Category: Uncategorized

… it turns out that I had the misfortune, which I consider a stroke of luck, to have spent my childhood in a monstrous world. It taught me a lot, and I don’t regret it. Later, I was a young woman in a world that seemed instead a paradise. My children have experienced it as well. Since I had children very early, they have shared in it with me. They were my companions through the happy times of the ’70s, when the gems of thought of what is called French theory spread from France to the rest of the West. When I began to write, I had Blanchot and Gracq at my side. One must try to be worthy. There were noble philosophers, dazzling linguistics, applied mathematics, psychoanalysis. After Freud, there was Lacan. A slew of luminaries and innovators: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault… It was a happy time: those researchers were able to come together thanks to the movement of 1968. They finally met, exchanged, gathered together, and effected a worldwide change in thought. Now we are in a fallow period. It is not pleasant. I feel sorry for my grandchildren. I find they are living in an era of ashes.

Hélène Cixous interview from a couple of years back.

… if to constituent power there correspond revolutions, revolts, and new constitutions, namely, a violence that puts in place and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is necessary to think entirely different strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that has only been knocked down with a constituent violence will resurge in another form, in the unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, between the violence that puts the juridical in place and violence that preserves it.

A form-of-life is that which ceaselessly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself to live, without negating them, but simply by using them.

Because power is constituted through the inclusive exclusion of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the lucid exposition of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is what becomes thinkable only at the point where we grasp and render destitute the anarchy of power.

… there is form-of-life only where there is contemplation of a potential. Certainly there can only be contemplation of a potential in a work. But in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work.

The Arcanum of politics is in our form-of-life, and yet precisely for this reason we cannot manage to penetrate it. It is so intimate and close that if we seek to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the ungraspable, tedious everyday. It is like the forms of the cities or houses where we have lived, which coincide perfectly with the life we have frittered away in them, and perhaps precisely for this reason, it seems suddenly impenetrable to us, while other times, at a stroke, it is collectively innervated and seems to unveil to us its secret.

Agamben, The Use of Bodies

Don’t be mistaken, what I’ve written here for Maria, is a tale of spiritual transcendence. Maria’s break with the world, her crisis, occurs when she realizes she has accidentally killed her father. This is also the brutal culmination of a day of hard-to-take realities. She has been brought low. She can now see the world for exactly what it is. She has become enlightened. She sees the vanity and pointlessness of human ambition. And begins to transcend these things. That’s her physicality, the physicality of the saint, the person without: simple, relaxed, patient, the clarity of decision and movement. 

Hal Hartley, interviewed by Martin Donovan in 1992 on Trust

The specific form of solitude he praises, however, derives its appeal from its dependence on a logically prior ethical community […] Solitude independent of community is indistinguishable from loneliness. Nietzsche speaks fondly and repeatedly of his unknown ‘friends’, precisely because they represent a community from which his self-imposed exile involves only a temporary respite.

‘We Europeans of the day after tomorrow’ … ‘these brave companions and familiars’ served ‘as compensation for the friends I lacked’.

… the pedagogical aim of his writing is neither to convert not to ‘improve’ his readers, but to announce himself to kindred spirits and fellow squanderers. His moral pedagogy is designed not to ‘cure’ the sick and infirm, but to embolden and encourage the healthy – much as his ‘friends’, the fictitious free spirits, served as ‘brave companions and familiars’ during his own convalescence.

… Nietzsche depicts friendship as a mutually empowering agon, in which select individuals undergo moral development through their voluntary engagement in contest and conflict. On this agonistic model of friendship, one has no ethical obligations to those who cannot contribute to one’s own quest for self-perfection …

One ‘becomes what one is’ by overcoming oneself, which always involves elements of both self-creation and self-discovery. While his voluntaristic rhetoric suggests the construction of selfhood, his fatalism recommends the discovery of an authentic self.

… only the combination of self-creation and self-discovery engenders the cruelty – both to oneself and to others – that endures the nomothetic impact of self-overcoming.

Nietzsche’s model of self-overcoming is strongly Apollonian, insofar as it promotes the mastery within a single soul of as many tensions and contradictions as possible. But this model is undeniably Dionysian, for it promotes internal mastery only as a means of further expanding the capacity of the soul, in an ever-escalating process that must eventually culminate in the destruction of the soul. The philosopher who constantly overcomes himself thus ‘builds his city on the slopes of Vesuvius’. For he voluntarily stations himself on the brink of Dionysian excess and disintegration.

… the philosopher ‘creates’ a community only indirectly and unwittingly, through his expenditure of the excess affect required to turn the hammer on himself. He thus becomes a sign unto himself, irrepressibly projecting his self-directed legislations in to the public space that surrounds him.

… it is the business of politics, Nietzsche believes, to oversee the production of those rare, exotic individuals who, by virtue of their overhuman beauty, excite in others the stirring of eros.

… such individuals are ‘lucky strikes’ … culture itself usually arises only as a fortunate accident within the sumptuary economy of nature.

… askesis begets eros. …the experimental disciplines developed by the philosopher arouse in (some) others the erotic attachment that alone forges the ‘circle of culture’.

Nietzsche often speaks of self-overcoming In terms of self-creation, and thus fecund metaphor conveys his sense of the nomothetic influence of exemplary human beings. Great individuals are always artists in Nietzsche’s sense, for, in the course of their self-overcomings, they inadvertently produce in themselves the beauty that alone arouses erotic attachment.

… the irresistible public nature of the philosopher’s self-overcomings. Independent of the philosopher’s own aims and aspirations his overflowing will enters the public sphere as a sign, presenting itself for reception by observers and witnesses who do not share his first hand, artist’s perspective.

… the ethical life of any community is made possible only by the amoral self-creation of the exemplary human beings who found – and then desert – it.

Lovers ‘attach their hearts’ to a great human being and are thereby consecrated to culture, but their love is not reciprocated. Because eros only strives ever upward, these exemplary figures never come to love those whose eros they have inadvertently awakened. Their gaze fixed firmly on the simmering horizon of human perfectibility, great human beings love only themselves and their ‘next’ selves, which immediately vanish upon consummation. In a pithy statement of his own tragic view of the human condition, Nietzsche submits that all great love, but its very nature, stands unrequited.

Nietzsche consequently identifies his own self-overcoming as his greatest contribution to the permanent enhancement of humankind: ‘my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them. My humanity is a constant self-overcoming’ (Ecce Homo).

Through his self-experimentation, Nietzsche hopes not only to resist his twin temptations, nausea and pity, but also to furnish his unknown ‘friends’ with aversive strategies designed to postpone the advent of the will to nothingness.

Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political

I’m going to write a few lines to you, by which I mean accomplish my first act as a solid living being, because I’ve already accomplished numerous acts as a living being: I’ve cried, for instance, and tears are as far as possible from death. But it is you I write to first because I want you to able to maintain within yourself, perhaps for a little while longer, the wondrous feeling of having saved a man. I say ‘a while longer’ because to the same degree that the one saved holds eternally before him the image of the saviour, the saviour has the tendency to see the image of his act grow indistinct and even to render common the subject he tore from evil.

Thus, my dear Dionys, we are in some sense now completely separate. Our consciences respectively no longer weigh the same. There will always be some indiscretion in my eyes, in my words. You will try not to see it.

I’d like to tell you other things on this subject that seem important to me but I’m aware that I run a fairly grave danger. Dionys, I think I no longer know what is said and what is not said. In Hell, one says everything and it must be for this that we recognise it. For my part, it is certainly in this way that it was revealed to me. In our world, on the contrary, we are accustomed to choosing, and I believe I no longer know how to choose. Well, in what represented Hell for me and others, saying everything was where I lived my paradise. For you must know this, Dionys, that during the first days that I was in my bed and spoke to you, to you and to Marguerite first of all, I was not a man of this earth. I stressed this fact that haunts me retrospectively. To have been able to give freedom to words that were barely formed and had no years, no age, but took shape in relation to my breath. This you see – this happiness – wounded me definitively and, at this moment, I who believed myself so far from death by some affliction – typhus, fever and so forth – could think of dying only from this very happiness. And now I have begun again to give a form to things; at least, my spirit and my body try to.

But, I repeat, I think I can no longer choose. In what I am saying there are surely tremendous vulgarities and what you call in your laughter ‘an incredible tyranny’. So, am I going to have to reclassify myself; whittle myself down so that one sees only once again a smooth envelope? You’ll tell me that my language is ill-fitting and that the best oil is one that reveals a thousand rough points without ceasing to be oil. In reality, I believe that the problem I am posing is nonetheless a moral one. I have the feeling, which perhaps not all of my comrades have, of being a new being. Not in Wells’ sense of the word – in the fantastic sense – but on the contrary in the most hidden sense, so that my true sickness, which began so tenderly, just a few weeks ago now, and at that time it was still bearable, now reaches its maturity and becomes very intractable.

Here is an appendage that grows; a spirit without channels or compartments. A freedom perhaps ready to grasp itself; perhaps ready to annihilate other freedoms. Either to kill them or, better, to embrace them. So, if one wanted to see a man take form, one might observe me up close, taking into account the morbid character of the formative process.

Forgive me for insisting – it must be unbearable for you who go on to hear someone speak of his original indeterminacy. I think there is even something boorish in all this, and then you would be right be right in answering that in a few months I will have ceased being reborn; that I too will get on and no doubt even along that abandoned path that I left a year ago. You will tell me this, Dionys, or not; you’ll think it, or not. Depending on whether you will or will not have some faith in man. You are certainly one of the few beings in whom I fear fatigue; I mean, despair. There are many who I have loved a great deal and whose despair left me indifferent. By which I mean, a kind of definitive state. I left them in this state, or I revelled and struggled to bring them back. For you, Dionys, whose despair must constantly mix with joy, flights and unfathomable pauses, I could not bear that this despair fix itself and become established. I told you I was not afraid and that such was my sole fear. If you laugh, if you tease me in saying you have never seen so much future, I will tell you that I recognised in myself the right to have this fear.

I stopped there because my hand was hurting.

June 1945

Robert Antelme, writing to Dionys Mascolo, transcribed by Steve Mitchelmore, and paragraphed by me.

You can’t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write. I could make them shorter, but it still wouldn’t work. The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel. What has been written one day must be affirmed the next, not by going back to correct it (which is futile) but by pressing on, supplying the sense that was lacking by advancing resolutely. This seems magical, but in fact it’s how everything works; living, for a start. In this respect, which is fundamental, the novel defeats the law of diminishing returns, reformulating it and turning it to advantage.

from Cesar Aira, 'Novels Defeat the Law of Diminishing Returns' (1999)

Schumann, Ich grolle nicht, the song sung by Claudia in Blanchot's Au Moment Voulu:

Bereshit is not a constituent power that can establish a new world order. Genesis 1-11 teaches that the basis of everything is an abyss. Bereshit is not the ground on which things stand but the hand that pulls the rug out from under them. The first chapters of Genesis do not resemble a constitution of any sort. On the contrary, they convey a distinct sense of destitution. Consequently, an organized religion runs a considerable risk by acknowledging Bereshit as its groundless ground. Under Bereshit's spell, the religious apparatus that purports to bind together (religare) the human and the divine can easily fizzle out.

Unlike 'creation' in English, which has artistic and other connotations, the Hebrew word only applies to the creation of the world. After the conclusion of the seventh day, it is said that heaven and earth 'were created', in the passive voice (2:4). But there is no indication as to who should get the credit for this creative act. The only thing for certain in this verse is that God 'made' both heaven and earth […]. But it never explicitly stated, either here or anywhere else in Genesis, that God was indeed the creator of the world.

If Adam means 'human', is Noah in some sense already post-human? To see oneself as a descendant of Noah […] is above all to understand that the secure ground on which we appear to walk,  where we seem to breathe freely, is nothing more than the deck of an ark. It is also to realise that most creatures on board have no access to this exclusive space because they are kept in the hull, just as most people and virtually all animals living on earth today are still relegated to the margins of society, to a kind of social death.

Noah, like the baby Moses, is saved by an ark [teva], not a ship [oniya]. This is an important distinction, because the latter needs a captain to steer it in the right (or wrong) direction, while the former drifts passively hither and thither (7:18), being led by the wind, water, God or fate.

… Noah's passivity allows him to safeguard both his subjectivity and her potentiality. His strength lies in silently forfeiting his own will.

… Noah's name … means relief or rest, comfort or consolation (5:29). A reliever is not to be confused with a redeemer.

The seventh day is declared holy not because it was when something magnificent was made, but because nothing was.  Hence the Hebrew word for seven (sheva) can also be read as satiation or saturation (sova), while the word for Saturday (shabat) is closely linked to the idea of going on strike (shavat). God's supreme and highest achievement is not the creation of humanity , but his own recreation.

… the Sabbath was instituted as a temporal temple to stop the linear flow of everyday life.

In the beginning was formless life. Instead of creating the universe, God finds himself in a position to give it some order. He does not bring it about ex nihilo, out of nothing, a world external to his divine being. Rather, he imagines ex anihilo, out of the abysmal and chaotic rubble with which he was entrusted, a cosmos, an organised and articulated form, mainly through a series of divisions, distinctions and definitions. This process, as described in the first chapter  of Genesis, is surprisingly akin to what contemporary biologists aptly call ontogenesis, the organism's development through cell division.

… although the Hebrew God encompasses or monopolizes the entirety of nature, he is not equivalent to it. Instead of being the life of the sun or the sea, he now functions as the life of the whole world: he is how the world is; the fact that it exists is beyond him. 

The anguished earth is […] described as a devastated battlefield: 'unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep' (1:2).

The simplistic assumption that God is beyond the world as if looking at it from a distance, stems from misunderstanding the idea that he is the life of the world. Life in this context has nothing to do with vitalism or animism. Life is not some nebulous force but simply the way the world is. 

Even God does not seem able to change and certainly not to remake the world in its entirety. The way it was established during the first week remains intact. Instead, God chooses to cultivate his own perfect-yet-limited garden and forsake the unmanageable wasteland that has spread all around.  The bitter truth that lies beyond the gate of Eden is set aside so he can focus on the fantastic truths that grow within.

Life is not a physical, psychological, or spiritual phenomenon that can be either gained or lost. It is more like a relation: something is the life of something else. For example, God is the life of the world, and the world is the life of humanity.

The prolonged entanglement of the human race with this world – what is retrospectively called the Anthropocene – is more profound, consequential, and ancient than any other loyalty or devotion. Being on earth takes precedence over other types of belonging or identity – familial, national, ideological, spiritual, cultural, geographical, historical – all of which easily obfuscate humanity's primary terrestial fidelity (something only the Gnostics dared to contest). This breach between human beings and the word is as old as their bond. Yet it appears that those who entered the garden of Genesis and left unharmed were also able to eat from the tree of life and live for the world.

According to Baruch Spinoza, eternity is 'existence itself', insofar as it follows from the definition of God. Now recall what happens to the God of Genesis when he is considered not as a character in a mythology, but as a concept in a theology: he becomes the life of the world. rather than indefinitely prolong an individual's existence, Genesis aspires to address humanity's true limitation, which has nothing to do with its short lifespan and everything to do with its strained relationship with the world. One can thus see why Spinoza thinks that death should be feared least of all things. to see things from the perspective of eternity is to be, above all, a being in the world. This world life is what the different characters that inhabit 1-11 before the advent of civilization epitomize.

A real state of exception is the exact opposite of a chaotic or anarchic situation.A state of law and order is always exceptional, even when it pretends to be the prevalent rule. The garden of Eden […], along with Noah's Ark […] are perfect examples of such exceptional zones. these are small pockets of calm surrounded by an overwhelmingly hopeless desolation. the rare life cultivated within is shielded from the majority of nature without. 

Humans retreat into a kingdom within a kingdom, where violence can be at least partially, locally, and temporarily suspended. as concrete as such safe spaces can be, they are not designed to spread and expand successfully across the world. A shining example tends to end up as oppressive darkness since its limited applicability is ignored. Survivors of shipwrecks search for lifeboats that over time become the new battleships. 

David Kishik, Book of Shem

This universe is an abandoned kingdom; its price is the withdrawal of God, and its very existence is the cause of separation from God.

… the space that God left in the world is located not so much outside God, but instead ‘between’ God and God.

Evil is the distance between the creature and God.

God creates a finite being who says I, who cannot love God. By the effect of grace, little by little the I disappears, and God loves himself through the creature who becomes empty, who becomes nothing.

De-creation as transcendent completion of creation: annihilation in God that gives the annihilated creature the plenitude of being of which it is deprived so long as it exists.

To live while ceasing to exist so that in a self that is no longer the self God and his creation may find themselves face to face’.

… the person in us is the part of us belonging to error and sin.

… the ego is only the shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light and which I take for a being.

Simone Weil

Is that also the secret of Velasquez’s fools? Is the sadness in their eyes the bitterness of possessing the truth, of having, at the cost of an unnameable degradation, the possibility of saying the truth, and of not being heard by anyone? (except Velasquez). It is worth the trouble of considering them [fools] again with this question in mind.

Simone Weil

I have no desire to demonstrate, to amuse, or to persuade … I aspire to absolute rest and continuous night … to know nothing, to teach nothing ,to will nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still to sleep, this today is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but still sincere.

Baudelaire

Sometimes I believe that nothing has meaning. On a miniscule planet that has been heading towards oblivion for millennia, we are born in pain, grow up, struggle, fall ill, suffer, cause suffering, cry out and die: and at that very moment, others are born in order to start the whole useless comedy over.

Sabato

Nietzsche and the Burbs, my next novel, out next year from Melville House. More details soon.

New long interview on the podcast Unsound Methods. 

A guest post from Sinead Murphy, author of Zombie University. It was written to support the current UCU strike.

We were horrified at Trump’s great wall and indulged ourselves in an oh-so-liberal outrage. Again and again we were directed to loathe it, by the media and their politician-puppets. And we did loathe it, again and again. And all the while, a real wall continued to rise, far higher than Trump’s folly ever could. Britain, among other countries, is cut through by this real wall. On one side are those with access to the trillions ‘printed’ by ‘quantitative easing’, at zero percent, or even ‘negative percent’, interest-rates. On the other side is everyone else, who continue to suffer the ‘credit crunch’ and who sometimes pay interest-rates equivalent to one-thousand percent or more for loans from ‘pay-day’ providers. On one side, lots of cash at no cost. On the other side, very little cash at high cost. The result is neo-Feudal Britain, founded upon a drastically unequal distribution of money and risk allied with the very sinister principle that where the money goes the risk does not. How paltry Trump’s mere bricks and mortar, next to this financial engineering.

But what of the University in neo-Feudal Britain? Does it take issue with the accumulation-by-dispossession that has so surely impoverished all but the few? Does it put all its left-liberal posturing to work in defence of the right-to-livelihood of those it employs? On the contrary. The supposed institution of ideas accepts that there-is-no-alternative idea, and duly plays its part in the British horror show: the low interest-rates that have made such a playground for the elites on the other side of the wall have suppressed yield on investments on both sides of the wall, with the result that pension funds have to engage in more ‘imaginative’ speculation, where increased risk comes with increased potential return; and, on that sinister principle that risk must now be borne by the most vulnerable, the University has ruled that the worker take on the risk of her pension contributions doing badly in a market entirely rigged in favour of those who are paid money to borrow it and speculate with it –   ‘Defined Contribution,’ not ‘Defined Benefit.’

My Zombie University makes and argues for the claim that, as the Bank now does nothing more or less than steal our money, so the University now does nothing more or less than suppress our thoughts. But it turns out that, given half a chance, the University will steal our money too.

The White Review anthology, featuring my manifesto, reviewed by the Irish Times.

The world wasn’t created for our happiness. It’s difficult to say whether we’re happy or not. It doesn’t depend on us. Sure, we can regret being born. But life can give us surprising things. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me. Happiness does not exist.

I don’t know what it means to hear myself speak. I wouldn’t recognise my own voice. I’ve never said anything.

Predestination. We’re getting ready for something. – but what? We’re being prepared – for what? I’ve never said a single word.

I’ve never spoken. This isn’t speech. As a child – I was immortal and all was feasible. Possibility? My childhood is beside me.

Art exists because the world isn’t perfect. A man wouldn’t look for harmony, but simply live in it. The search for harmonic relationships between art and life. between time and history.

I’ve ceased being happy now I understand life. As a child, I might have been happy. We don’t believe in nature, in our selves. We don’t have any time to think. We’re not emotional. We don’t contemplate. Children and animals are closer to the truth. We all like children more than adults. I’ve always thought that what I say and do is someone else’s decision. If we allowed ourselves, we could love the others. We could feel love for people. For life itself.

If I’m disgusted with myself, I’m disgusted with everyone. I’m disgusted with life. I’m too intolerant. I feel no sympathy. People annoy me. I’m not cheerful. The world is full of insoluble problems. This is no time for laughing. When I laugh, I feel guilty. I can’t approach people. Everyone annoys me. There’s stupidity everywhere.

When I read I feel ashamed. I can’t read. Even as I read, I can’t read. I’m too stupid. I keep on dreaming the same thing. When I am a child again. And everything lies before me. And everything’s possible. Life seems forced upon us. We made mistakes in the past. We should have lived differently.

Tarkovsky, interviewed somewhere

At the end of the day Myshkin is not the Russian Christ, as some readers have wished to see him – he succeeds in 'resurrecting' no one – and he is scarcely a traditional saint. Although he embodies to an unusual degree those features which Dostoevskii associates with the Christian personality (compassion, insight, humility, sensitivity to beauty, tenderness of heart, forgiveness) and shares Dostoevskii's own glimpse of paradise through the aura of an epileptic fit, this glimpse is followed by a sense of utter desolation.

Epilepsy. Quotes from Revelations: ‘time will be no more’. Ecstatic vision of a state beyond time and so beyond choice and action. Some sense in which this ecstatic vision of harmony is bound up with death. For all the compelling beauty of what is experience and the overpowering feeling of having really grasped the nature of things, the outcome is destructive.

Notes on Rowan Williams's book on Dostoevsky

 

Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche’s solution – his attempted overcoming of nihilism – consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such – all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It’s an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time’s. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

 

 

 

 

An old interview (2013) by Foyles now with missing parts left in:

'Exodus' is the third in a trilogy – will we be seeing more from Lars and W. (and perhaps those elusive Essex post-graduates) in the future?

That’s all from Lars and W. for now. You have to know when to quit! Think of the last few seasons of The Sopranos! Having said that, there are some interesting real-life events coming up which might lend themselves, one day, to fictional treatment. For example, we’re bringing some of the Italian philosophers I mention in the trilogy to Oxford in April. And there are some parts of the backstories of Lars and W. still left unexplored …

 This book is almost as long as Spurious and Dogma put together, and feels more expansive somehow – was there a reason for this wider scope?

I wanted to say everything, in some way. To say it all in this strange new style I’ve developed, to say everything it can allow me to say. And I wanted to draw together everything I’d written so far, to follow all the hares to their lairs …

 Would you say Exodus is a more serious work than the previous two novels? There seems to be a more overtly political aspect to this one. Do W.'s feelings about the current state of academia in this country chime with your own?

The trilogy is set in neoliberal Britain in the mid- to late 2000s, but I also wanted to explore the way its characters had been shaped by the turn to neoliberal capitalism in the Thatcher years. There’s some of this in Dogma. But Exodus deepens this account of the characters, depicting a younger W. studying in the 1980s, as part of a group of highly politicized and utopian Essex postgraduates, and a younger Lars, studying in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in a rapidly regenerating Manchester. For his part, W. still burns with the desire for politics, but the case of Lars is more difficult to determine. Lars seems too ravaged by what Wendy Brown has called ‘quotidian nihilism’ – a general, barely individualised sense of despair – to have any real faith in political transformation.

You ask me whether I share W.’s feelings about academia. Like many others, I am worried by what Bill Readings long ago diagnosed as the collapse of the ‘idea of culture’ on which the modern university was based. The notion of ‘excellence’ that replaced this older ideal is a technocratic one, being concerned with narrow notions of productivity and market performance. For me, as for my characters W. and Lars, the humanities are in danger simply of servicing neoliberal capitalism, training students to fit in with the new ‘knowledge economy’ rather than encouraging them to more general ethical and civic reflection, and weeding out would-be academics who are not content simply to produce yet more academic papers, monographs and funding proposals.

 You've mentioned daily cartoons like Peanuts as influences in previous interviews – I certainly saw elements of Garfield and Jon's relationship in that of Lars and W., a kind of outwardly relentless cruelty punctuated by moments of affection… Do you agree? Would you consider printing Spurious as a cartoon?

I’ve always thought of the W. and Lars material as a kind of comic strip. That’s how it functioned on the blog, back when I wrote in a greater variety of styles – it was supposed to be a kind of light relief, my equivalent of the ‘funnies’ at the bottom of the newspaper page. I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as Schultz’s Peanuts and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat: each daily ‘strip’ (in my case, each W. and Lars blog post) was to be free-standing enough to introduce new readers to these characters and their situations, but, at the same time, part of a longer story arc, part of a larger ‘mythology’. When I found it difficult to come up with new twists on the W. and Lars relationship, I reminded myself of Schutlz and Herriman, and what they were able to do with a tiny number of characters and a restricted range of situations.

But the trilogy could not be printed as a cartoon, for the same reason that it couldn’t be made into a play, or a film: so much of its effect depends on a narrative distancing, which means we can never be sure of the veracity of W.’s account of Lars. Is Lars really as fat as W. suggests, or as stupid? For me, it’s vital that the audience is unsure about the answer to these questions.

All three novels are written from an interesting perspective, from Lars' point of view but mainly reporting W.'s speech – yet somehow it feels natural. Why did you settle on this way of writing? 

The critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici praises those kinds of narrative which free us from believing that the stories we tell about the world are anything other than stories, thereby allowing the world to be what it is. I hope my fiction is freeing in this way, even if the ‘otherness’ of the world, in my work, is presented as a kind of horror.

I wanted to give a sense of Lars’s presence beyond the stories W. tells about him. I wanted him to be there

My novels are centred on conversation, around the reporting of conversations. For me the human capacity to communicate is of central importance, even if it seems so obvious that we forget it. The narrative technique I employ is supposed to remind the reader of this capacity, in all its wonder.

At many points in my trilogy, nothing seems to make sense to my characters. They feel bewildered – they feel that time is out of joint, that there is no intrinsically meaningful action that they can perform, that nothing is worthwhile. Sure, W. is capable of great hope, of believing in the possibility of writing a great philosophical work, or being part of some great revolution, but he slumps back from those moments into a kind of listlessness, regathering strength only by tormenting his friend Lars, and by sharing his frustrations. For his part, Lars is sometimes presented as a contemporary equivalent to Rabelais’s Gargantua, obsessed with his appetites, but Lars, too is someone who falls victim to ‘quotidian nihilism’.

In the narrative technique I use in the trilogy, I wanted to convey to the reader the sense both of the political and philosophical energies W. feels able to summon, but also of the failure of those energies – to give a sense of W.’s efforts to project political or philosophical meaning into the world, but also of the ultimate otherness of the world, its refractoriness and even indifference to those efforts. W. is constantly running up against this meaninglessness, he’s constantly rebuffed – not least by the Gargantua-like Lars, who seems to incarnate this meaninglessness, or at least enjoy a privileged link to it.

Lars is linked in the trilogy to chaos, to the passage in the book of Genesis about ‘welter and waste’, about the world ‘without form or void’. The character of Lars, considered from W.,’s point of view, in the trilogy, as well as the damp in Spurious and the rats in Dogma and the building noise in Exodus, were ways, for me, of presenting the world in its remoteness, its otherness – the world as it is totally refractory to human concerns. Commenting on the damp and the rats in my first two novels in an essay in The New Inquiry, Saelan Twerdy writes, ‘reality is infinitely more complex and multilayered than our frame of reference normally allows for and the forms of our entanglement in it often escape us.’ I think he is right, and appreciate his reading.

But I had something else in mind in deploying my particular narrative technique. My novels are books of chatter. We hear W. speaking. We overhear the conversations he has with his friend. We encounter their banter, their faux-profundity, their sense of fun in their exchanges. In focusing on the to-and-fro of these friends, I wanted to convey the importance of human communication in allowing us to speak of the chaos that lacks both form and void. I wanted to convey the significance of friendship as it permits such communication – of a joy which remains after despair – the joy of being able to talk (and write) about contingency and meaninglessness. For me, this capacity to communicate, is part of what allows us to live in the world without experiencing it as a solely impersonal fate, as sheer otherness. In speaking, we clear our little patch in the wilderness, we live our small human lives …

You've touched on the philosophers that are frequently mentioned in all three books. Did you feel it was a risk to include some of the more esoteric references, that the average fiction reader may be unfamiliar with? I certainly had to scramble Wikipedia a few times. 

The most crucial philosophical references in the trilogy are to those late-nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish philosophers, who saw the meaning-giving significance of human communication, which they understood as speech. Does it matter if the reader is unfamiliar with Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen? Not at all! The ‘message’ of the trilogy – of the importance of friendship, of love, centred on speech, is present in the very form of the trilogy – in its most basic narrative technique. It’s my hope that the reader is made to experience what very obscure and difficult philosophers like Rosenzweig have taught without any knowledge of those philosophers whatsoever. 

I wanted to talk a bit more about the apocalypse, in its various forms. W. is convinced that the world is about to end, at times almost hopeful for it, and that 'the language of the end times is wholly appropriate to our times'. Do you think that the end of the world is something that we all secretly crave?

The characters do indeed believe that they are living in the ‘end times’, just as many thinkers have believed this before them. W. and Lars really do believe that the apocalypse is around the corner. But there is a crucial difference between W. and Lars and the millenarians that Norman Cohn has written about in his Pursuit of the Millennium (a book I explicitly reference in Exodus): my characters cannot believe that the apocalypse will actually reveal anything, will actually make things clear. Etymologically, the word, ‘apocalypse’, suggests a kind of unveiling, a revelation. The apocalypse is supposed to show God’s plan for the world. But what if there is no plan, and nothing to reveal? It’s no wonder that W. and Lars sometimes give in to despair!

Of course, as the work of Cohn shows us, there has always been a not-so-secret desire for apocalypse. It’s the moment of judgement, when the wicked are punished, and the meek rewarded. Yes, the apocalypse involves destruction, but it is a destruction in the name of a new hope, a destruction in the name of the Messiah, of the messianic age. The apocalypse is a moment in which the Messiah intervenes in human history. But what happens when you have no faith in a final judgement, in the coming of the Messiah, or in the opening of the messianic age? Instead of the ‘end times’, there is only an endless end, the continual resurgence of chaos and meaninglessness.

Things might seem hopeless for W. and Lars – they are overwhelmed by the ‘welter and waste’. But they actually have hope, which takes the form of their capacity to speak, to converse, to communicate. For the Jewish philosophers I have mentioned, messianism is to be found in human communication, in speech. Even in the ‘endless end’ of climatic and financial catastrophe, W. and Lars are still able to speak about the catastrophe. That, by itself, is a source of hope. Granted, it’s not going to prevent the catastrophe in question, but it does allow a kind of distancing from it. The characters, through their humorous exchanges concerning the catastrophe, are, for that reason, never its passive victims.

Let me make the point in another way. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not simply a play about absurdity, about the fruitless waiting for a messianic figure who never comes. It is about characters talking as they wait, making meaning and amusing themselves in the meantime. It is actually in this talk that the ‘messianism’ of Beckett’s play lies, its lived capacity for hope. Sure, all the speech in the world isn’t going to make Godot keep his appointment. The Messiah isn’t actually going to turn up. But the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon is rich with meaning, with messianism, even if it seems that the characters are obsessed with meaninglessness and failure. Beckett’s play shows us how chatter is anything but insignificant, since it is part of the all-too-human effort to make meaning. Not only that, but it sets this effort against the constantly acknowledged otherness of the world. It is in this tension between meaning-making and meaninglessness, between the human and the inhuman, that Waiting for Godot is alive to me as a work of art.

There is a yearning for other places in other times that dominates all three novels, and especially for 'Old Europe'. Kafka's Prague, Kierkegaard's Denmark… Yet Lars and W. are permanently grounded in monotony – lager on trains and reduced-price sandwiches. Was it important to you to harness them to the here and now, even as they try and escape it?

Yes, W. and Lars find themselves mired in the ‘endless end’ of ordinary life in neoliberal Britain, with all its petty frustrations. W., in particular, dreams of being part of a larger community – whether it be founded on political activism, in the manner of the Autonomia group of Mario Tronti and his friends, or on something more nebulous, as when W. dreams of migrating to Canada, or undertaking an expedition to the legendary land behind the North wind. W. longs to have a whole army of thinker-friends; some great unguessed-at politico-philosophical leap might be possible then, he hopes. Instead, he finds himself stuck with Lars on a train …!

I wanted, in Exodus, to give a sense of the ‘endless end’ of neoliberal Britain, with all its frustrations and trivialities. I wanted to convey ordinary, banal experiences of everyday life – those intervals when nothing much happens. It’s in such banality that you can experience ‘quotidian nihilism’, to be sure, but in which you can also find the ‘messianism’ of banter, the to-and-fro of aimless conversation.

And think my focus on the everyday allows for more than this. Absurd as W.’s dreams might seem, there is a legitimate sense that ‘life is elsewhere’ in these times – that a whole cluster of philosophical, artistic and political possibilities, linked to what my characters call ‘Old Europe’, to Modernism, has disappeared. By bringing together the dreams of this vanished Modern Europe with the mundane world of contemporary Britain, I want to indicate just how remote these vanished possibilities have become. I want the audience to feel these possibilities too, and to feel the sadness of their passing.

Of course, there is a danger, in presenting this remoteness, of falling into the very British trap of laughing at the utopian dreams of would-be intellectuals. There is a danger of reconfirming the hegemony of ‘common sense’ – of saying, in effect: of course we can’t transform the world!; of course we can’t rediscover our political agency! My aim, by contrast, was to give the reader a sense that a real loss has occurred, reawakening a sense of lost Modernist futures, even for those who live in an everyday world as seemingly devoid of possibility as W. and Lars.

W. (William Large) and I will be discussing the Spurious trilogy at the great Cumberland pub in Newcastle on Thurs 6th July at 9PM. We'll be in the upstairs function room (free entry). Abstract below (though we won't be sticking closely to this.)

 

The Humour of Failure: Laughing at the Achievement Society

What does failure mean? Are you a failure? Do you find it difficult to remain upbeat and engaged? Does your capacity to hope seem merely a mocking reminder of your powerlessness?

In our world, what matters is success. We live in an achievement society, governed by a pressure to achieve and a stifling positivity. We are supposed to be entrepreneurs of ourselves – individual micro-enterprises, constantly networking and optimising skills. But this means burn-out and depression are never far away.

In this discussion, Lars Iyer and William Large, aka the fictional characters Lars and W. of Lars Iyer's Spurious trilogy (Melville House, 2011-13), consider how humour might permit a tactics of withdrawal from contemporary opportunism and cynicism.

I translated Blanchot’s texts because I felt a kinship there. I liked his lack of pretentiousness, his way of going deeply into a small, mysterious moment of interaction between people—or between abstractions that he treated as characters. I liked the fact that he didn’t need a dramatic story line.

Lydia Davis, interviewed

Jonathan Ross versus Aki Kaurismäki, from 1991.

'What is surprising is not that things are; it's that they are such and not other', Valéry writes in the 'Note et digression' he appended to his Leonardo essay in 1919. This is profoundly opposed to the pragmatic and positivist English tradition, which takes the world and ourselves for granted and sees the task of art as the simple (or not so simple) exploration of the vagaries of life and the problems of mortality. it is this, we could say, that makes it difficult for the English to respond to the manifestations of European modernism, which is too often accused of 'abstraction' and 'deliberate obfuscation', whether it be the poetry of Rilke and Paul Celan, the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Bernhard. For the English reader and critic, not to be interested in nature for its own sake, not to be interested in the moral dimension of murder and adultery, is not merely a literary but a human failing, a sign of a fatal abstraction, an unwillingness to engage with life as it is. For Valéry or Robbe-Grillet, to be interested in a tree or a bird – or a murder or a jealous husband – for its own sake, is to be concerned merely with the anecdotal and ephemeral. What interests them is what bird-leaving-tree tells us about our condition, it is the nature of murder and of jealousy. 

Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale