always been said that she must go a-begging; but now she will die of hunger. Whence might come that unaffectedness of spirit that is so necessary for its enjoyment, in times like these when, as Pfuel says, sorrow deals everyone such blows?

We yearn to do what is good and beautiful, but no one has need of us, everything happens without our assistance.

Their criss-crossing chatter can hardly be called conversation.

The more I see of Berlin, the more certain that this city, like all the cities and capitals of the world, is no proper abode for love. People here are too affected to be true, to clever to be open.

[… he is obsessed by one thought, namely that] 'your only, your highest goal has sunk from sight'.

… one should read at least one good poem daily, see one beautiful painting, hear one sweet melody, or exchange heart to heart words with a friend, and thus educate the more beautiful, I might say the more human, side of our nature as well.

Heinrich von Kleist, from various letters

Wittgenstein's Walks

Ben Eastham

Protesting altogether too much, Lars Iyer's fourth book carries the subtitle 'A novel'. Readers of Iyer's Spurious trilogy will know that he pays little attention to the conventions of the novel form, with characterization and plot of secondary importance to the mechanics of setting up a good joke or, better, diatribe. Wittgenstein Jr is a little different. It isn't really a novel, or not only a novel. It's more interesting than that.

Our narrator is Peters (we learn only his surname, and that through reported speech), a sophomore student of Philosophy at Cambridge University, the once-august institution now swarming with 'Ethno-sloanes', 'Sloane-ingenues', 'rah boys in gilets', 'yummy-not-yet-mummies' and the various other sects concomitant with privilege, public school and the assumption that higher education is a drunken rite of passage rather than an intellectual adventure. Though it is not made explicit – the reader is never provided with Peters's backstory, nor direct access to the workings of his mind – it's easy to infer from the anthropologist's distance with which he reports on these tribes that he does not belong to them. He is the archetypal provincial scholarship boy, expected to be grateful for access to a world he does not understand, and by which he is at once awed and appalled. 

Peters is among the more reserved of a motley group of male friends united by their dedication to the reckless consumption of recreational drugs, konb jokes, conspicuous Weltschmerz, and showing off. Cynical and confused, beautiful and damned, they belong to a generation 'too late for politics' and conscious of the corruption of academia by market-capitalism. Into this morass steps a young new professor – radical, aesthetic, inscrutable – whom the students nickname Wittgenstein Jr. This plot development is dealt with perfunctorily, and beyond the generational fig leaf Iyer takes no pains to disguise the fact that our hero is modelled on his historical namesake. A native German speaker, he has 'come to Cambridge to do fundamental work in philosophical logic' (Iyer is fond of italicis). He is haunted by his brother's suicide (three of Wittgenstein's four took their own lives); he rebels against the academy; he is working on a book called Logik, 'with a k' (Wittgenstein's thesis of the same name was rejected by the university). This is a fictionalized portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein as a young man, parachuted into contemporary society in order to pass damning judgement on it. Drawing on source material including the diaries of David Pinsent (to whom the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is dedicated) Wittgenstein Jr might have easily been subtitled 'Historical Novel'. Or 'Historical-Philosophical novel'. Or 'Tragic-Comical-Historical-Philosophical-Novel'.

This character, 'pompous' and 'ridiculous' as he seems to them, fascinates his twenty-first century students ('we confide our desires to share in Wittgenstein's walks. To become, if not fellow thinkers, then at least fellow walkers, companions in thought'). They compete for his attention, responding to his disdain for their ignorance with desperate attempts to gain his respect. Their admiration is predicated on the authenticity of Wittgenstein's obvious suffering, which gives the lie to their own theatricalized performances of despair, and Wittgenstein comes quickly to resemble a messianic figure (a Second Coming, perhaps). Foremost among his acolytes is Peters, mocked by Ede as a 'virgin gay' with 'a thing for genius. You want to be fucked by genius'.

The double act was a defining feature of Iyer's previous novels, built on the bickering of two lecturers in Philosophy, and here he establishes a productive comic tension between the students' anarchic dissolution and Wittgenstein's Mitteleuropean po-facedness (his diatribes against Labradors and lawns, those metonyms for English gentility, are among the funniest of many funny passages in the book). The dialogic mode is a vehicle to expand on his own preoccupations, which have little to do with psychologizing depths, interiority, direct characterization or any of the other conventions of the British novel since the middle of the nineteenth century. Instead the author creates characters who are almost allegorical in their one-dimensionality, and through which he can vent unreservedly on his favourite themes, specifically the parlous state of higher education in the UK, the corruption of a society that equates progress with gross domestic product, and the romance of intellectual endeavour.

Fans of Iyer's previous work will relish the comic hyperbole of these polemics, to whoch the author's barracking style is perfectly suited, but Wittgenstein Jr is distinguished from its predecessors by the possibility of redemption to be found in the relationship between teacher and student. Incorporating allusions to Wittgenstein's own writing alongside nods to sources as various as Bela Tarr and Derek Jarman, Iyer has compiled an idiosyncratic – and surprisingly tender – paean to love and learning.

Times Literary Supplement, 17th October, 2014

Doctor, how nice of you

Harmlessness no longer exists. The small pleasures, the expressions of life that appear exempt from the responsibility of thinking, not only contain an element of defiant stupidity, of obstinate blindness; they enter directly into the service of their extreme opposite. Even the blossoming tree connives in falsehood at the moment when its blossoming is experienced without the shadow of horror; even the innocent 'how nice' becomes and escape from the shape of an existence that is quite the opposite.

Adorno

To Posterity

Truly I live in dark times!

The innocent word is stupid. A smooth forehead

Is a sign of insensitivity. He who laughs

Has simply not yet heard

The terrible news.

What kind of times are these, when

A conversation about trees is almost a crime,

Because it entails silence about so many evil deeds.

Brecht

Your madness has broken out and you use it as a toy of destruction, you change what lies behind other people's ramparts. It reveals itself to be the equivalent of revolutionary dissidence, a far cry from other people's buried madness….

They are mad, but they don't know it, you are mad too, and you don't know it either. But they remain afraid of madness, while youi aren't.

You are swarming with words, like them, but your condition causes you to see words glide into sentences, and the words slip unnoticed into their sentences.

[…] Act out the text in its brutality, as it is, without looking for anything else, without psychology.

Above all it has to be wild, no niceness, no halftones; what makes it wild is that these are people who have become raw, abrupt, pure again like uncut crystal.

Duras's advice to actors in a performance of Le Shaga in early 1968