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The account of the birth of the ego in Levinas's Totality and Infinity resembles a cosmogony. It is said to originate through a relationship with a series of media or milieus – in the plenitude of a cosmic womb that bears distinct elements within it: the earth and the sea, light and warmth, but also the familiar expanses of the city. The ego, from the first, is immersed in these elements, bathing in light and warmth, and nourishing itself in a movement that sustains and consolidates its existence.

This dependency on the non-self does not belie the independence of the ego, its happiness. Need – Levinas's term for the relation to the other, to the things which nourish the ego or bathe it in light and warmth – is not first of all a lack. 'Enjoyment is made', writes Levinas, 'of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching'; certainly, enjoyment contains a memory of privation, but this is only as a dissatisfaction that has already been answered. The ego remembers a withdrawal from sustenance such that its plenitude can be experienced; lack appears only in the realisation of its appeasement, and it is inferred rather than experienced.

It is in this act of remembering – this enjoyment of enjoyment, which has always fulfilled a need – that the ego comes to itself in its independence. To live on or from the series of elemental media – to relish the taste of fruit, the coolness of the river, the familiar vistas of the street – 'delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and happiness'. For Levinas, the ego is given in a 'contraction of sensation, the pole of a spiral in which the trajectory of turns and involutions is inscribed in joy' that is itself enjoyed.

With this claim – and his whole account of enjoyment – Levinas seeks to break from what he sees as the intellectualist bias of phenomenology. The ego is given in its ipseity through a contraction of sensation – no ideal self needs to be understood as the basis of this involution. And likewise, Levinas insists, we do not first of all represent what we enjoy to ourselves, ascribing value to something already represented, but conversely; it is upon the non-objectifying acts of breathing, eating and drinking that we live from, and whose value is no way separable from the immediacy in which they are given. Intentional consciousness, understood to constitute its objects, rests upon a prior act of positing – of the achievement of an embodiment that serves as the basis for consciousness.

Just such an autoaffective positing takes place within the sights, sounds and sensations – qualities apparently without support (the ego is not concerned from whence they come, but only that they come) – in which we bathe. For Levinas, the ego emerges from the not-I, the other, but this is not accomplished once and for all. Certainly, the ego is singularised and autonomous before the appearance of consciousness, but this happy self-sufficiency has to be constantly reachieved; it depends on a movement of becoming that is the basis of the life of the ego. It depends upon the movement for which alimentation, says Levinas, expresses the essence: that which passes from the other to the same.

As such, intentional consciousness depends upon a prior, bodily intentionality – upon a series of elements whose form it cannot constitute in advance – the immediacy of light and warmth as they gratify me all at once, as well as the indeterminate milieu from which they emerge. In this way, enjoyment breaks from the subordination of the things we encounter to a 'technical finality' such as, he suggests, we find in Heidegger. 'As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinate to enjoyment – the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment'. In place of a single finality, then – the for-the-sake-of-which of human existence that gives sense to the things we encounter – we find a series of finalities that are autonomous with respect to one another. Here, Levinas waxes positively Batailliean: to enjoy something is to do so 'without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure'. Happiness is the suspension of a single finality; it belongs to 'the disinterested joy of play'.

But what happens when food cannot be found, and the sun sinks beneath the horizon? what, when the river has dried up and the fruit on the vine withered? For the most part, the absence of immediate gratification is still to be understood as a mode of enjoyment: our distress and trouble are merely part of that movement of alimentation that provides invigoration, continued life. Sensibility is passive compared to the activity of thought – I am the mercy of the elements that provide me with light, warmth and food, but I am still confident in my ability to consume the other, transmuting it into the same. I still hold myself separate from the world, looking to absorb what I encounter into a higher unity; perhaps we find here a doubling of the constitutive activity of consciousness in the way the ego, in enjoyment, partially and provisionally constitutes the habitat which sustains it.

Pain and trouble, for the most part, belong to the rhythm of enjoyment – the uncertainty of finding nourishment does not belie the confidence that there will something, once more, to eat. In enjoyment, sensibility is given in an egoism – a monadic separation – whose essence is this confidence. Yet enjoyment is precarious; there is the threat that confidence will not be enough, and the element, far from affording sustenance and invigoration, becomes indifferent matter. Water, water everywhere and nor a drop to drink … Coleridge's becalmed mariner knows the element only as what Levinas calls 'an opaque density without origin, the bad infinite, or the indefinite, the aperion'.

Suffering, says Levinas, is not a state more basic than enjoyment; it is, he argues, an inversion of joy – a vulnerability to matter that is no longer an immersed, oblivious participation. One can never take for granted what is expressed by Levinas in the infinitive – to eat, to drink, to sleep, to warm oneself – since each can be prolonged into the indefinite reserve that resists the egoic movement from the other to the same. What, then, does hunger become when it is no longer part of the rhythm through which the other is measured by the same?

Remembering Antelme's The Human Race, which relates its author's experience in the camps, Blanchot writes,

We must meditate (but is it possible?) upon this: in the camp (as Robert Antelme said while enduring it) need sustains everything, maintaining an infinite relation to life even if it be in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a matter of high or low) – if need consecrates life through an egoism without ego – there is also the point at which need no longer helps one to live, but is an aggression against the entire person: a torment which denudes, an obsession of the whole being whereby the being is utterly destroyed.

Blanchot goes on to evoke that 'egoism without ego' which reveals itself in a need for nourishment that is no longer part of the structure Levinas calls enjoyment. Need, now, has displaced itself from the ipseity of the ego, which thrives on the contents of what it ingests. In lieu of itself, enduring only as an empty craving, the ego absents itself from the autoaffection in which it was born. Or this auto-affection seems to outlive it, need become impulse, ipseity voiding itself in the mechanism of existence.

Enjoyment, now, reaches its limit. If for the most part, we are steeped in an instinctive hedonism by which life is first of all a 'love of life', and whose worth is given in terms of its contents as they are 'more dear than my being', Antelme shows us what happens when need destroys the ipseity it formerly sustained.

We live, says Levinas, from "good soup", air, light, spectacles, work, sleep etc.' – but our dependency brings with it what we cannot possess. If I am grounded by the relation to things as they are given to me in enjoyment, I might also be uprooted by their absence. And if the carnal ego – Levinas's rebuttal to what he sees as the separation of mind and body in phenomenology – is not yet the formal identity from which consciousness constitutes the world, it is vulnerable when the elements become indefinite, bad infinities, and lack all determination.

Sensibility, which seems to grant the life of the separated ego, may also threaten this separation. Hunger is not only a pause, a momentary rest that has the certainty of sustenance before it, but menaces the very ipseity of the I. In enjoyment, the elements withdraw as they allow individual things – this piece of fruit, this cleared patch of woodland – to be absorbed into the same. But enjoyment also vouchsafes that uncertainty Levinas calls the 'concern for the morrow'. It describes, on the one hand, the movement from the other to the same, that maintains the ego in its independence within dependence, but on the other, threatens to let the other become indigestible and thereby undo the ipsiety of what it sustained.

Even as enjoyment is exaltation (the enjoyment of enjoyment, its doubling up in joy and gratification) it is also inhabited by uncertainty. One cannot by certain of having time to enjoy. What else is the experience of pain and suffering, for Levinas, but the absence of the prospect that seems to open to the ego in enjoyment – an immediacy that is given as the return of what detaches the present moment from any kind of future?

Blanchot again:

Dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread 'even if one is perfectly aware that death is a few minutes away' and that there is no longer any point in nourishment.

This gleam, this brilliance does not illuminate anything living. However, with this gaze which is a last gaze, bread is given us bread. This gift, outside all reason, and at the point where all the values have been exterminated – in nihilist desolation and when all objective order has been given up – maintains life's fragile chance by the sanctification of hunger – nothing 'sacred', let us understand, if something which is given without being broken or shared by him who is dying of it ('Great is hungering', Levinas says, recalling a Jewish saying).

But at the same time the fascination of the dying gaze, where the space of life congeals, does not leave intact the need's demand, not even in a primitive form, for it no longer allows hunger (it no longer allows bread) to be related in any way to nourishment.

In this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread, not any longer, in order to satisfy a need and still less in order to make bread desirable, need – in need – also dies as simple need. And it exalts, it glorifies – by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) – the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves.

Beyond the awareness that death is close, there is the impersonal need for bread that has come too late for sustenance. Food is the parody of food. Bread appears as what it is – but only as it is no longer a content that nourishes life. It appears as what it is – but only when enjoyment has collapsed into bare existence, and need has become an empty absolute detached from any particular existence.

Here, we might remember that for Hegel, the absolute names the conceptual system contained by the phenomenal world as it develops, granting itself to human knowledge. For Blanchot, the absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The absolute, for Hegel, must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation, but for Blanchot, hunger withdraws the ego from the relation in question and from the measure of knowledge. Ego and world – the ego and the elements – intermingle in an experience of brute existing that no longer permits of particular existents.

Great is hungering – great indeed, as it turns the ego inside out, revealing it to have been only ever a knot tied in the continuity of being. The experience Antelme describes, and that Blanchot recalls is, to be sure, exceptional. But it also indicates in what the uncertainty that inhabits enjoyment consists: the 'concern for the morrow' is a concern that life will become impersonal, its contents no longer more dear to it than its existing. The body, dependent in its independence, is exposed on all sides to the threat of a sensibility that no longer sustains its separation.

Great is hungering – and all the way up to the 'there is' in terms of which Levinas presents the empty absolute, the collapse of the world into the aperion. If the ego, as Levinas will recount, seeks to make a dwelling in the uncertainty of the element, setting up its home, it is in order to leave behind the threat of a future in which the 'there is' cannot be held at bay. But the home, like the digestive system, cannot maintain a simple dichotomy between inside and outside, as it allows the movement that converts the other into the same.

2. Recalling more than 10 years later the way his friendship with Jean Paulhan was tested when, in May 1958, de Gaulle returned to power, Blanchot makes the following remark:

Communism is this as well: the incommensurable communication where everything that is public – and then everything is public – ties us to the other (others) through what is closest to us.

Communism demands that the private becomes the public. The distant – de Gaulle's unconstitutional return to power – must reach us in the intimacy of our relationship; it must find us there and interrogate us, as, perhaps, Hiroshima did the lovers of Duras’s screenplay. How to become worthy of friendship as communism, communism as friendship? Blanchot’s friendship with Paulhan was tested by their disagreement about the significance of de Gaulle’s return to power on May 13th 1958. But it was also in name of friendship that he allied himself with Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras, Jean Schuster and others over the same issue, contributing articles to the anti-Gaullist Le 14 Juillet.

Invoking the solidarity granted by the refusal to allow the reconciliation of what happened on May 13th by the authority of de Gaulle’s name, Blanchot writes “Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time of joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived”. Then what he calls in the next sentence “the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No” is a solidarity that belongs to a time out of joint.

A break has occurred. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement that is without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, nor in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first to those who cannot speak.

Friendship, here, is a solidarity with those who are deprived the power of speaking. The aim is not to speak in the place of others – but to preserve, anonymously, that speechlessness in its simplicity, reaffirming it, and allowing it to resound. A kind of silence, then, that suspends the movement of good sense to reconcile everything in the continuity of discourse. Friendship, communism are set back into an incapacity, in much the same way as the literary work, as Blanchot argues in his literary criticism in a similar period, lets speak the impossibility of speech.

But what, then, is the relationship between literature and politics?

3. Speaking of the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, whose signatories gave their support to those who refused to bear arms against the Algerians, or who offered them assistance, Blanchot says he signed it “not as a political writer, nor even as a citizen involved in the political struggle, but as an apolitical writer who felt moved to express an opinion about problems that concern him essentially”.

A surprising declaration – because in the same period it is out of the experience of literature that Blanchot will attempt to think the “change of epoch” he feels is underway – the technological uprooting of old mythologies and the media-driven appearance of new ones, the eclipse of other forms of violence by the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, and which calls for a dialogue with Marxism. This the project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him from 1960 to 1965, emerging directly out of his engagement with Mascolo and others on Le 14 Juillet and his opposition to the Algerian War.

The Revue Internationale was the Italian novelist’s Elio Vittorini’s idea, Blanchot remembers in 1996; he recalls that Italo Calvino, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson being associated with the project; Louis-René des Forêts was its secretary, and Maurice Nadeau and Roland Barthes were also involved.

The Revue only appeared once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò, containing translations of Blanchot’s texts “The Name Berlin” and “The Conquest of Space”, as well as “Archipelagic Speech” and the final page of “Everyday Speech” as it was published later in The Infinite Conversation. In 1990, Michel Surya published the texts associated with the Revue, Blanchot’s “Proposal for the Revue Internationale”, along with letters between the participants, in his magazine Lignes.

What kind of dialogue is Marxism to seek with literature in theRevue? One that will also have to come to terms with the fact that, in Blanchot’s words in the “Proposal”, “Literature represents a distinctive kind of power, a kind of power not predicated upon possibility (and the dialectic has to do only with that which is possible)”: “a power without power” associated with a “literary responsibility” that is irreducibly different from “political responsibility”. Both kinds of responsibility “engage[…] us absolutely”, Blanchot writes to his fellow participants, “as in a sense does the disparity between them”. One of the tasks of the review is precisely to explore the possibility of a solution to the clash of literature and politics.

4. But how is this possible, when Blanchot’s notion of literature seems to be founded on a refusal of any notion of political commitment?

Recall the general account Blanchot offers of language and literature. For the most part, I am able to speak in my own name, using language to the extent that it seems transparent, barely interposing itself between what I say and what I might want to say. Everything seems expressible; language is obedient, docile; speech and writing are part of the economy of what possible for human beings. I refer to the world; I express my feelings: language answers to a faith in human ability, and in the ability to be able, to the power and possibility that is proper to each of us.

But this is not always the case. Remembering his clashes with the examining magistrate who sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Declaration, Blanchot recalls, “After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: 'No, no', I said, 'you will not substitute your words for my own'”. If Blanchot repeats the exact same words he had uttered earlier, it is not because of any difference in the content of what he would say, but because of the place he would reclaim for his utterances within a network of power. To speak in his own name is not to arrogate speech to himself as to an individual as powerful as the magistrate within a given institutional context, but to disclose the operation of this context as it makes of speech something more than mere information. Blanchot expresses a solidarity with those who are unable to reclaim their speech as it is made to speak without them – attesting to speech as non-power, to the “cry of the Other” unable to speak in an institutional context. A speech that can also be reaffirmed as a kind of refusal, and that is the basis of what Blanchot calls communism and friendship.

Literature, too, belongs to this refusal. True, the novel seems continuous with the world in which we live, but there is a practice of writing in which language brackets its capacity to refer, interposing itself in its thickness and opacity in place of that transparency it assumes in ordinary communication. Poetry emphasises the rhythm or the sonority of language, its flesh. Fiction – even the vastest novel – can wear away the world it seems to carefully construct, dramatising the way in which language withdraws from its referential function. To read Kafka’sThe Castle, for example, is to lose oneself into a labyrinth without issue, as language wanders like K., unable to take refuge in the intentions of its author, in his ability to conjure a world from ink and paper.

For Blanchot, a writer is never quite a writer, or never writer enough, since language does not grant itself to the measure of power. But nor does it grant itself to the power of a reader, insofar as it carries what it says beyond the intentions of any particular reading. This is not because it gives itself to be read in any number of ways, but that it lets itself be experienced as the double or the image of language.

For Blanchot, both author and the reader both sense their distance from what does not cease murmuring in the work; for the former, this is why it is necessary to start writing again, to enclose the unfinishable work in a book; for the latter, it draws the reader to read anew. Both, then, have a relation that passes by way of the work as it sets itself back from writing and reading. Both find themselves elected or commanded by what has no power. This, indeed, is what literary responsibility might mean: the attempt to maintain a response to what lays claim to both author and reader, and to answer that response anew.

The passion of this encounter, which means the writer is never quite a writer, can be hidden by the imposingness of the narrative. Even the vastest novel bears, at its heart, a simple récit, if this word is allowed to name not only a literary genre, but the event upon which the creation of literature depends. And likewise, any critical study is engaged by the same event, repeating it in turn, even if it is overwhelmed by the imposingness of criticism, of literary judgement.

This is the responsibility Blanchot lets claim him in his fiction and his criticism. His récits seem to pare themselves away until they are concerned simply with the act of narration in its possibility and its impossibility. Only a minimal realism survives; the most tenuous link with the world. What matters is the narrator’s journey to the “truth” of the narrative – the interminable, incessant return of language as language, of language as it appears in place of itself. A journey which requires that he be sacrificed as he falls from that power, that measure of possibility to which language normally grants itself, all the while keeping up his narrative. Until, at the end of each récit, he returns to the world of the present from the peculiar passion of his narrative.

Blanchot’s fiction is that path of research that drives his encounter with the texts of others, discovering a récit in literary narratives that narrates the return, from writing, from the experience of language, of the double of ordinary language. Before it can be analysed in terms of metaphor and imagery, the poem has always retreated from the world in which it seems to be able to be read, bringing its reader close to the image of language as it retreats from signification, from what it can be made to say.

It is thus that Blanchot seeks to answer literary responsibility, experiencing the work, undergoing it as though it were a kind of fate, and finally, in his fiction and his criticism, welcoming it, affirming what happened as it had done just as Joë Bousquet, Deleuze reminds us, claimed his wound pre-existed him. Blanchot lets himself be haunted and doubled by the “other” language as it seems to dispose of him in order to return to itself through his fiction and his literary criticism, and thereby suspending those relations that bind him to the world.

Who am I, as author, as reader? For Blanchot, I exist only as my double, just as language, too, wanders in itself. A double, now, that is not subordinate to its original, but that indicates the way in which the original is always doubled, that what exists can do so otherwise. I am fated by what I cannot even will, by what returns over and again. And as it returns, engaging me as language, as the non-power of language, the “I” becomes “it” – as, in Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche, the capacity to say “I”, to speak in one’s own name appears and disappears. I am all the names in history; I am none of those names. Amor fati: the self is not yet itself, and lives as this “not yet”, in the interval where it is turned to language as it resounds ceaselessly in its mute murmuring.

5. What, then, when literary responsibility passes over into political responsibility? Communism names the attempt to answer the cry of the Other and to maintain it, affirming what reaches each of us so as to command solidarity. True, it is possible to fall short of this responsibility, to let it wither, in the same way as a literary writer attempts to escape the call that singularises him and awaits his response. But this escape is also a kind of relation to what does not cease to call. Communism is the attempt to acknowledge what first gives itself as this relation: to language as it escapes power, and calls for us to respond.

It is this response, one presumes, for which he intends the Revueto answer. But an answer, now that must be appropriate to that call. The text of the column is to be dispersed throughout each issue, being interrupted by other texts. The “disrupted continuity” of the column will be an opportunity to experiment with the “short form”, a term Blanchot says he has borrowed from contemporary music, which he characterises in another essay as “a-cultural”.

Each national editorial board, he suggests, will jointly devise a fragmentary column or essay, “The Course of Events” exploring a particular intellectual event, be it philosophical, poetic, or sociological. The production of fragments must be a collective practice, Blanchot notes, each writer transcending the limits of his or her thought, putting their name to fragments for which they feel themselves jointly responsible. “We must not be afraid to roll up our sleeves”, warns Blanchot: the work will be laborious, challenging.

6. “If the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians”, wrote Blanchot of the collective editorial policy of the Revue. It did fail; the documents passed down to us which survive of the attempt to hold this utopia ahead of us not as an unrealisable dream, but as a programme that overturns our conceptions of literature, writing and authorial agency as well as our model of political activism on the other. But what survives?

In his proposal, Blanchot gives a long list of possible topics for discussion in the Revue, one of which, reflecting on the overcoming of the limits of place with Gagarin’s ascent into space, is sketched in detail. Technology, Blanchot claims, promises to dissolve the fascination with nations and peoples. Upon his return, Gagarin is greeted by Khrushchev on behalf of his fatherland, but he was nevertheless able to deliver a new kind of speech: a speech from outside.

Blanchot extends these gnomic reflections in an article he wrote for the Revue; in Gagarin’s rambling speech, he says,

something disturbs us and dismays us in that rambling: it does not stop, it must never stop; the slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void; any gap or interruption introduces something which is much more than death, which is the nothingness outside entered into discourse.

Gagarin becomes “the man from the Outside”, whose speech says “the truth is nomadic”. Tantalising rather than dully developed, Blanchot's fragment is indicative rather than being fully developed, bringing together a surprising constellation of topics. To what does it point? To the challenge of formulating an “adequate response to the enigma of these changing times” – a response that is fragmentary. How should this be understood? The literary fragment, Blanchot writes, “points to a linguistic space in which the purpose and function of each moment is to render all other moments indeterminate”. The fragmentary writing Blanchot calls for in the Revue is linked to the same indeterminacy, reaffirming the murmuring of speech, the image of language as it is sensed by the literary author.

Reflecting on Blanchot’s musings on Gagarin, Hollier and Mehlman suggest the journal “had […] the ambition of becoming a sort of literary station (a communication vessel) launched in literary space”. A satellite that would broadcast in a number of languages, raising questions about translation, Blanchot suggests, “as an original form of literary activity”. The linguistic difference between languages need not be abolished, but deployed – altering the language into which a translation is to be made.

Moving more rapidly, Blanchot also sketches a number of other possible themes: a reflection on the new treatment of text in contemporary music, for example, as found in Boulez’s use of Mallarmé in Pli Selon Pli, and in his lecture on the relationship between music and poetry; an exploration of the meaning of violence in a world where total destruction is possible: what is the revolutionary significance of this violence? what is its relationship with de-Stalinisation? what changes has de-Stalinisation accomplished in political language: how to understand terms like cult of personality, or peaceful coexistence? What questions, Blanchot asks, are raised by Fanon on violence, Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind or Pernoud’s book on the bourgeoisie?: a swarm of topics which begins with the particular into order to open into the general – to broach the question of the whole.

Why did the Revue fail? Blanchot suggests in 1996 that it was because its German contributors were overwhelmed by the Berlin War; as they departed, the whole project faded away. But what if they had instead joined Blanchot in reflecting on the fate of that divided city? In another fragment he wrote for the Revue, Blanchot suggests Uwe Johnson’s novels are uniquely able to answer “the singularity of “Berlin”, precisely through the hiatus that it was obliged to leave open, with an obscure and unflagging rigour, between reality and the literary expression of its meaning”. An indirect approach to the problem of Berlin – but one which, if the Revue had indeed gone about its work, might have maintained the literary station in its solitary orbit, continuing to hold its participants in friendship, in communism.

Swimming in the Real

Posts from the archives follow. They were supposed to point the way to a literary critical/ philosophical book, which I never got around to writing.

I've started a new blog, Wittgenstein Jr, for a new novel. Non-consecutive, unplanned, no real idea where it will go, or if it will be any good.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 11th January. 

'The Trouble With Productivity'. Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive. 

What's ragged should be left ragged.

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture which God makes. As a man sits quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. – Now, do I believe that this happens? I don't. […]

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill. / Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Go on, believe! It does no harm!

No cry of torment can be great than the cry of one man. / Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer. / A man is capable of infinite torment therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help. / The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite torment. / The whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul. / The Christian faith – as I see it – is a man's refuge in this ultimate torment. […]

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched.

Are all men great? No. – Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man! Why should something be bestowed on you that's not bestowed on your neighbour? To what purpose?! If it isn't you wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you experience (other than vanity)? Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of my particular talent.

The thought working its way towards the light.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. / Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning of think about things in a new way. The change is a decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish.

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? – Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!

[…] a man will never be great if he misjudges himself: if he throws dust in his own eyes.

How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life! […]

The purely corporeal can by uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

[…] Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be. –

I cannot kneel to pray because it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. […]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.

The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart.

A typical American film, naive and silly, can – for all its silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film.

Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens – why should I concern myself that the fruits of my labours should not be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in any case be more than clever.

Sometimes you see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway).

The book is full of life – not like a man, but like an ant-heap.

One keeps forgotten to go right down to the foundations. One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down.

'Wisdom is grey'. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.

My thoughts probably move in a far narrower circle than I suspect.

Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes.

Perhaps one day this civilisation will produce a culture. […]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

[…] the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes or does.

What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.

(For the Preface). It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon – this is what I wish for it – be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. […]

I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!

Bach said that all his achievements were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength. And someone who, with all this, can also express himself perfectly, simply speaks to us in the language of a great man.

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

A writer far more talented than I would still have only a minor talent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Tradition is not something a man can learn; nor a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. / Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Moore stirred up a philosophical wasps' nest with his paradox; and the only reason the wasps did not duly fly out was that they were too listless.

In the sphere of the mind someone's project cannot usually be continued by anyone else, nor should it be. These thoughts will fertilise the soil for a new sowing.

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

Ambition is the death of thought.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'

For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.

If Christianity is truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.

I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us 'the existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us. […]

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

God may say to me: 'I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them'.

Wittgenstein, random remarks from his notebooks, from Culture and Value

Interview with Adam Phillips here.

Will Buckingham's brief review of Spurious.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian on the Not the Booker event hosted by Melville House at The Book Club in Shoreditch last week.

Fleur MacDonald in The Spectator on The White Review and (in passing) the Manifesto of mine that was published there. 

(Apologies for the lack of real content at the blog. This should change soon.)

'Literary Melancholy', a long new interview with me by David Winters is now up at 3:AM. On the Manifesto, the Daniel Davis Wood essay and other things. 

D. Quentin Miller reviews Spurious for the Review of Contemporary Fiction. 

I've written an essay/manifesto available here.

(link corrected)

Last three posts from Dogma, due out Feb 2012.

Pre-order Dogma at Amazon UK or Amazon USA. Or order it directly from Melville House themselves, meaning you can receive it a month early.

The cover of Dogma is above.

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.

He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods.

A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …' When did it go wrong?, W. asks. Where did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse!, W. says. There are no vistas! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.

A familiar cliché holds that philosophy deals with thinking about thinking, a metacognition that appears to be signally lacking in L, the provincial English university philosopher who narrates Spurious. The irony of course is that a man paid to teach self-reflexive thought is shown to be incapable of even rudimentary self-reflection (a bit like Jack Gladney, the Hitler scholar who can’t speak a word of German).

L’s blindness to self-experience seems to pervade every aspect of his life. In the book’s opening pages we meet W, the man condemned to serve as L’s eternal interlocutor, reproaching him for his inability to experience shame in the appropriate fashion: L feels shame, W complains, but is not ashamed of this shame.

W doesn’t so much correct L as help narrate his experience of the world. L plays the ape, W jokes about it, though the joke seems to be on him; ‘what do I get out of it’, he asks himself constantly. W dreams of seriousness, but his life appears to consist in endlessly escaping the pretentions of seriousness to find the nearest pub, where he sits and amuses himself with L’s apishness. He is an admirer of Continental Europe, a fetishised place of gentle manners and civility, but most of his trips there seem to end in the gutters with L, drunk. He once heard something about a stupid messiah, but he can’t remember exactly what it was he heard, or where he heard it. He is sure it was at an academic event though, which means that, even if it’s not true, the messiah is invested with the type of seriousness he clings to.

If W resembles the superfluous man of Lermontov then L resembles bicameral man of Jaynes, operating through right brained whisperings in which he fails to recognise his own voice. Troubled by their shortcomings, W and L set out in search of a leader who might dictate the great project of their lives. Unfortunately the leaders they find offer only trite sound bites (‘I’m not interesting’ one of them says, ‘but my thoughts are interesting’, the kind of thing a stock character in a Woody Allen film might say).

At one point W laments that their fates matter to no one, not even to themselves, confirmation that the apocalyptic visions and the desperate search for a leader belong to the same void; the phalanx is formed, it just needs to be told where to march. W’s superfluous man is a token representing an age where even the relative comforts of university lecturer can’t prevent the onset of despair.

When L pays a visit W ‘opens a bottle of Chablis . . unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats’ along with olives and home-made bread. A more solidly middle-class existence could not be conceived (L is less comfortable and seems to be plagued by a mysterious damp that welcomes him home, a perverse contrast with the friendly dog W has invents for his own book.) Yet as their evenings together unfold both are plagued by a lack of purpose.

Conversations swing wildly from the opiate to the amphetamine, from indulging a self-consciously stupid lassitude to a panicked febricity. L plans to become a scholar of Sanskrit one week, of music the next, a frantic search for the final score that will consume his life. At the same time however he can’t be bothered to read W’s book properly, and generally his ambitions collapse into yet more wasted time.

W is less desultory in this respect, and is able to remain focused on Talmudic philosophy, though things don’t seem to work out any better for him; his volumes of Rosenweig are annotated with question marks, he ploughs through Cohen but admits he may as well be reading it in Dutch.

This then is the paradox of their lives: they are able to sit at ease, wasting whole stretches of the night staring at ceilings or TVs, yet they do so in the grip of a mania that tells them they are trapped. But if their apocalyptic premonitions are true, wouldn’t the academic leader’s stuffy seriousness be the height of stupidity? And if that’s true then wouldn’t L’s ethereal persona bear the mark of Messianic genius? And wouldn’t their conspicuous incongruity with this world means they themselves are the very leaders they seek?

Their second false-dawn messiah tells them pompously of ‘the interlacing of his life and thought’, an interlacing L & W seem to pull off later in the book when, in contrast to the off-the-peg existentialism of sleek black conference wear, they sit ‘fat and blousy’ at the bar. Mercifully their leaders abandon them. Mercifully W never finds serious conversation and L never tries to think about why he is interesting. Mercifully they do manage to find a pub, and we get to hear about it.

James Wood, Not the Booker review

In 'Spurious' Lars Iyer has managed a difficult trick: he has written a book that is intelligent and unconventional in form but eminently readable, serious yet funny, and not a sentence too long. Laurel and Hardy butt heads with Levinas and Blanchot, Kafka and Rosenzweig in a way that should seem arch but gives birth to a strange poignancy. I highly recommend the experience.

Paul Bowles, Not the Booker review

Whether they are drinking, at a conference, meeting people or travelling, they never escape their failure. Like a Blanchotian death, it hangs over them like an ominous cloud. But while driven by a sense failure and death, Spurious is a darkly hilarious book, self deprecating and brutally honest. It is an effortless read, written with great poise and confidence tht it leaves you wondering how this could be the work of such an idiot.

Ibitsu, Not the Booker Review

Spurious is many things: an attempt to place philosophy into (almost) everyday conversation; an account of a classic existential double act (think Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Withnail and I, or the psychogeographers of the "Robinson" films); a tale of menace and despair; and an opportunity to see how the narrative logic of the blog can be fitted (or not) to the more traditional framework of the book. Which of these (or other) aspects we wish to dwell on will lead to multiple different readings, different reasons to like or dislike the novel. Personally, I like to read Spurious as an assertion of the importance of friendship in the face of loss and despair. The loss in question seems to be connected to an inability to make connections, to make sense of the world. The world here is like that described by Beckett in ‘The Lost Ones’, an ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.’ There is no escaping the search, in Beckett’s formulation, but neither is there any hope for closure. Are Lars and W., the protagonists of this novel, each other's lost one? Is the promise of Spurious that friendship, in all its tender brutality, all its wretched neediness, is still the quality that we search for above all others? It seems telling that this novel, which some reviewers have found plotless, meandering, should finish with the lucid observation that "the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost".

Richard Elliott, Not the Booker review

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one had tried hard enough, that's what W. discerned when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough. And what a task! How many times has he tried? How many emails has he sent?

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it’s like beating a big, dumb animal. It seems pointless and cruel. How can I understand why I am being beaten? I bellow, that’s all. It’s perfectly senseless to me.

He’s drawn pictures, W. says. He’s scrawled red lines across my work, but I have never understood; I’ve carried on regardless.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

The argumentum ad misericordiam, that's the name for it, W. says, my basic scholarly move. It's the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which in my case is implied in the state of the speaker: my bloodshot eyes, my general decay. Don't I always give my presentations as though on my knees?, W. says.

It's as though I'm praying for mercy, W. says, although it's also, no doubt, a plea to put me out of my misery. Kill me now, that's what my presentations say. Don't spare me. Which is why, inevitably, I am spared. It would be too easy to destroy me, W. says. And who would clean up afterwards?