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This connection between religion and nihilism was for Scholem reflected most intensely in the writings of Franz Kafka: “For, like no one else before, he expressed the limit between religion and nihilism.” He argued that Kafka bore witness to the modern experience of a meaningless world where God is completely absent and where revelation and salvation are unrealizable. Kafka’s nihilistic experience, paradigmatic for modernity in general, was not the atheistic realization that there is nothing beyond this world; it was ultimately a religious experience of divine nothingness: “This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void, in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.” This divine nothingness is manifested first and foremost in the meaninglessness of revelation. Again, this modern meaninglessness does not mark the end of religion but uncovers the true nihilistic nature of revelation itself.

For Scholem, the significance of God’s revelation is by definition inexhaustible, infinite, and as such incomprehensible and meaningless to human understanding. God’s word is overdetermined and gains its concrete meaning only in its mediation by tradition and interpretation. Although God’s word is essentially void of meaning, this meaninglessness is initially masked by religious traditions—in Scholem’s case, the rabbinic tradition— that establish certain interpretations of revelation as absolute. However, when religious traditions start to lose their authority in secular modernity the “nothingness of revelation” (das Nichts der Offenbarung) becomes apparent.

Kafka’s writings represented this condition where the crumbling legitimacy of Jewish law and tradition problematized revelation. The concept of the law was absolutely central in his stories and novels but always appeared as fundamentally inaccessible and incomprehensible. According to Scholem’s interpretation of Kafka, revelation therefore does take place in Kafka’s universe and in the modern world but is absolutely void of meaning.

Similarly, the law absolutely determines Kafka’s main character K., but it is impossible for him to know its meaning or its lawgiver. In a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin, Scholem characterized this as “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.” This empty and meaningless revelation reveals literally nothing, but is a manifestation of divine nothingness.

More than that, secularism paradoxically appears as a fully religious phenomenon. Modernity, in this respect, is neither opposed to religion nor is it the result of religious transformations; rather, it is religion. Modernity is just another episode, probably even the most interesting, in the long history of religious evolutions.

What was ultimately at stake in Scholem’s fascination with Gnosticism was therefore not just the possibility of a modern religiosity but a precept for modernity as such. If the modern worldview is characterized by an absolute absence of the divine and accordingly by a nihilistic conception of the world as devoid of any meaning, the crucial question is what our comportment with this world is. In other words, how do we make sense of the world and our lives if meaning is no longer given?

Someone who rejects the immanent world as meaningless in favor of an exclusive focus on transcendence still has to live in this world. A mere passive resignation might be speculatively attractive, but it is practically impossible. However hard the Gnostic hoped for salvation, he still lived in an unredeemed world and inevitably had to decide how exactly he wanted to do this in a meaningful way that squared with his Gnostic convictions. Paradoxically, even the most extreme negation of the world requires us to take a position within this world. In spite of its exclusive emphasis on transcendence, the Gnostic speculations necessarily had implications for the way one had to live in the immanent world. In other words, the dual schema of rejection and escape requires a third move: a return to immanence. This return can obviously not involve a simple acceptance of the profane, but it will be a dialectical return mediated by the initial rejection.

Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World

In a letter to Vita Sackville-West (16 March 1926), Woolf wrote:

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief ) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year.

Woolf ’s assertion that rhythm is style and ‘a very simple matter’ is thus immediately countered by a claim for its complexity. If her ideas are placed in the context of her correspondence with Sackville-West, it becomes clear that she was responding to the latter’s view that ‘style and surface-texture’ should receive greater attention from critics and that the perfection of Woolf ’s ‘style’ (rivalled, Sackville-West suggested, only by that of Max Beerbohm) came, enviably, at no cost ‘of thought or trouble’. Woolf ’s response was that while ‘style’ might indeed be a ‘simple matter’ the question of ‘rhythm’ (on which the choice of words was dependent) was in fact ‘profound’, going ‘far deeper than words’ and, by implication, than ‘surface-texture’ (Sackville-West’s phrase), and entailing much creative effort in the ‘recapture’ of the rhythmic movement and the ‘exact shapes’ of consciousness. The imaginative process, she indicates, was a plunge (the word she uses at the opening of Mrs Dalloway), while her watery-depth metaphors were a foretaste of The Waves, written, as Woolf observed to the musician and composer Ethel Smyth, ‘to a rhythm and not to a plot’: ‘And thus though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader.’ The rhythm of the waves, taking up the earlier image of ‘the wave in the mind’, sounds throughout the interludes that punctuate The Waves, as Woolf finds images to represent the passage of time, and of light, from dawn to darkness and, in the final pages of the novel, to dawn again: ‘Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.’ The motif became central to the construction of the novel’s unity and Woolf ’s desire to represent simultaneity rather than sequence (as in her intention for the final section of To the Lighthouse to represent two things happening at the same time): ‘The Waves is I think resolving itself … into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves.’

[In a footnote:]  In a further letter to Smyth, Woolf wrote of the disturbances of listening to Wagner on the radio: ‘His rhythm destroys my rhythm; yes, thats [sic] a true observation. All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done … Thank God, Wagner has  stopped murmuring among the forest leaves, and I’m my own mistress again’; ibid., vol. 4, 303–5 (7 April 1931).

Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern

An essay focused on Hölderlin and originally published as ‘The Turning’ (1955) is the last to be included in the appendix to The Space of Literature. The essay is in part a response to Beda Allemann’s reading of the turning or reversal undertaken by Hölderlin between earlier commentaries on Empedocles and Hyperion – in which Hölderlin expresses the desire for reconciliation with the divine which is formulated as the desire to unite with the fiery element, to pass into another world, the desire for immediacy, for death – and later writing where the task of the poet is one of mediation between mortals and the gods. Here Blanchot references ‘As When on a Holiday’ as a well-known example thanks to Heidegger’s commentary, which itself became known in France thanks to his 1946 review ‘The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin’. This turning is deemed necessary for the poet to save himself from the dangerous experience of fire which threatens to consume him; Blanchot notes that it has also been interpreted by critics as a glorification of the earthly fatherland and as a patriotic return to the duties of this world. Blanchot challenges the interpretation of the turning offered by Allemann – and Heidegger, although he is not named – by focusing on a reversal which is never ‘one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 276).

Allemann understands the idea of reversal in Hölderlin as a response to the experience of fire which threatened to consume the poet at the time he was writing Hyperion and Empedocles. Blanchot writes that Hölderlin denounces this experience as not only dangerous but, more significantly, false, ‘insofar at least as it claims to be immediate communication with the immediate’. Blanchot cites Hölderlin’s commentary on a fragment by Pindar on the law, where Hölderlin writes that both the gods and man must distinguish between worlds to maintain celestial pureness (the gods) and the opposition of contraries that alone allows knowledge (man) (SL 273). The immediate is impossible for both men and gods alike, and the poet is not intermediary between these two worlds but the one tasked with safeguarding this absence; Blanchot reminds us that when Hölderlin writes of ‘the categorical reversal’, he is commenting on his translation of the tragedy of Oedipus, who was condemned to live apart from both gods and men and to maintain the empty place opened up by this double infidelity (SL 272). In the absence of the gods our relationship to them is not purely negative, and this is what makes it terrible; it has been replaced by a relation with what is higher than the gods – the ‘Sacred’, the law, or what Hölderlin names ‘the Most High’ – and it is this relation without relation that threatens to tear and disorientate us (SL 275).

The reversal is an indication of the impossibility of the mediation of the immediate at the edge of this abyss; it is man’s heart that must become ‘the intimacy where the echo of the empty deep becomes. language, but not through one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 275–6). Blanchot cites the hymn Germania as an example of the richer conception of inspiration which results from the reversal understood not as singular and redemptive but as repeated and reversed: with Allemann, he notes that the focus of earlier hymns (when the poet felt the necessity of not giving himself over to the experience of the fire) becomes appeased power in Germania; Allemann argues that this is because Hölderlin has accomplished the reversal and opened that pure region of mediation between sky and earth; but Blanchot sees the poet as turned aside from both heavens and earth as the one tasked with maintaining this rupture. The closing lines of the essay cite Hölderlin at a time when ‘madness had completely obscured [his] mind’:

And when we read these words gleaming with madness: ‘Would I like to be a comet? Yes. For they have the speed of birds, they flourish in fire and are as children in purity’, we sense how the desire to be united with the fire, with the day, may have been realised for the poet in the purity guaranteed by his exceptional integrity. And we are not surprised by this metamorphosis which, with the silent speed of a bird’s flight, bears him henceforth through the sky, flower of light, star that burns but unfurls innocently into a flower. (SL 276)

Hölderlin suggests that the turn to the divine, the immediate, the Open, is achievable; perhaps his madness is evidence of this indifference. Blanchot’s rewriting of this quotation in the lines that follow, however, does not bear witness to the incineration of this comet but to its light, which at once destroys and unveils. Figurative language becomes more literal in this rewriting as the comet transforms into blossoming flower, signalling not reconciliation between the human and the gods but multiple metamorphoses which result from this endless confrontation with the void.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

• What is it about the mythic or hyperbolic term ‘cancer’ that frightens us by its very name, as if it were the unnameable itself? The reason might be that it claims to defeat the system of codes under the authority of which, alive and accepting life, we enjoy the security. of a purely formal existence, obeying a model sign according to a programme unfolding in apparently normative fashion from beginning to end. ‘Cancer’ may be thought to symbolise (and ‘realise’) the refusal to respond: here is a cell that ignores instructions, develops outside the law, in a way said to be anarchic – but it also does more: it destroys the idea of any programme, undermining both the exchange and the message, and the possibility of reducing everything to a sign-based simulation. Cancer, in this perspective, is a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways in which the system comes to be dislocated, and its universal programming and signifying power disarticulated by proliferation and disorder – a task accomplished in former times by leprosy, then by the plague. Something we cannot understand maliciously neutralises the authority of knowledge in its position of mastery. It is not therefore because it simply represents death at work [au travail] that cancer may be described as a singular threat: it is as a deadly malfunction [dérèglement], a malfunction more threatening than the fact of dying itself and endowing that fact with the characteristic of not allowing itself to be counted or taken into account, in the same way that suicide disappears from the statistics supposed to keep count of it. [If the so-called cancerous cell, reproducing itself indefinitely, is timeless, whoever is dying of it thinks, and this is the irony of their death: ‘I am dying of my timelessness.’]

The final sentence of the fragment quoted here does not appear in the first French edition of The Writing of the Disaster dated 18 September 1980.

[…] Through a sort of wayward proliferation, an uncontrollable dissemination that escapes the system, the cancerous cell works outside the law of the programme and destroys all idea of a programme. The cancerous cell is perhaps a Foucauldian resistance to the biopolitical forces that regulate and manage our lives – Foucault writes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that suicide was once a crime, because the right to death was the power possessed by the sovereign over his people, but now it is a unique and individual act of resistance against forms of administering life – but Blanchot goes further: cancer is mortal malfunctioning, not simply death at work. The significance of this difference is clarified in the cancerous proliferation of the fragment: the irony of this death is that it eludes the subject. Blanchot would suggest that Foucault’s account of suicidal resistance is reliant on the will of a subject (we saw earlier that Blanchot understands romantic irony as an expression of poetic subjectivity); this cancerous proliferation is a different sort of incomprehensible and infinitely reflexive irony that exceeds. and contests subjectivity.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

The apocalypse always disappoints; it is that ambiguous and excessive event that does not reveal the truth of the end because it encounters death as the insurmountable impossibility that we are incapable of dominating or wanting: man is not some sort of ‘supreme hero of the negative’ or ‘final Hamlet’ (F 106). Our understanding, which takes us to the limits of comprehension, helps us to see that we will never know this universal death and that our ending will never be of any significance (F 107). Blanchot exposes the difference between the future treated as an object by totalising scientific knowledge and the future as what cannot be negated, as what remains unknowable and uncertain. The latter is why the apocalypse always disappoints: apocalyptic foretelling exposes us to the banality of an end that will never have any meaning for us as subjects.

[…] [A]ll modes of technique expose the human to a turning because all relate us to the unknowable and expose us to a profound powerlessness. 

[…] Noted at the start of this chapter was Derrida’s analysis which claimed that any attempt to shed light on the apocalypse leads only. to a brighter apocalyptic tone; Derrida suggests that by listening to the multiplicity of apocalyptic tones, by recognising that there is more than one tone, we allow the possibility that the other tone, or the tone of the other, might be heard. Towards the end of ‘The Apocalypse is Disappointing’, Blanchot is doing just this when he argues that Jaspers ‘[dismisses] the abstract shadow of this apocalypse as if it were an irritating fly and [perseveres] with the habits of a tradition and a language in which one sees nothing to change’ (F 108). The essay concludes by stressing that the choice between all or nothing, between transformation or destruction, is not the one and only truth of our situation. We should note this fly out of the corner of our eye; we should risk a surreptitious glance in its direction.

[…] the limits of history, world and culture are contested by an impersonal force which the human cannot master: the neuter as a sort of disobedient techne continuing where other modes of technique have left off.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

The human participates in the anonymous and collective flow, hum, movement of the street, but is not subject in this errant and unrestricted space. Blanchot refers to this hum elsewhere as chatter [bavardage]:

I have always been struck by the widely enthusiastic endorsement of Heidegger when, under the pretext of analysis and with his characteristic sober forcefulness, he condemns inauthentic speech.  A scorned speech, which is never that of the resolute, laconic and heroic ‘I’, but the non-speech of the irresponsible ‘One’. One speaks. This means: no one speaks. This means: we live in a world where there is speech without a subject speaking it, a civilization of speakers without speech, aphasic chatterboxes, spokespeople who report and give no opinions, technicians without name and without power of decision.

This chatter, rather than being degraded or inauthentic as the German pronoun man is for Heidegger, points towards the unknowable future for Blanchot precisely because it belongs to no one. Michael Sheringham argues that the chatter of the street in Blanchot brings us closer to the ‘essence of the everyday’, which, ‘in its radicality, its immunity from all origins, its anarchic destruction of all established order, will always provide a basis for the future’.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

[C]riticism prepares the way for a different and unforeseeable affirmation, thus making it ‘one of the most difficult but important tasks of our time’ (LS 6). Why, Blanchot asks, can the work not speak for itself? Why between the reader and the work, between history and the work, is this strange hybrid figure of the critic imposed? Criticism, having no reality of its own, disappears in the affirmation of what is otherwise silent in the work; the accomplishment of criticism is signalled by its disappearance as the mediated becomes the immediate – here Blanchot seems close to Heidegger who is referenced in the early pages of his response – but any such relation to the immediate is impossible and both criticism and literature are perpetually turned outwards:

this sort of sudden distance, in which the completed work is reflected and which the critic is called upon to gauge, is only the last metamorphosis of the opening which is the work in its genesis, what one might call its essential non-coincidence with itself, everything that continuously makes it possible-impossible. All that criticism does, then, is represent and follow outside what, from within, as torn affirmation, infinite insecurity [inquiétude], conflict (and in all other forms), does not cease to be present as a living reserve of emptiness, of space, of error, or, better yet, as the power that belongs to literature to make itself while always maintaining itself in lack [en défaut]. 

The domain of literature cannot be stabilised because there is no outside point from which to delimit the parameters of the work. The lack that allows the work and criticism to proliferate offers the possibility of moving beyond metaphysical representation towards this torn affirmation, torn because erring between the yes and the no, between the inside and the outside, contesting all limits, including those of literature.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

For me, Artaud and Bataille, Simone Weil, you know, all the emotional tribe, they had anticipated what was going to happen and they tried to forge little cells where a vaccine was being invented, a bit like the plague. It was a counter-plague, but if they managed to be contaminated in a ritualistic way, then it could go viral and counter the whole wave of massacres and violence that was going over the world. So I think they were creating little laboratories, using whatever was at hand. Artaud and Bataille were both Christian, and they thought of becoming priests, just like Hitler and Stalin. They were all in cahoots for this Christianity, attempting to compensate with a Christianity that might go beyond it. So I followed suit. I went on my horse and said, okay, just show me the way. I can go there and take what I need and face the unfaceable. I needed to have people who had their own itinerary that led them in the same direction, but I couldn’t take it. It was too much for me.

[…] It was in the air of the time, as I say: l’air du temps. It circulates from one to the other, and this reinforces my feeling that it’s not really the person that you interrogate. The person, the artist, is the access to the time. And this time was both exciting, because new things were happening, but also very dangerous because people had not begun to realize how much of a horror the First World War really was. It was an extermination of 20 million people. It entirely changed the relation of people to their country, to the earth, to everything. The whole generation we talked about, they were not so prominent, you know, Caillois and this or that. It was just a little group. But they were working on the environment. Artaud, in one of the last letters to Jacques Rivière,  says I don’t want you to think that my sickness, that what I feel, is just a symptom of the time. But that was what the time was about, and they were expressing it. And I think that’s why — in the same way the first World War introduced the technology for a bigger massacre — the war never stopped. It was a preparation for the Second World War.

These artists and thinkers were attuned to the degree of atrocity that had been committed, and the fact that society and the population were getting ready for it to continue. All the elements were there but they were the only ones trying to put all of this together. Céline was caught into it; Bataille was attracted to fascism, not because he was a fascist but because, to my mind, he realized that you cannot understand anything if you don’t have at least one foot in it. And that’s what I do with Artaud and Bataille and these people. I can’t really connect to what they went through at the time if I don’t connect with my own unimportant sensibility. What is important is not me or them. They were touching on something that had been touched upon with the First World War, but it was just the beginning.

Freud wrote about the death wish at the time, in 1920. Marcel Mauss wrote about the potlatch in 1925. Everyone was getting ready, but they didn’t know it. And some people were getting crazy enough to really go directly against it, or with it, or in it. My relation with all these people was that. Some people were floating with fascism, Bataille a little bit, Simone Weil in some aspect of her work towards the end of her life, when she accused the Jews of being murderers when they were being murdered in Europe. Jews are going to have a hard time acknowledging this, or accepting it, because she did it at the wrong time. But she was crazy. She was crazy for God. But what went on through God was a lot of feeling of despair and self-doubt and a sense of premonition.

My feeling is that the whole era was a laboratory. Some people participated actively while others were like the cattle that were led into it — the populations in Germany and Italy, with all the affect that was generated. Gustave Le Bon wrote about the crowd, saying that when people are together they become like a group of kids. All this was there, but it’s only retrospectively that historians and sociologists will really start putting things together. They did it at their own expense. They took the risk for it, and one of the risks was madness. I found that more convincing as an approach, maybe as the only approach. That’s why, at times, I felt insufficient, because I connected to something that was so strong that had nothing to do with me, that had everything to do with me, but not with me as a person. I was entering something that I didn’t know how to handle. It was not sacred, because the sacred has a sense of nobility. You acknowledge a person who is about to be killed or victimized. It’s like this ritual you have now among the Islamists, of cutting off people’s heads. Well I find that horrible, but there is a sense that they respect a person that they kill. But the way people were killed during the First and Second World Wars, that had no respect. It was not a sacrifice. It was not a way of solving the problem.

So people were dealing with what they had. They created these groups that were nothing like Tel Quel and that salon group. They were really working on a material that was deadly. You had to match it and you had to know what it is. That’s why they got very close to the point that Walter Benjamin said that Bataille was working for the fascists and all that. I work for the fascists, too, in a sense, because I feel what it could have been like at the time to be totally crazy. But at the same time I can’t express it and I can’t feel that way as a person. For me, that’s the whole attraction. They were there before it happened. Adorno has a famous saying that after Auschwitz you can’t write poetry, but I think this is bullshit. You can write poetry after, but he was right in the sense that, every time I see documents about that time, images of these skeletons that were slumped into trucks — it’s unbearable. That some people could have done that is just beyond the beyond. So I went to people who were emotionally on the same level with what had happened, and that is why.

[…] That was the difference between these two periods we’re discussing, the 1930s and 40s, and the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. They were using religious concepts in that earlier period in order to analyze society, which is why they had to go through rituals and sacrifice and death. For people who came later, at the time of May 68 and the consumer society which had invaded France, there was no God any more. The sign had replaced everything. Images were replacing everything. The society of the spectacle was taking over. So you had to envisage that as something very different, where affects were not vital, but viral. The sign connected signs to other signs. It was like the plague — the plague was a system that connected everything — so it was very different, historically.

And then there’s the society we live in today where everything is being abstracted by technology. Technology is engulfing the entire society and destroying the environment. We’re not in control anymore. The corporations are much more decisive than nations and presidents and there’s no one to stop them. They are on the way to the next massacre, the massacre of the environment, by creating a world that is basically unlivable. It’s part of the same continuation.

Sylvère Lotringer, interviewed

New interview with me as part of the Second Life bookclub.

Ahead of our discussion on Second Life Book Club tomorrow, Draxtor has some thoughts about My Weil.

In Dostoevsky, awareness of human insufficiency leads to an almost hysterical signalling of vice from characters who retain any vestige of social respectability, whether an old Karamazov, a Marmeladov or a Raskolnikov. These characters and many others intermittently seek exterior humiliation in the eyes of society while refusing to see the full contemptibility of their lives; thus they court punishment rather than mercy. They are honest enough to judge themselves harshly, but their pride in such self-condemnation – combined with an awareness that other people share their vileness without exercising a similar honesty of judgment – leads them to assume that they have seen the fullness of their debased condition. This is a false humiliation that, in the words of the old Russian proverb, is `worse than pride'. This false humiliation, if maintained, will lead its bearer to seek extinction. Dostoevsky mercilessly pushes the reader onwards to see that anyone who fully understands the depths of his own sinful negations can have only the response of complete humiliation, one so profound that it cannot speak at all except to ask for grace or extinction. Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow for much of Dostoevsky's lifetime, explains this vision: `All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.

From, 'Beyond the will: Humiliation as Christian necessity', by Henry M. W. Russell

New written interview with me at Full Stop.

New podcast interview with me by Sam Jordison and Lori Feather at Across the Pond.

Katie Kadue reviews My Weil for Bookforum.

BY NOW IT’S CLEAR that the academic humanities—that supposedly disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, preserved from the whims of the market—are under threat. But that threat is perhaps best personified not by a powerful politician loudly looking to defund “ripoff” programs, but by an ordinary guy pursuing a PhD in Business Studies. This is a guy who’s getting an advanced degree not to save his soul or to preserve and expand the edifice of human knowledge but to destroy both. He is at once the ideal consumer and the ideal product of the modern university increasingly run like a corporation: a cog in the machine that converts qualities into quantities and meaningful language into the jargon of the deal, with devastating effects on higher education and culture in general. The fact that he’s getting a doctorate of philosophy in what philosophy graduate students might call anti-philosophy adds insult to injury: the same degree is awarded both to those who see value in arts and letters and to those who see only profit—or lack thereof.

 In Lars Iyer’s latest novel, My Weil, this Business Studies guy has a name: Business Studies Guy. A pure cipher in a nonspeaking role, Business Studies Guy is nonetheless a constant in the lives of Iyer’s main characters, a group of PhD students—real PhD students—at the philosophy-adjacent Centre for Disaster Studies at All Saints University, an apparent stand-in for Manchester Metropolitan University, where Iyer earned his PhD in philosophy. Self-consciously self-aggrandizing, this self-mockingly self-titled “League of Extraordinary PhD Students” rings in the beginning of the academic school year by scoffing at the “pretend” subjects of Business Studies (“Kleptocracy? Corporate raiding? Debt leveraging? Overgrowth? Financial engineering? The pillaging of the system before the final collapse?”) and rhapsodizing about their own forays into “the final academic frontier”: “A trial of the soul! A dark night of the intellect!” Into their midst arrives the novel’s title character, a new student in Disaster Studies who has adopted both the philosophical commitments and the name of the twentieth-century French mystic Simone Weil.

The merrily dyspeptic crew, also known as the All Saints Disaster Studies Collective, introduce themselves to Simone over post-orientation picklebacks (she does not partake) at Ruin Bar, their regular symposium spot. Their areas of expertise are exposited as if they were an assembled team in a heist movie: there’s Ismail (“Performance philosophy. Showing that films can think”), Valentine (“Religious anarchism and the anarchism of religion”), Marcie (“Lumpenproletariat revolt as ultra-politics”), Gita (“Something about late heterosexuality”), and the narrator, Johnny (“Ontological evil”). Their friendship is forged in bonds of mutual mockery: Ismail’s experimental films are pronounced “in the international elitist artwank style”; Gita’s interest in “queer communism” is derided as “very radical”; ultra-political Marcie, as a kind of joke of which she’s also the punchline, is ironically dating Business Studies Guy. Simone’s own project is more extracurricular. She spends most of her time ministering to the downtrodden denizens of Manchester, to the alarm of her peers, who worry she’s putting herself in danger. For Simone, this is what it means to devote oneself to Simone Weil’s philosophy: to abdicate the ego and give oneself over entirely to others and to God, in a process Weil called the “passive activity” of “decreation.”

Iyer was a longtime philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University; he is now, having renounced philosophy for fiction, on the creative writing faculty. The new novel is Iyer’s third in a row to center on a character who has taken on the name of a famous philosopher, following Wittgenstein Jr. and Nietzsche and the Burbs. He is also the author of the Spurious trilogy (Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus), and My Weil shares themes with those novels as well: academia, absurdism, friendship, the mysterious spread of a mysterious fungus. All Iyer’s novels rail, in one way or another, against the abyss of meaning into which Business Studies Guy and his ilk threaten to drag intellectual life. The alternative they propose to soulless business administration is “infinite philosophical eros,” or what the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, the erstwhile subject of Iyer’s academic work, called “the infinite conversation.”

The conversation in My Weil really does feel infinite. Characters speak in hypnotically anaphoric sentences, punctuated by italics and ellipses, that plow through the page with a pointed pointlessness, creating less a plot than an intellectual mood, a vibe of energetic ennui. Ismail’s admiration for Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, which Valentine has pulled out and randomly started reading aloud, both exemplifies and describes Iyer’s approach:

It’s like the opposite of a dissertation. Not defining his terms. Not stating aims and objectives. Not summarizing his position—or even having a position. Not having chapters or subchapters. Or an introduction. Or a conclusion. Or a method, probably . . . 

This droningly droll style, which has earned Iyer comparisons to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whom he has called his favorite novelist, derives from his blog, where he first began the experiments with dialogue-based fiction that would eventually become Spurious. This novel, too, consists mostly of dialogue, interspersed with sparse stage directions that can feel like improv prompts (“Simone and I, walking to the bus stop”; “Sitting around the table”; “Pointing out our fellow Disaster Studies PhD students”) and Johnny’s immersive present-tense narration, which sometimes bleeds into the Greek-chorus-like first-person plural of the Collective. Like going through grad school or scrolling through social media, reading My Weil can feel like a cruel joke of a time loop, an endless slog that seems to be going nowhere, dialogue that lacks the direction of dialectic. 

This, Iyer might say, is the point. His depiction of graduate school sounds a lot like his depiction of the suburbs, and like the teenagers whiling away their time in Wokingham in Nietzsche and the Burbs, the PhD students in My Weil chafe against boredom, arrested development, and a nagging sense that real life is elsewhere. “Always the dissertation to write,” the Collective collectively muses. “Always stuff to read. Life goes on and on and on. . . .” These are characters in search of a method for finding meaning amid our multiple ongoing contemporary disasters, and though they know they won’t find it in Disaster Studies Methods class with “Professor Bollocks,” they aren’t sure where else to look. Mostly from humble beginnings and skeptical about the prospects of higher education, they in some ways identify with the lumpenproletariat underclass that is the subject of Marcie’s dissertation (“we’re spiritually lumpen,” Marcie insists), acting out their contempt for “the Man” through his proxy in Business Studies Guy. But they also fear the “mancunian madness” of the city’s mean streets, a fear that feels justified when Simone, in the course of her humanitarian work, gets stabbed. They are committed to their bits, and not much else. 

Nothing really happens in the novel that can’t be attributed to the magic of mushrooms, caffeine, alcohol, and the graduate student urge to procrastinate with endless riffs, self-parody, and meta-jokes about the metaphysical impossibility of finishing one’s thesis. These are clearly meant to be funny, but some jokes about tedium are simply tedious. A lecture from Professor Bollocks on tips for “time management” is met with hysterical outcry:

Rising rage. Tired anger. Not this topic . . . Anything but this topic . . . Is he actually going to couple the word time with the word management? TIME! MANAGEMENT! TIME! MANAGEMENT! Within the walls of a uni! As if Henri Bergson never existed! Nor Martin Heidegger! As if Deleuze had never formulated the three syntheses of time!

The conceit is a familiar one to anyone who has spent time in an academic humanities department: the practice of turning assignments in on time requires a different understanding of time than, for example, the theory of messianic time developed by Walter Benjamin. Graduate students like to make jokes based on such mismatches of theory and practice. How can we possibly complete essays on the poetics of incompletion? How can we possibly work on our thesis on antiwork politics? These one-liners can pass the time in the library or on social media. When cannily deployed, they might even invite us to think seriously about the contradictions that structure our lives. But they become tiresome when unrelentingly repeated over the course of multiple heavily italicized pages of a novel. 

When not sitting through lectures or engaging in what they call “drunken philosophy” at Ruin Bar, the characters float through a variety of other briefly indicated locations: the local café; the bus; the vintage clothing boutique where Gita works; the Ees, the spooky forest on the outskirts of town populated by fantastical folkloric figures and dubious mushrooms, including a giant “god-shroom” that leads to the novel’s hallucinogenic climax. Sometimes Business Studies Guy tags along to take abuse. Allusions to thinkers ranging from Zhuangzi to Terence to Shakespeare to Thoreau mingle with mock-melodramatic name-drops of modern theorists like Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (who lend their names to a two-headed rat who “might be a spy for the Man”), and Blanchot, whose first editions, notebooks, and even baby pictures show up in the private collection of a rich cryptocurrency-crazy student nicknamed Bitcoin. 

The Blanchot bit invites reflection on Iyer’s own relationship to his former career in academic philosophy. His pivot to fiction doesn’t seem to have come out of an investment in the novel as form; in interviews, he claims not to read any contemporary novels, and betrays no sign of having read any novels at all beyond those of Bernhard and Dostoyevsky. Instead, like his character and fellow Blanchot fan Ismail, he’s interested in the possibilities for philosophy when unyoked from current academic conventions. My Weil is a philosophical novel not only in its subject matter but also because it is a novel that knows, with Jacques Derrida, that generic distinctions are never stable, that there is perhaps no such thing as a novel. It is not a novel for “London Review of Books reviewers,” “Radio 4 contributors,” students at Manchester’s fancier Victoria University, and the other unfree thinkers who reside in the expensive suburb the All Saints Collective stumbles into to attend a student party: 

Didsbury intellectuals, reassuring us that everything can be thought, discussed, explained, and calmly . . . That everything can be written about in full sentences, not telegraphic bursts . . . That there’s no need for a single exclamation mark! never a single ellipsis . . . That nothing will ever have to be said IN CAPITALS . . .

Nor is it, we’re led to think, a novel for philosophy professors. The main action, such as it is, revolves around Ismail leading the group in the production of a film, first conceived as a high-concept “anti-film”—“A critical interrogation of high arthouse seriousness, of the piety of the long shot and le temps mort”—and then revised into a different kind of anti-film, a straightforward documentary of the friends’ ordinary daily lives, which they title Simone Weil. When the Collective wins a departmental prize for their film, they act offended that their avant-garde artwork has appealed to such conventional tastes. Their outrage is played for laughs, but they’re in on the joke. Their combination of pretentiousness and self-awareness creates the ideal conditions for both true sophisticates—namely, each other—and the middlebrow midwits of the prize committee to enjoy their work. These might be the conditions Iyer himself strives for. His ideal audience may be those enlightened souls who know better than to confuse what goes on in university humanities departments for thinking, who know that the London Review of Books is hopelessly bourgeois, who know more than Professor Bollocks—but the Professor Bollockses of the world will chuckle at the Deleuze/Guattari two-headed rat joke, too. Nonacademics love to laugh at the foibles of academics, but academics love it even more.

It’s also not, of course, a novel for Business Studies Guy, even though large chunks of it are directly addressed to him. “Bet you never talk like this in Business Studies,” Marcie murmurs to Business Studies Guy after a bout of drunken philosophy. “Bet it’s not all ecstatic nihilism, the lumpenproletariat and the void of God in Business Studies. . . .” Business Studies Guy doesn’t respond—here, and throughout the novel, his utter silence implies that he truly has nothing to say—but Simone does, by rising to leave, which prompts one of the group to cry, “Don’t leave us! God. . . .” The expletive doubles as an address: the Collective has overestimated its comfort level with the void of God, and when they realize that ecstatic nihilism isn’t the only alternative to Business Studies, they start to question if they really know how to do philosophy at all. Simone stands against their fragmentary aimlessness, a wholly holy figure of serenity and moral clarity. “Saints look for a way of living while renouncing being someone,” Simone says by way of defining “decreation”; say what you will about the paradoxes of Weil’s philosophy, at least it’s an ethos. 

Yet Simone exists almost entirely as an idea. This isn’t only because she’s ideologically and intellectually committed to asceticism and decreation; it’s also that she’s so barely fleshed out as a character that she seems almost not to have been created at all. Johnny is most taken with the strange new arrival, holding her up as a paragon of virtue, a Virgin Mary or a Beatrice whom he hopes might guide him out of the purgatorial, profanity-laced milieu of All Saints, an idealization made easier by her lack of personality. This Simone bears only passing resemblance to the historical Weil, whose flailing, almost zany attempts to live out her ethics—stepping into a vat of boiling oil while trying to assist the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War; nearly starving due to a combination of self-imposed poverty and pickiness when it came to cuts of meat; getting repeatedly fired from factory jobs due to clumsiness—had a heartbreakingly funny aesthetics. The great philosopher, activist, and mystic is the same person as the gawky germaphobe; her travails call to mind Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory and klutzy rom-com heroines as much as medieval saints. Her physical awkwardness fits perfectly with her extreme embrace of suffering and her principled refusal, up to the self-denial of food that accelerated her early death, to feel comfortable in her skin. As Weil herself put it, “Affliction is ridiculous.” 

Iyer, in his way, takes the ridiculousness of affliction seriously. PhD candidates in a fictional branch of a subfield of philosophy may not be straightforwardly representative of the wider population, but any young person trying to find a method to live in the face of political, economic, and ecological crisis is, in their way, a student of disaster. My Weil looks for meaning in the desire to stave off the meaninglessness of a world increasingly run, within universities and without, by Business Studies Guys. The novel ends with Johnny and Simone living in dreamlike, postapocalyptic—or possibly psychedelic-induced—domestic bliss in a house in the Ees. Here, metaphysical horrors are survived not with a constant flow of coffee, bourbon, and riffs but “by doing ordinary things”: chopping vegetables, setting the table, emptying the washing machine, hanging clothes to dry. The stylistic repetition that for most of the novel feels like compulsion here becomes a ritual comfort; each of the twelve short paragraphs of this final section begins with “This is our house.” Maybe the real philosophy consists of the friends we make along the way, and maybe the only way out is through. But it’s an abrupt ending for a novel that seemed so committed to the open-ended pleasures of intellectual life, the infinite conversation in which all of us, though not Business Studies Guy, can take a small but meaningful part.

The Infinite Conversation is a collection of Blanchot’s writings where the philosopher stages meandering dialogues influenced by his long engagements with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Pascal, Kafka, Heraclitus, and Sade. It is also a website, infiniteconversation.com, where AI-generated versions of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek talk back and forth, forever. In answer to the question “Why did you do this?” on the site’s FAQ, its creator offers three reasons: “1) because I could; 2) as an awareness campaign over the powers of machine learning applied unscrupulously . . . 3) as a love letter to Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, their brilliant ideas and their idiosyncratic speech.” Like infiniteconversation.com, My Weil can read like an awareness campaign: the forces aligned with Business Studies Guy threaten to nullify real conversation with technologies that mimic it for profit. And like infiniteconversation.com, the rote jokes of the novel can themselves feel like the machine rendering of philosophical ideas, even if they also lovingly parody the impulses to endlessness that make us most human, a bit like how, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s fallen angels pass the time of their indefinite stay in Hell in philosophical debate over fate and free will “and found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” Getting lost in the labyrinthine turns of such conversations can still be pleasurable even as it proves increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real philosophical exchange and its hellish simulacrum. Reading Iyer’s novel might lead to a similar aporia: is this a pleasurable suspension of finality, or a dead end? 

Markku Nivalainen interviews me for 3:AM.

The theme for the inaugural issue of the Journal for Discarded Daydreams comes an extract from My Weil, namely:

The plan is total creative destruction. A Year Zero reset, Jacobin-style. A new financial transaction system to replace the banks: that’s what’s coming. And a new global security system, to manage the transition. Biometric IDs for all. The digitalisation of all interactions. A new transnational governance system, so the Man can satellite-control us from afar like livestock.

More details here.

A cartoonist present at the Journal launch captured the occasion here:

Download Discarded Daydreams Cartoon

Nicholas Dames, editor in chief of Public Books, chooses My Weil as one of his books of the year.

Think Minima Moralia as a stand-up routine. You’ll want to quote whole pages. And then there’s the perfect, groan-inducing title. I’ll admit it: I’m a paid-up member of the underground sodality of Lars Iyer fans. Such groupuscules are, as it happens, the subject of Iyer’s work, particularly the one we call the humanities, fast becoming a semi-covert retreat within the neoliberal academy. In My Weil, the scene is the PhD program in Disaster Studies at the fictional All Saints University, set in a Manchester that has become a fiction to itself—the vintage Happy Mondays shirts selling for fifty quid, the conferences held at the renovated warehouse now called the Tony Wilson Centre. A loose collective of graduate students, including one who’s taken the name Simone Weil (“I wanted to live deliberately,” she explains), spend their days in a fugue of theory banter, loathing for the Business Studies students who are the targets of their inner monologues, self-loathing, booze and hallucinogens. They’re waiting for the world to end, because what’s the humanities now but a kind of eschatology? More than anything, Iyer asks us to relish it: the abjection, the dead-endedness, and the comic sublimity of philosophizing from within damaged life. Because maybe, just maybe, when there’s finally no hope for the humanities (or humanity), that abjection may show you a way out.

I accept the world – the whole world with its stupidity, obliqueness, dead and dry colours – only in order to fool this bony witch and make her young again. In the embraces of the Fool and the Buffoon the old world brightens up, becomes young, and its eyes become translucent, depthless.

Alexander Blok, in a letter from 1906

 

The liveliest and most perceptive children of our time are afflicted by a disease unknown to doctors of the body and of the mind. This disease has an affinity with mental diseases and can be called 'irony'. Its symptoms are fits of exhausting laughter which begin with a devilishly mocking, provocative smile and ends with violence and blasphemy.

I know people that are ready to choke with laughter at the very same time that their mother is dying, they themselves are starving to death and their beloved is betraying them. A man guffaws, and you don't know whether as soon as he leaves you he is going to drink some poison and you wonder if you will ever see him again. And to me this very laughter tells about this person, that he despises everything and abandons everything – as if it were nothing at all.

Don't listen to our laughter; listen to the pain in it. Don't believe any of us, but those that are behind us.

Blok, in an article from 1908

Patrick O'Connor interviews me for Thales' Well podcast. 

Photo of Maurice Blanchot.

Adam Potts interviews me about My Weil for the NCLA.

Alana Estelle reviews My Weil on YouTube. And on Instagram.

[This written interview was the basis of the recent interview/ profile in The Morning Star. Here it is in full:]

You’re one of the few contemporary writers who can make me laugh on the 0630 bus. From your perspective, what’s the attraction of a comic approach and where is the humour coming from?

Is the comedy a (Beckettian) coping mechanism? A provocation? The only viable means of critiquing the devastating impact of C21st capitalism?    

The novels are supposed to be fresh and funny: that first of all. Laughter is important – it’s necessary to breathe. ‘Everything I've written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, of suffocation. It wasn't from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe’: that’s E.M. Cioran in an interview. For me, that getting-free involves laughter: laughing at the Man. Laughing at the madness. Laughing at the po-faced and humourless absurdity that is all around us.

The attraction of comedy: it allows some freedom, and perhaps might grant freedom in turn. A way of diagnosing what’s happening to us, but not being crushed by it. Perhaps it might be the beginning of a critique, which is only possible if we can find others to laugh with.

 

In My Weil (and throughout your fiction) there seems to be a genuine and deep-seated sense of despair below the erudite wit and sharp observations. Do you believe we’re doomed? If so, why? If not, what do you believe will save us?

Definitely despair. About what? Numerous disasters on the horizon; perhaps as disastrous are the means meant to solve them.

Problem: ecosystem collapse, soil microbiology exhaustion, insect biomass erosion. Solution: the seizure and financialisation of the global commons; nature valued as a natural asset which can then be managed, controlled and, of course, profited upon.

Problem: inequality. Solution: human capital investment, which is to say, opening a new futures market by betting on the life-outcomes of prisoners, refugees and welfare recipients.

Problem: the financial crisis, unpayable debt (53 trillion dollars worldwide and counting; 31 trillion dollars in the US alone.) Solution: the Going Direct Reset initiative, as agreed to by the Federal Reserve and the big asset management corporations at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2019. This will see the replacement of currencies with the Central Bank Digital Currency, allowing complete control over every transaction, cutting off the wealth of deplorables. Tyrants of the past only dreamed of such power …

Are we doomed? Not if we awaken to what’s happening. What will save us? Human unmanageability, perhaps. It’s just such unmanageability that is shown in my characters’ laughter, in their friendship. Internal struggles between various factions of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be, perhaps … Something contingent, miraculous, perhaps …

 

My reading of Spurious, Exodus and Dogma is that there’s a focus on individual despair. In My Weil there is a collegiate spirit, but it’s mired in chaotic inertia. To what extent does this reflect an implicit rejection of the possibility of intelligent and impactful collective action?

The characters in My Weil consider various possibilities for collective action. There’s becoming lumpenproletariat – living like the raggle-taggle of criminal-types, unmanageable déclassés that Marx wrote about, who keep to the shadows. There’s becoming apocalyptic – gathering like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming; only this time, they’re waiting for an incoming, shattering transcendence that would explode the present order of the world. There’s secession – going under the state, on the model of villages in Alpine valleys that that have their own currency, that keep low-tech – using mechanics, not electronics; or those parts of Mexico that just do their own thing, regardless of central government decree.

My characters have little faith in present institutions. My question would be whether and how we might make them more accountable, transparent and democratic. My characters are tired of all that. They say they only want to let the present world go down. I’m not sure I’d take them at their word. Perhaps we can see a viable form of collective action – or rather, collective inaction – in their common drifting, their vagueness, their abandonment of proper ends.

 

I’ve seen reviews of your work in which it’s suggested characters are secondary to ideas and comic situations. I don’t accept this. The dialogue fizzes and – while your characters knock lumps out of each other, with serious discussion lurching into banter and then drifting into invective – you give some serious consideration to the themes of friendship and intellectual affiliation. In terms of the Disaster Studies PhD candidates in My Weil, is this driven by a fascination with these types of personal/professional relationship, or is it rooted in the sentiment reflected in an David Bowie song: “While troubles are rising we’d rather be scared together than alone”?

Being scared together: yes, that’s the thing. Despairing together. Sharing such moods, being humorous about them, comically exaggerating them, ringing changes upon them, which means they’re no longer solely negative. Things might seem hopeless, but hope is there in our capacity to talk. We might think that we that we can’t do much about the disasters ahead of us – about neuroweaponry or weather warfare, about education capture and health capture, about destabilisation agendas, about transhumanism, but we can discuss and diagnose them. Laughing together at their folly, shaking our heads together at their evil, we needn’t be merely passive victims.

 

To what extent is the rejection of plot in your six novels tied into your apparent fatalism about the future (of academia, of our culture, of humanity)?

No fatalism from me. And there is some plot, at least in the last three novels. The end of Nietzsche and the Burbs sees its characters high as kites, full of wild plans. They’re together, joyful, engaged in what anthropologist Victor Turner has called ‘communitas’: a radically egalitarian, non-hierarchical community of associative friendship.

Communitas, Turner explains, can never last; its liberatory joy must inevitably give way to a restoration of order, of the ‘societas’ of familiar social bonds and roles, the usual hierarchies. The question my characters begin to ask concern the relation between the joy of communitas and the societas to which they have to return.

In My Weil, my characters, equipped with their studies in philosophy, are better able to consider this question. True, they don’t formulate it as such, but they’re constantly thinking about ways of escaping the system. The opposite of fatalism!

 

Focussing on your satirical take on academia. It’s particularly sharp in My Weil: how much of an exaggeration is Professor Bollocks and the notion of ‘accountability buddies’? Is it really getting worse?  [I’m particularly interested in this because, in the 1980s, under the Thatcher government, I worked in an Alvey-funded AI project – each of the research teams in receipt of his funding was monitored by a figure called an “industrial uncle” (sic). I wonder if that was when the Bollocks began in earnest?]

An ‘industrial uncle’: wonderful! – I’ll borrow that. Nothing of the novel is exaggerated. The language of management theory has colonised the university. Expressions like ‘best practice’ and ‘seedcorn funding’, used without irony … No one laughs or rolls their eyes … Everything, taken straight.  

In academia, at all levels: the emphasis upon self-motivation, self-directed action, self-management. The student, the academic as a self-initiating entrepreneur, realising themselves as a piece of human capital; as an economically significant commodity … Management is the task, distributing resources, actions, practices to make them more efficient, more productive. As if every problem that counts could be solved through administrative power – through correct implementation of the system.

The logic here is technological – it reflects the deepening of the technological system so well diagnosed by Jacques Ellul. Systematisation, schematisation, tabulation, bureaucratisation, qualification, rationalisation, mechanisation, standardisation, materialism and scientism: that’s what’s at work. The bollocks began long ago. To make it worse, this process of stripping away meaning, comradeship, a sense of the absurd is accompanied by the grotesque parodying of the same notions that this process hollows out: to the university as your ‘family’, to your fellow students as potential ‘buddies’, etc.

My characters, in response, cultivate counter-techniques of failure and ineffectiveness, of wandering and vagueness and of displacing ends from means. They aim at a deliberate incompetence, in which not finishing your PhD dissertation is more of a sign of honour than completing it on time; in which failure is a better sign of scholarly integrity than system-rewarded success. And they laugh – they have fun, which is pretty much forbidden in these over-serious times.

 

I’d argue that all six of your novels are literary fiction / new weird hybrid – based on the criteria of “[exploring] the boundaries of reality of reality and experience through philosophical speculation” (Jason Sanford, 2009). This is notable in My Weil, particularly in the supernatural (maybe?) sequences set in the Ees. [Would you be happy with the label critical realism?]  Did this approach an emergent property of the subject matter, or is it a style of writing you particularly enjoy?

The Ees, a scrap of woodland in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester – meant to resemble the Zone from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker – permits the wandering and vagueness, the displacement of ends from means to which I have referred. It’s about dis-activation, which is why it’s full of all kinds of junk.

As such, the Ees is an embodiment of the students’ relationship to their PhD dissertations and, more broadly, to study. It allows them to be stupid, ignorant, disoriented – but in a positive sense. In an antidote-to-Professor-Bollocks kind of sense.  

No coincidence that the character most strongly linked to the Ees is least committed to finishing his dissertation. In all things, romance included, my protagonist Johnny’s aim is to stay with potential without submitting it to an purpose, without actualising it in any course of action. And in the end, the Ees seems to ‘reward’ Johnny by letting him dwell permanently in the suspension of development.

 

Why Manchester? What fascinates you about the music and culture of that city in the 1980s?

The Manchester I discovered when I moved there in 1989 still had areas that were like the Ees of the my novel: unproductive areas, temporary autonomous zones such as the Hulme Crescents, an edgy zone of low-rise, system-built flats. They’re described an excellent recent article in The Guardian, and which I’ve tried to write about in my own way. It was from such places that so much great mancunian culture came.

Manchester was regenerated in the ‘90s. Investors and financiers, gentrifiers and speculators, transformed the cityscape with statement architecture, with steel-balconied warehouse conversions: monuments to cheap credit. My characters dream of battering back the mancunian regenerators, of re-opening the figurative cracks and the crevices where you used to be able live unnoticed and unbothered on government benefits. Only the Ees is left to them of that world now – the Ees and the great mancunian music to which they still listen.

 

What attracts you to the philosophers featured in your second (loose) trilogy, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Weil?  

All of them I regarded as philosophical ‘enemies’ – thinkers who were, I thought, were remote from my own philosophical allegiances and concerns, but with whose work I nevertheless wanted to spend time. And I’m glad I did. You sharpen your thought by working with what you’re against …

 

You’ve written two books on Maurice Blanchot – is he a thinker you believe can have a transformative impact on life in the C21st? Why?

Blanchot’s a subterranean influence on so many thinkers – think of Marcuse’s notion of refusal, for example. Currents from his thought run everywhere.

 

What led you from philosophy to creative writing? What can fiction achieve that philosophy can’t?

1. M. Cioran says regarding his own break with philosophy: ‘I realised that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own’.

I don’t quite agree: philosophy helps in diagnosing the causes of despair, and thereby achieving some distance from the horror. Philosophy is about self-knowledge, but this is not about our inner selves so much as learning about how our inner selves are constituted. It is in this way that philosophy can provide answers about the sources of despair – about the sources of joy, too; about the meaning of friendship, about Turner’s notion of communitas and its relationship with societas.

But I agree with Cioran about poetry and literature, which can embody despair so directly, making it tangible, real. And I admit that sometimes philosophy is of no help. I want company. Thank goodness for Dostoevsky, for Mann, for Beckett, for Duras, for Blanchot, for Lispector, for Cixous and the others. For Bernhard above all! No doubt they’ll ban him soon …

 

In My Weil, Marcie veers from enthused earnestness to heartbreaking cynicism to naïve absurdity. Is this a satirical take on the trials and tribulations of writing a doctorate or a metaphor for the competing identities of higher education?

Although they have each other, my characters become increasingly deranged by what they fear. They know so much about what’s going on – about, say, the dangers of surveillance: behaviour tracking, compliance tracking, predictive analytics (‘pre-crime’), warning us when and where lawbreaking will emerge; even prescriptive analytics: programmes to prevent the possibility of that emergence, sending in robot dogs and supersoldiers to where our masters think a rebellion might break out; locking down the population of a troublesome district just in case …

Marcie’s Vision, capital ‘V’ – you’ll have to read the novel for context – shows her even more. She discerns the coming internal surveillance, too: synthetic biology that could see so-called ‘electroceuticals’ introduced into the bloodstream, keeping an eye on our insides. She senses the possibility of the live-editing of our DNA – of the so-called improvement of the human genome to make us more compliant, more useful. Just right for when attention turns from the enemy without to the enemy within, treating us all as potential threats to be neutralised in advance.

There’s more, much more, that Marcie sees. It’s unbearable. All she can hope for is human unmanageability, which she understands as the capacity to love …

Nothing satirical intended with my depiction of Marcie, who tries to revive a myth of sorts, the story of the Antichrist, to give her a sense that something might be done, to inflate the issue to the level of the cosmos …

New interview with me at Hermitix. 

 

'Simone Now': me in discussion with Simone Weil scholar Christopher Thomas about My Weil, courtesy of The Philosopher. 

Benji DeMott reflects on My Weil as part of his rich account of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival in New York at First of the Month: a Website of the Radical Imagination. There's a lot here, but here is an extract: 

My friend’s wife’s sojourn on the block—they came to last year’s party too—brought to mind one of my favorite figures in My Weil—the comic novel by Lars Iyer I rushed through during the run-up to the Festival. Iyer puts a subcontinental twist on his deft meld of Lucky Jim and 24-Hour Party People—including a posh Indian beauty in his fictional crew of rad Brit grad students who are failing to do PhD’s under the aegis of the “Disaster Studies” Department at a beat-down Uni in Manchester. Gita rolls with her mates’ punky mockery of “Prof. Bullocks,” “art-wank,” Business Studies students, to-the-tenure-born types at a tonier school, yet she also repeatedly busts their high trifling. She serves as a grounded, desirous contra to her cohorts’ other exemplar—the student invoked in the novel’s title who tries to walk like Simone Weil (“nun-shoes” and all). I was tickled to find Gita facing off with a character acting Weily (even if the would-be saint wasn’t up to the real Rosa) at the very moment when my brother’s name was going up on a sign a half-block away from the Riverside Drive plaque memorializing Weil’s season in exile in NYC.

My Weil leans on its Mancunian black sun setting. Iyer’s anti-heroes still get thrills from sounds of their city’s greatest depressives—Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Morrissey, New Order. There’s wilding in the streets and faux-lumpen scuffling about in overgrown commons at the city’s edge. Iyer’s students of low life seem to be on to something when they connect shattered urban street people with changing climes. A walker in my city now can’t help but become a Master of Disaster Studies. (I seem to run into someone broken every time I do my nightly constitutional on the UWS.) “There is a natural alliance,” the real Weil wrote, “between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” The screamers I pass by (more frequently than ever?) aren’t mute, but they may as well be since their shouts in the street are overwritten by blankest generation hopelessness. My Weil’s wiseasses do no-futurism with a comic vengeance. Yet author Iyer, with help from his Gita, isn’t afraid to take the piss out of their lumpen-identification (without dumping on their compassion). My Weil sallies past fashionable leftism of psychosis. Near the end of the novel, Iyer plays with the history of cinema (the beach scene in Malick’s Tree of Life) and pop lore (raves at The Hacienda) to conger up restorative places: “Where we’ve retired the words eschatology and Gnosticism. Where the word apocalypse never passes our lips.” My instinct says Iyer would’ve been at home in our hood last Saturday. An affirmation in one of his scripts for a peace beyond negative dialectics—”What we Want (with a capital W):…Not to have lived for nothing. Not just to have fallen.”—seems on point when I think of my late brother’s life and gaze at this festive photo.

I heard an echo from My Weil’s muse as I pored over more post-Festival pics of our public happiness. (Maybe I was under the influence of one grinning hombre who was wearing a t-shirt that read BENDICIÓN.) The saint of outsiders once recalled an instance when she felt Jesus’s presence (as she tried to soothe a migraine by reading George Herbert’s sonnet “Love” (III).): “…in this sudden hold Christ had on me, neither my imagination nor my senses played any part; I simply felt, across the pain, the presence of love, similar to that which one can read on the smile of a loved face…”

Podcast: Jon Day and I discuss My Weil at Liberia Bookshop.

New essay by me on Mark E. Smith. 

For a limtied time only, by request: discussion of My Weil, Joy Division and Manchester available for download:

Download David Collard MY WEIL audio