Under Ice

A dream: beneath any narrative you might write, there is the counter-narrative of writing. Beneath and behind the narrative, but also touching it at each moment of its development, the narrative against narrative, that lets the story hover out over 70,000 fathoms and voids its episodes from within.

How can it itself be brought closer to the surface, as a drowned body to the surface of the ice? How can it be made to pass close to the ice but beneath it, moving away from you but there?

Dream of a narrative so faintly written that another narrative can pass beneath its surface like a body under ice. A narrative so faint, so broken, that the other narration is also there and speaks in its own voice, far and distant. Its own voice but that is also yours, the unfamiliar sound that comes from you when, like the narrator of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (just before the starting credits) you are able to say, ‘I can speak now’.

‘I can speak’ – but can you? For it is not what you can say that matters, but also what says itself by means of that saying. And I think of Tarkovsky’s film again, the newsreel clips, the Chinese at the Russian border waving the little red book; the girl in an evacuation who turns to the camera; the troops in Crimea, still cheerful, crossing the mud.

What says itself by means of film? By means of it, but holding itself into its own means, its own capacity? Even as it cannot own itself, or that it is what disowns itself from you as a filmmaker in your finished (unfinishable) work of art?

Imagine this instead: the artwork that cannot resort even to newsreels, or continuity shots that Ozu loved. That presents the bareness of the narration, of a narrative voice that says nothing. The breaks in Bergman’s Persona, perhaps.

Is it possible to say even Tarkovsky was afraid of abandonment, that he sought to fill the void from which speech comes and to which it returns with historical footage; that even when his camera pans across abandoned items in the water during Stalker (the same items as were on Stalker’s nightstand earlier in the film; the same, but sea-changed, become image …) his cinema is still an attempt to avoid what abandons itself in narrative. And isn’t Bergman’s Persona, despite its breaks, still too ‘psychological’, still a descendant of Strindberg’s theatre (his chamber pieces in particular)?

And now, idly as usual, I think of Bacon’s attempt to strip his paintings of any narrative. Ah, but that is the good fortune of the painter, whose work needs much less time to unfold, that unfolds across space (crude analogy) and not through time; that is not obliged to narrate. That can be, in some sense. That stands on its two feet.

What would a film be that told despite narration, across it? Images, now, that are set loose from any particular story? Think of Duras’s remaking of India Song … what was its name? But wasn’t it too boring? Didn’t it fail to carry you along, even though you saw only the briefest excerpt.

Idle thoughts. Perhaps we must all be like Tarkovsky and Bergman, who stumble upon the ‘break’ – that other narration. Perhaps it can be spoken of ‘despite’, in negligence, happenstance, and according to those contingencies where something else speaks by way of what unfolds.

Think of Tarkovsky again. Tarkovsky, editing Mirror over and again, looking for – what? It fell together, after long effort, all at once, and there it was: broken narratives, though interconnected. Broken, though, and just enough to let something else shine through.

Shine? I imagine instead the body under ice, the drowned one Tarkovsky also was as he made his film. As though the whole film was seachanged like the items from Stalker’s nightstand. The whole film – and perhaps, too, if we can read it autobiographically – Tarkovsky’s life, his whole life as it had been offered as a sacrifice. A sacrifice, as it had been made to speak of that other who drowned beneath him, under ice …

Painting’s Desire

Bacon’s self-portraits. He does them not because he considers himself of any particular interest, but because he’s the only model around. He paints, of course, not from life, but from photos – strips of them, often, from passport photo machines. Strips of them you’ll sometimes find reproduced in editons of his artworks, and you can recognise them. There’s George Dyer. Isabelle Rawthorne. And Bacon himself, with his wounded eye …


Bacon says he needs to feel the aura of a person, their animal presence. Their movements. That’s what he’s looking for in his portraits. And for his own gestures, too – to discover his own singularity just as he says he can find it in the way someone walks. You like to fold your arm when you relax just so. You chew your teeshirt like that when no one’s looking.


And yet Bacon’s unsentimental; he drops the photos on the floor on his studio. They get scuffed up, paint-splashed. As though they were the record of the raw material his painting needs. As though it was painting that wanted the auras of his friends and not him. Or that it wanted them through his wants, through his loves. That he loved George Dyer because he would paint him. And that he stayed with him, although he was troublesome, because he knew in advance a triptych would be made that depicted his suicide. And isn’t that what the self-portraits show? Not Bacon, but Bacon become image, Bacon as what paint looked for to splash itself, to thicken itself …


But note it is not narration that Bacon seeks by way of his paintings, but its opposite. Dyer’s suicide mattered because it could be broken from itself, unnarrated, not cancelling life, but summoning it to full intensity. Sensation, as Valery said, without the boredom of its conveyance.

Indecency

Indecency. A big book of Balthus’s paintings, and not because of his adolescent girls. It is the size of the book that is indecent, its imposingness. As though all such books should be small, cheap, and their reproductions should be poor, not good.


What happens to the reproductions of Da Vinci’s paintings in Tarkovsky’s films? They are rain-splashed, rain-mottled. They threaten to vanish into the greeny-blue of the landscape, but not quite. The image survives despite near-ruin: the Lady in Ermine, say; the Madonna cartoon. Survives, but age-marked as though they’d fallen out of the Museum that contained them like Dorian Gray’s painting, and aged all at once.


And so with Balthus’s paintings, so splendidly present in this volume. Their splendour gives them too much immortality, and nothing of what the Japanese call sabi, the patina of age, that Munch tried to lend his paintings by leaving them out in the rain.

Solitude and Communion

Intimate writing. The small bound book, a cool blue – Swedish blue rather than porcelain – that I took because of its smallness, its colour as much as its title: Solitude and Communion, written by a nun in an enclosed order. I imagined it as the quintessence of a life; ten thousand days compacted. The secrets of all these days lying down like the skeletons of sea creatures that give us coral. Day after day, sheet after sheet until something was made. Or like the rarest of whiskies, distilled and double- and tripled distilled. Or like a paneer pushed through muslin and pushed over and again through muslin. Until there was nothing left – or just that, itself. Itself – the spirit of ten thousand days.

Solicitous Writing

Writing that solicits writing. Writing that asks others to write. Barthes’ Incidents seems like that. Casually written, and important for that. Important that it records ordinary life, lived day to day. Ordinary life and lusts (after a lifetime of discretion). As though it was writing that led Barthes to speak of himself thus. That writing drew discretion from him; that it led it out. ‘I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t mean to say it’.

And isn’t such writing that calls writing from you? That says: I will confess in your place, speak everything. Or that: your life doesn’t matter because it lets me live. Imagine it: a confession that begins because it does not matter. That can speak of everything because it cares about nothing. Is that the wave that spreads at the end of Barthes’ life (though he did not know it was about to end)? Is that what reaches us in these posthumous texts?

Indulgent Writing

Indulgent writing. Writing swirled and warmed up about like brandy in a glass. A writing treated before it is used, like one of Cage’s pianos. Or rather, that treats itself, thickens itself and indulges its own wanting to say, language without user, language that speaks and hums and mutters to itself. What does writing do when your back is turned? What words form on the page? Rather that the heads of written words bow like barley in a sudden wind. A wind across the words. Through them – and that blows in your absence, when you’ve turned away.

Drop

Writing falling, released from itself. Writing like a drop falling through space, and what is written like a succession of drops, a stalagmite. ‘What have you made?’ – ‘Nothing’. – ‘What have you made?’ – ‘Writing made it. Writing fell inside me’. (Mishima writes of the rain of words that fell inside him. Mazzy Star’s cover of ‘Drop’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain. Nietzsche’s superman as a drop from a coming storm.)

Anyone’s Writing

A writing without qualities. Anyone’s writing. A writing without interiority. As though it wrote only on its own surface. As though it had folded itself back as a medium to write on itself, across itself. As though it had made its own surface, made a page out of ink, and wrote upon it in ink, its sense lost straightaway. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘Nothing, nothing at all’.

Nothing in Particular

Nothing to say. Writing when nothing concerns you, nothing presses forward to be said. In a kind of equanimity. And neglectfully, as though writing did not matter. With a nib that touches the page lightly. With a keystroke that barely indents the page (a mecnhical typewriter). Or that imprints the page dark black on black (a wordprocessor). -‘What are you writing?’ – ‘Oh, nothing in particular’.

Overwriting

To overwrite – to write like a painting whose impasto no longer lets you see what was painted. The thickness of paint; overpainting. And overwriting as its correlate – writing that says nothing, conveys nothing but itself, even as it is barely itself. The crust of writing. The shell of what said itself long ago. The nova husk of meaning, that does not mean.

Mannered Writing

Mannered writing. A writing that has retreated into itself, that has become overly idiomatic. A poem turned away from its readers, looking into itself. A poem sealed like a pebble, and that does not ask for attention. That says: disregard me, or, I am a stone among other stones. A poem that, thing-like, seals itself from meaning, from interpretation has become the least important thing of all. That says, in its closedness: I am a thing. That says nothing.

Neglect

To neglect an oevure into life. ‘When did you begin?’ – ‘I can’t remember’. To write as though it didn’t matter. ‘It means nothing to me’. ‘I’m not trying to say anything’. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m not interested in it’. Or to begin to write only at that point, after a life time, when it began no longer to matter. ‘Only now, when it means nothing to me, can I begin to write’.

Presumption

Trying to get something published – isn’t that an odd task, a presumptious one? Who would presume to be wanted to be read? Imagine instead a writing that neglects itself into existence, that grows, strange byproduct in the obscurest corner of a life. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘I’m not sure’.

Writing that, epiphenomenal, has no intention behind it, and certainly not publication. That grows by itself – or rather that accretes, strange stalagmite, in the caves of interiority. ‘What are you doing?’ – ‘I’m not sure’.

The presumption of published poetry, say, and especially when it’s arranged carefully on the page. A few lines, then white space, a few more lines. Too purposeful. The presumption of drafted writing, written over and again. Rather that writing that could be found only as you might gather mushrooms: hidden growths, whole oeuvres beneath leaves and confusable with them. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter’.

Surface Noise

What was it I was supposed to do this morning? My Visitor works in the other room. In this one, I can play Jandek very very quietly. Six and Six – ‘Point Judith’ and ‘I Knew You Would Leave’ from the LP, not the CD – the difference: more surface noise; more ‘distance’ to the music – or rather, that it retreats to its distance, pushing me back. As though it played to itself at some remove from me. As though Jandek sung to Jandek, and I am only overhearing.

Another difference: the noise of something being dropped – a microphone? – breaking up the song. An accident, but not of the sort Bacon would have used as the basis of the image (or the image’s deformation): the CD reissue corrects this fault, but I miss it, and listen to the older recording by preference. And now imagine such a fault across the surface of your life – life like a record, unfolding in space across time, a needle running in a groove – but the needle, now, out of its groove, scratching across the record’s surface.

A noise made by the medium. The medium’s noise – and in Jandek’s case, it is probably a dropped microphone, rolling across the floor. And imagine that life has a kind of thickness and makes its own quiet noise. That it’s like the sound you carry in your head and through which you hear everything. Through it, but not it, as though it sang to itself, that it roared distantly and to itself, and you heard it only a great distance.

The Writing Reader

Are you ever a reader, only? Or is it that you write, too, as you read, or that what you read is concealed by that – by another writing, by your desire to write? Imagine it: the banker who gave up dreams of writing for finance, but who reads to know it again – writing, the desire to write. Who reads and writes, but without pen or paper. In another life, when writing would not give her up.

She reads – but does she read? Lacan says no one is interested in another’s symptom. And likewise, I think sometimes, with those readers who write when they read, but in another life. Thus, reading Handke, I dream of another book I would like to write, and my reading is that dreaming. And what I write here? So many emails from creative writers and musicians – what are they reading? Of what do they dream as they read?

Conference Dressing

We’re off to a conference. How many shirts are you taking?, asks W. 4, I tell him. 4! He says he’ll only take 2. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says. You sweat a lot, don’t you fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking? 4, I tell him. 4 pairs of pants, W. muses. He’ll take 4 as well, he decides, and 4 pairs of socks. How many pairs of trousers will you take?, asks W. 1, I tell him. 1!, W. says, after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing? W.’s going to take 2 pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.

The Culvert

W. is a fan of local history, and a great reader of explanatory plaques. Whenever there’s a plaque, he stops to pore over it carefully. Tonight I’ve decided we’re to walk home. W. is whining. ‘It’s cold! It’s too far!’ But we’ve come across a plaque.

‘The Ouseburn Valley’, he reads aloud. ‘What do you know about the Ouseburn Valley?’, he asks me, ‘nothing, I would have thought’. He continues to read. ‘The river becomes a culvert. Do you know what a culvert is?’, he asks me. I don’t. He explains: ‘It’s like a pipe, going underground’. – ‘Ah’. – ‘Once there was a valley here, but it’s been filled in’, W. explains, after reading the plaque. ‘The river goes through a culvert. You know what that is now, don’t you? You’ve learnt something’.

Saying and Seeing


Deleuze is insistent in his book on Foucault: despite appearances, despite the fact his recently deceased friend placed emphasis on discourse, he was a thinker of what Deleuze calls visibilities (and we should not be too quick to look for a definition of this word).


The elegant, but complex argument of Deleuze’s Foucault shows us how saying and seeing, ‘discursive practices and forms of self’evidence’ are divided – how the articulable and the visible, the forms of expression and the forms of content never quite coincide even as they combine to make possible particular behaviours, mentalities or sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (strata).


And not only that. Deleuze wants, too, to show how Foucault thinks their interrelationship as it draws upon a ‘non-relating relation’ such as Blanchot formulated it (albeit in a different context), which will require a unique ontology made up of folds and foldings, of the single plane of the outside that lends itself to particular interiorisations, but periodically shakes them out like a tablecloth, only to allow new crumplings, mutations by way of which new behaviours, mentalities and sets of ideas are distributed.


One Speaks, One Sees


Foucault’s archeological endeavour, Deleuze notes, ‘is firstly to discover a true form of expression which cannot be confused with any linguistic study, be it signifier, word, phrase, proposition, or linguistic act’. His particular target is the Signifier, where (Deleuze quoting Foucault) “‘discourse is annihilated in its reality by entering into the order of the signifier'”.


True, Deleuze grants, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere, discourse is granted primacy, but this does not mean the visibilities can be reduced to discourse; Foucault comes to believe, Deleuze notes, that his early books do not show this primacy forcefully enough – ‘this is his reaction against phenomenology’; nevertheless, the visible remains irreducible; it has its own laws and its own autonomy.


Against phenomenology: Foucault sets himself against the idea of the primacy of the subject to whom the world is visible. For the phenomenologist, what matters is not consciousness in itself, or the world in its natural reality, but the network of relations that reveals itself in the specific combination of the empirical and the transcendental that characterises intentionality.


What, then, of Foucault’s visibilities? Saying and seeing, discusivity and visibility are comprised of practicies, or positivities, says Deleuze. They make possible the behaviour, mentality and sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (Foucault calls them strata). The articulable and the visible become, with Foucault, the two elements of stratification. Together, considered as ‘a “mechanism” of statements and visibilities’, they constitute knowledge, understood as ‘a practical assemblage’ as it combines both discursive and non-discursive practices.


Does this mean Foucault seeks to relativise the findings of phenomenology to a particular historical formation? More than that. For what matters with Foucault’s archaeology is to open up words, phrases and propositions to retrieve statements on the one hand, and to open up qualities things and objects to retrieve visibilities on the other. Statements, they become readable in relation to the conditions that make them so, says Deleuze, and visibilities visible likewise.


This implies the displacement of the subject in Foucault’s archaeology. The subject, Deleuze comments, is merely a ‘variable, or rather a set of variables of the statement’ – it is a function that is derived from the statement, and its author is merely a position with respect to the statement. What comes first, for Foucault, is ‘an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects’ – the ‘ONE SPEAKS’, understood as the drone of discourse that precedes and withdraws from speakers and listeners, writers and readers, always threatening to return.


What matters, as I have tried to clarify in a previous post, is the ‘it speaks’ rather than the ‘I speak’; the ‘there is language’ or ‘the being of language’, the great murmur that varies in each historical formation. In the classical age, the being of language is confined by the regime of representation. By the nineteenth century, it has begun to escape these limits, losing its unifying function and rediscovering it in a new sense in literature. Henceforward, a certain literature presents language as the outside – as its historical being fails to be encompassable by an inner consciousness.


Roughly the same can be said of the visible. Visibilities, says Deleuze,

are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects[….] Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer.

Then with the notion of visibilities, Foucault has created a function that doubles that of the statement. What matters is not simply to see, to attend to what has been delivered us by way of intuition, but to ‘break things open’. This is what happens with the figure of the panopticon of Discipline and Punish, where we find, Deleuze remarks,

a luminous form that bathes the peripheral cells in light but leaves the central tower opaque, distributing prisoners who are seen without being able to see, and the observer who sees everything without being seen.

Foucault does not begin, like the phenomenologist, from a particular perspective, but from the light that belongs to a particular ‘mechanism’ or ‘machine’ (Deleuze’s words), just as statements belong to particular systems.


Likewise with Foucault’s famous reading of Velasquez’s Las Meninas in terms of its distribution of ‘what is seen and who sees, the exchanges and reflections, right up to the place of the king who can only be inferred as existing outside the painting …’ What matters once again is that luminosity from which the position of participants in the scene can be observed (or deduced).


Thus we can speak of a ‘there is’ of light, of a being of light. As in the case of discourse, this light-being is historical insofar as it cannot be separated from the way it falls into a formation, the way it gives itself up to be experienced, but also absolute as it outstrips that formation, just as the ‘there is’ of language, language-being outstrips any particular system of discourse.  And just as the being of discourse cannot be thought from the intention to speak of an individual speaker or writer, visibilities are not defined by sight.


Is the phenomenologist to be understood as a function of discourse, the ‘I’ of the investigator giving way to the ‘one’ of ‘one writes’ or ‘one speaks’, and likewise the ‘I’ who sees and to whom being is revealed (the transcendental ego) to the ‘one’ of ‘one sees’?


Literature and Seeing


(When Deleuze reads literature, it is always to emphasise what is made visible by this ‘one sees’, even as it does so by way of the ‘one speaks’ of the written. This is what he writes very beautifully, in his book on Foucault, of Faulkner:

statements trace fantastic curves which pass through discursive objects and mobile subject-positions (the one name for several persons, two names for the one person) and which are inscribed within a language-being, in a reunion of all the language unique to Faulkner. But the descriptions conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature’s greatest ‘luminist’).

This reading sets Deleuze, I think, against Blanchot, an important figure in the Foucault book. For Blanchot, speaking, writing, have a primacy with respect to the visible. As Deleuze puts it, ‘… while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element’. This seems to me exactly right, and can be understood in terms of the importance of Levinas to Blanchot, and to a whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing.)


Extractive Conditions


What is the role of archaeology with respect to the sayable and the seeable?


The statement is not a simple given, but has to be broken open from words, phrases and propositions. Likewise with the ‘content’ that is expressed – Deleuze emphasises for Foucault it is not to be understood as a signified, nor indeed as a referent. Visibilities are not simply visible or perceptible; they are not given in the forms of objects, since it is objects they reveal. Rather, they are forms of luminosity in relation to which things, objects exist ‘only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer’.


Archaeology opens up words, phrases and propositions and open up qualities, things and objects, says Deleuze; ‘It must extract from words and language the statements corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract from things ans sight the visibilities and “self-evidences” unique to each stratum’. The archaeologist must discover the extractive conditions that allow the uncovery of what is said.


This uncovery reveals, certainly, what was previous hidden. But it does so all at once: the archaeologist opens everything that is seen and said in a particular stratum; everything, that is, that is known. This is ‘Foucault’s greatest historical principle’, says Deleuze: there is nothing hidden behind the curtain; but this makes it all the more important to describe the curtain. He gives the example of politics:

politics hides nothing, in diplomacy, legislation, control or government, even though each cluster of statements assumes a certain method for intertwining words, phrases and propositions. We need only know how to read, however difficult that may prove to be. The secret exists only in order to be betrayed, or to betray itself. Each age articulates perfectly the most cynical elements of its politics, or the rawest element of its sexuality, to the point where transgression has little merit. Each age says everything it can according to the conditions laid down for its statements.

Nothing is hidden: and the same is the case for visibilities; ‘Each strata sees and reveals everything it can according to the conditions for visibility’, Deleuze writes, just as everything it says is so in terms of the conditions for statements.


Neo-Kantianism?


It is also crucial that we understand these conditions as they escape the interiority of consciousness: if they are to be understood, as Deleuze recommends, as a priori conditions, this must not be understood as a neo-Kantianism. Conditions, here, are to be thought in terms of real experience – they belong on the side of the ‘object’ rather than the universal subject; the a priori is itself historical. Nevertheless, Deleuze notes,

… if there is any neo-Kantianism, it is because visibilities together with their conditions form a Receptivity, and statements together with their conditions form a Spontaneity. The spontaneity of language and the receptivity of light.

How should we understand this? On the one hand, for Kant, space and time exist as forms of intuition – as products of the subject. The concrete matter of the intution is given in terms of its prior form, which is not found in the things themselves, but in the mind of the subject. Intution is receptive.


On the other hand, we have the abstract categories of the understanding, which, although likewise belonging to the mind, are of a different kind than intuited matter or the forms of intuition (space and time). Understanding, on Kant’s account, is spontaneous.


Deleuze comments,

In Foucault, the spontaneity of understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the ‘there is’ of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time).

Of course the parallel can only go so far; but it is useful in terms of presenting the next step Deleuze wants to take.


The Primacy of Discourse


Deleuze, as we have seen, wants to highlight the importance of the visible for Foucault, but he also has to account for what is, for Foucault, the primacy of discourse. The visible and the articulable differ in the manner of the form of content and the form of expression even as they continually overlap to form particular strata or forms of knowledge. But between the two, Deleuze emphasise, ‘there is no isomorphism or conformity, in spite of a mutual presupposition and the primacy of the statement’.


But how, then, is the primacy of the statement to be thought? This question is bound up with others in a tangled network:

In Foucault, the spontaneity of the understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the ‘there is’ of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time). Henceforth it is easy to understand why the statement has a primacy over the visible: The Archaeology of Knowledge can claim a determining role for statements as discursive formations. But visibilities are no less irreducible, because they refer to a form of the determinable, which refuses to be reduced to the form of determination. This marked the point of Kant’s decisive break with Descartes: the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time). The problem is that of the coadaption of the two forms or two sorts of conditions, which differ in nature.

Why does Deleuze find it necessary to reflect on Kant’s break with Descartes? Deleuze’s text becomes particularly dense at this point; I turned to his lecture course on Kant, translated online, to the passages where he comments on the transition from Descartes.


In the Mediations, Descartes moves from ‘I think, I am’ to ‘I am a thing which thinks’. ‘The ‘I think’ determines the ‘I am’ as a thing that thinks’, comments Deleuze. But Kant, for Deleuze, while agreeing that in order to think it is necessary to be, shows that determination also implies something indeterminate which is to be determined by the determination. The determination of the ‘I am’ as a thinking thing points beyond itself …


Kant asks under what form the indeterminate, that is, in this case, the ‘I think’, is determinable by the determination. Under what form is the ‘I am’ determinate by the determination ‘I think’? For Kant, explains Deleuze in the lectures, it is the form of time. This produces what for Deleuze is the paradox of inner sense:

the active determination ‘I think’ determines my existence […] but it can only determine my existence under the form of the determinable, which is to say under the form of a passive being in space and in time. So ‘I’ is indeed an act, but an act that I can only represent to myself insofar as I am a passive being. […] it’s the same subject which has taken on two forms, the form of time and the form of thought, and the form of thought can only determine the existence of the subject as the existence of a passive being.

The determination of my existence occurs via the ‘I think’, but this depends in turn upon the determinable. I should note there is no mention of time in the Foucault book outside the complex space-time that comprises what Deleuze calls light (the visible). It is as space-time that light refuses to be reduced to the form of determination that is the statement.


I can only present this space-time to myself in terms of receptivity, a prior passivity, but as Deleuze emphasises, this is too simple: space-time is not a simple grid, set up a priori, but can be rearticulated (is this the word?) anew according to various kinds of action. Nevertheless, a difference remainds between the seeable and the sayable, which means the paradox Kant confronts as Deleuze presents it – a subject that has taken on two forms – remains, roughly speaking, in the work of Foucault.


But of course these two forms do not concern a subject, since it is, for Foucault, for Deleuze, the conditions under which the subject is produced that is at issue, the subject being only a function of the seeable and the sayable.  The apparent dualism that Kant confronts arises from the difficulty of joining together concepts, as they pertain to understanding, and intuitions. It is no surprise that Deleuze refers to the role of the schematism for Kant when discussing Foucault’s claim as to the ‘enigma’ of the relationship between the seeable and the sayable.


Deleuze, to run ahead of myself considerably, will propose, drawing on Foucault an ontology of folds, of the outside to overcome this problem. But for the moment (I am commenting, rather casually, and without understanding most of what I read, on chapter 3), Deleuze brings us to the brink of the Foucault’s version of the schematism (albeit as it is articulated in a very different context). In doing so, he still has the question of the primacy of discourse in Foucault’s work before him. His reflection on Kant (and upon Kant’s relationship to Descartes) is not intended as a work of comparative philosophy, but as an attempt to foreground the problem Foucault faces


Let us return to what Deleuze says on the relationship between the sayable and the seeable: ‘the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time)’. Space-time, as we have seen, is rethought by Deleuze (by his Foucault) as light, as the visible. The visible, the seeable, is what is as yet undetermined. The primacy of statements as discursive formations must be understood in terms of the activity of determining; visibilities, however, are not the determined; they do not allow themselves to be reduced to discourse. Light is leftover; the visible remains on its own terms.


The Duel


One more quotation to underline Deleuze’s point.

The statement has primacy by virtue of the spontaneity of its conditions (language) which give it a determining form, while the visible element, by virtue of the receptivity of its conditions (light), merely has the form of the determinable. Therefore, we can assume that determination always comes from the statement, although the two forms differ in nature.

There remains, then, an irresolvable tension between the seeable and the sayable – a ‘duel’, Deleuze says, between two forms of exteriority. The next question to consider is how they can be thought together – for Deleuze, this is what Foucault addresses with his notion of power.


(Note for Sinthome: the chapter of Foucault on which I am commenting begins with an illuminating reference to Hjelmslev:

Stata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As ‘sedimentary beds’ they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readibility, from contents and expressions. We borrow these last terms from Hjelmslev, and apply them to Foucault in a completely different way, since content is not to be confused here with a signified, not expression with a signifier.)

The Thought of the Outside

The word ‘I’ is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the ‘I’ is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The ‘I’ is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.


Benveniste (via): ‘In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person”‘. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the ‘I’, since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow – strange miracle – the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the ’empty forms’ of language. It appears as a subject.


The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. ‘Can speak’ – but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.


Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive it. Language that streams without it – without you or I – but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.


But is there a way in which the subject might also disappear, losing the place it seems to have achieved – and even its own subjectivity? Or rather, alongside the subject, might one not think of another locus of experience, this time as it belongs to a streaming of the empty forms of language over which the ‘I’ has no power? Such is what Foucault asks us to think in his essay, ‘The Thought Fom Outside’.


2. Foucault reflects on the Cretan Epimenides’ statement ‘all Cretans are liars’. Is Epimenides speaking the truth? This question generates what logicians have called the self-referential paradox, which can be solved, says Foucault, if we understand how a distinction is made in this statement ‘between two propositions, the first of which is the object of the second’. The sincerity of the Cretan is called in question by the content of what he says; he may be lying about lying.


But this depends upon the idea that the speaking subject is simply the speaker about which it speaks – to speak is also to say that you speak. And yet, the position of the ‘I speak’ is not assured. Foucault finds in this simple statement also ‘an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject – the “I” who speaks – fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space’. Language cannot be tied to the form of the ‘I’, and as such, Epimenides’ statement is not longer part of any system of representation.

In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a nonexistence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.

How do we access this exteriority of language? How does it reveal itself, language as the outside?


Foucault’s essay concerns literature, and specifically the work of Blanchot. It is Blanchot who would have revealed to us, in his fiction and criticism, the play of the outside. And of course it is from Blanchot the word outside comes, but to name what? A simple answer would be to say what revealed itself to him as he wrote literature, and as early as his first fictions. This, I think would be the answer of those for whom his relationship to philosophy followed his own experience and was secondary to it. But as Steve quotes him,

To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon, – or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon – is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste).

The philosophical horizon was formed, for Blanchot, by Heidegger, by Hegel (Kojeve’s Hegel); there was also the encounter with Bataille and Levinas … Whenever I think of the notion of the outside, it is with reference to the notion of interiority that we continue to find in Heidegger, which is thought in terms of ‘mineness’ – upon the hollow of the ‘I’, albeit an ‘I’ stretched into the future, distended – an ‘I’ that is given in terms of the possibilities that lie open before it, and the projection, the temporal transcendence against which things unfold.


For the early Levinas, the relation to being is impersonal; it does not allow mineness to be hollowed out, but, when it is encountered directly, undoes the form of the ‘I’ that Heidegger’s being elects it to be. Dense formulations! A paragraph where there should be a book! But the ‘I’ for Levinas emerges out of a prior field – emerges, but can also fall back there, into the pell-mell that precedes the subject and that always threatens to return.


This is why, for Levinas, being is a threat, and is to be thought of in terms of possession, of impersonal participation; existence is not a leap into the future, a projection on the basis of the prior leap of transcendence, but the result of a struggle, ever active and ongoing, whose achievement is the sense of a future we as human beings hold before us precariously and, too often, in delusion.


Something similar holds for Blanchot, but the tone is different – being, existence without existents, is encountered not only in horror, but in a kind of melting delight – there is joy (as Bataille might say) in the little deaths that deliver each of us over to possession, to dispossession. Which is, perhaps, only to say that Blanchot revives the ancient sense of inspiration as it implies another, stronger force with which the artist must be in contact: an alien power, masked by figures of gods or Muses, that asks of the would be-creator that he or she must first undergo a loss of self, an exposure.


It is only by returning from this initial detour that creation can begin; the stamp of the artist upon the work depends first of all on that contact – possessing, dispossessing – with what Blanchot also calls (confusingly, provocatively) the work, meaning by this (paradoxically) being as it draws the creator from existence, as it interrupts that projection, that plan, according to which the finished artwork is to be made.


Contacting being, touching it, hearing it, pressed against it – which is to say nothing at all, for there is no ‘it’, only chaos, only a pell mell, only that turning over and over of what has no final shape or form – there is, for a moment at least (a moment that does not endure in the time of possibility, of the ability to be able, but turns it aside) no ec-stasis of the subject, no future …


Sometimes, Blanchot will call this désoeuvrement. The artist’s plan, the strength of his or her powers gives way to worklessness, to unworking. What Blanchot calls the work is exactly this: worklessness, the inability to work. That is his version of Levinas’s account of the horror of being, just as Levinas’s account is his version of the experience Blanchot places at the heart of writing, of artistic creation. Levinas and Blanchot, thinking together, suffering apart but in another way together, formulated these thoughts together, and each in his own way.


Yes that is what I think of with the notion of the outside: an account of an experience that falls outside of the form of the self and that requires an ontology, a metaphysics, than Heidegger’s (and which I have not begun to sketch here, pointing lazily and shorthandedly to its results).


3. It is this experience that lies at the heart of Blanchot’s fiction and his criticism, which, it should be remembered, broadens to encompass the plastic arts as well as the written ones (and even touches upon music). I think it is this criticism Foucault remembers when he sketches a genealogy of literary experience as the outside.


Sade and Hölderlin, for him, introduce an experience of the outside, ‘the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings’ that would be uncovered in its implications only subsequently. These contemporaries of Kant and Hegel wanted other than to interiorise the world, humanising nature and naturalising the human being, or to overcome alienation: they belonged outside the history of humanism.


The same in Nietzsche and Mallarmé at the end of the nineteenth century, respectively in the discovery, respectively, that metaphysics is tied to its grammar, and with the idea that poetry demands the speaker’s disappearance. And it reappears in the twentieth century with Artaud, for whom the cry and the body rends discursive language, in Bataille, who performs the rupture of subjectivity, and in Klossowski, in whose work the double, the simulacra, multiply the ‘Me’ into dispersal.


But Blanchot, Foucault writes,

is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought. So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvellous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself – its real, absolute distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its necessary destiny, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite, measured strength.

4. Foucault’s text is published in Critique in 1966, a special volume dedicated to Blanchot. Paul de Man recalled that contributors to the journal were told to hurry: Blanchot, gravely ill, was going to die at any moment; of course Blanchot survived de Man and Foucault, dying only in 2003.


Blanchot himself, it has been said, offered to meet Foucault (he had been instrumental in getting Madness and Civilisation published); but his younger admirer, who said he once wanted to be Blanchot refused, wanting to maintain the mystery. Whether it is true or not, it reflects what Foucault observes in the paragraph above: Blanchot absent in such a way that his work was allowed to stand in his place, and this not by accident.


True, Blanchot made several important political interventions in the late 50s and early 60s, as he would again during the events of May 1968 (where he would meet Foucault, but without telling him who he was, since this would be to go against the implicit rule of the Events: that each was to act anonymously, refusing (Sartre was frustrated by this) to draw on fame and prestige), but he was removed from the intellectual circles of which other intellectuals were a part.


He’d spent most of the previous decade in isolation in a small town on the south coast of France, writing the works for which he was now renowned; soon enough (after May), he would retreat into near total reclusion (though he still saw some friends). And this is not by chance. In his refusal of publicity, interviews, providing photographs, Blanchot lived in consistency with his theory of literature, which insisted on the priority of depersonalisation – not of the ecstasis of the human being, but of the other ecstasis revealed in art (but not only in art).


Blanchot’s retreat is an attempt to live in consistency with the implications of this other ecstasis – with this outbreak of being in the raw, without existents, to which the author owes his or her existence. How could Blanchot lay claim, in his own name, to what his fictions and criticism revealed, when it was his own name that had to be lost for them to be realised, his own name, and ours, too, as readers, if we are able to be touched by the outside, if it rises to the surface of those pages to meet us.


This is why Blanchot above all is not just another witness to the thought of the outside. But what kind of thought is this? Not, it is clear, the thought ‘I exist’ – to experience language as the outside with Blanchot is to be unable to say with Descartes, ‘I am, I exist’ – to write, or voice the Cogito. That it is written, or spoken, means it also slips away from the form of the ‘I’ as it seems to come to itself in language. The knot is untied – language is experienced in its dispersal there where the ‘I’ once was. Or rather, the ‘I’ is the gap, the silence, that lets the echo of another experience of language resound – that murmur without determination, that rustling that does not resolve itself into words.


Language itself – but as it has retreated from anything that can be uttered by a determinate subject. Language itself – but what, then, is it? Observe Foucault’s distinction here:

Language, its every word, is indeed directed at contents that preexist it; but in its own being, provided that it holds as close to its being as possible, it only unfolds in the pureness of the wait. Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it.

In its own being: Foucault allows what is said by language to be separated by its own saying, its own happening. Contentful language, language as it refers, as it points to the world, is distinguished from language itself, language in its being, which is said to wait, but for nothing in particular. To wait – to remain beneath, behind, but also present in what is said by way of language.


What would it mean to refer to the being of language? Perhaps something similar to what is named by being – by impersonal being, by being as horror or being as dispossessing. It is the being of language that is experienced by Blanchot, according to Foucault. Language, then, as it forbids that ecstasis that would animate it and allow it to say what the ‘I’ would want. Language that pushes back, that reaches towards us by way of its own ecstasis, allowing us to read, but only insofar as we too are read; allowing us to express ourselves, but only as it expresses itself, reaching great pseudopodia into our mouth and lungs, and up through our typing fingers. Language like a sleeping giant whose dream is that world in which we can speak and hear, read and write. Yes, that is what Foucault points to when he writes of the being of writing, and thinks language as the outside.


5. But what does Foucault mean by the thought of the outside, the very title of his essay? To think is to grasp, is it not? To think is to subsume the singular to the particular, and the particular to the universal. It is a matter of the concept, of the general, of abstracting from the concrete and the specific. And thinking involves the unfolding of a human capacity: it is something of which we are capable, that opens from our innate capacity as homo sapiens: we, alone among animals, are able to truly think; thought lies within our power, and it is thus we conquered the world and flew to the moon.


But is there another thought and another thinking? Is there a way in which we might be dispossessed by thought, that the being of thinking has hatched its eggs in our brains? Can it be said that another thinks in us, in our place, usurping the place of the ‘I’ – our place?


Inspired thinking is older than philosophy, and returns to haunt it. What else was Socrates doing when he stood rapt on the porch of Agathon? Communing with his diamon. Perhaps there is a kind of thought that is likewise diamonic – not, now, as it names contact with the gods, but with what the gods had always hidden. For Foucault’s Holderlin, the gods disappear through a rift in language, and it is this rift that the diamonic might also name.


The power to think is not always ours. Or rather, thinking implies another thinker in us but away from us, a double who thinks in our place. Is this what is meant by the thought from outside? Is it this exposed double who thinks in our place, displacing us? Are we thought as well as thinkers; is thinking passive and not only active, and all the way to the depths of the unconscious? Strange the name of Freud is absent, here, from Foucault’s meditation – for what else is the unconscious but lost thoughts, dissevered from their affects?


To Blanchot, for Foucault belongs to another kind of thinking. ‘It is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to this thought’, notes Foucault. Theoretical reflection will tend to incorporate the outside in the interiority of the thinker’. Thinking is measured by the thinking ‘I’; the ‘I think’ linked to the ‘I am’ of the thinker. How, then, to speak of another kind of thinking, that attests not to the ‘I am’ but to another locus of thought – to the bearer of the fact of thinking, of the that-there-is-thinking? How to invoke the passion of thought?


Literature, the language of inspiration is an alternative. But literature is all too ready to fall back into readymade images ‘that stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside’: the outside is imagined by not experienced; the prose of a tale is not affected by what it would represent. Might one dream of a prose that is at one with what is experienced?


Foucault goes on to write incomparably about Blanchot’s fictions and his criticisms. Like many of the essays in this great period of philosophy, it is almost too dazzling to read … searing the reader, reducing him or her to silence. And like those essays, it exhibits a dizzying density, as though awaiting a calmer, darker age in which its meanings will be unfolded. Ah the style of the école normale – if that’s what it is! Casual brilliance, luminous density and – style: so much more beautiful than what is possible today (at least in my imagination). Who wrote these works? Who published them?


Let me leap impatiently to the pages where Foucault reads Blanchot under two headings – attraction and the companion. What does this mean?


The song of the Sirens, in Blanchot’s famous retelling of the story from the Iliad, is, Foucault says, ‘but the attraction of song’ – it is nothing in itself, but a kind of promise. But what does it offer Ulysses? ‘nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is’. The song is a name for language, which must mean and refer. It seduces – but it draws you towards destruction – to that death, that work of negativity upon which language depends, in which the immediate is taken up into language, and that blooming tree before you is no longer, in discourse, that tree.


The singular becomes a particular, and, as such, a participant in those universal forms that lift themselves from the here and now of sensuous immediacy. An operation that depends on what Hegel has called negation or death. But for the artist, of whom Ulysses as hero is a figure, it is the power of negation that itself fascinates, and the sailor would have himself lashed to the mast of his ship in order to hear what has summoned others to their deaths.


To hear the song of the Sirens as the work of negativity, to seize it as what it is, as pure power, pure possibility, allowing the artist to seize upon a Language more essential than language – lifting the poetic word from the crude currency of everyday speech. But language must nevertheless mean; it must refer – negativity, the inverse of the world of stable and enduring meanings, asks as its price the death of the artist as hero.


Then Ulysses’ boat is wrecked as others were before it; he drowns – even as, at the same time, he survives. Time divides in two – or rather, we must speak of time and its other, and of the other time that speaks of itself in the language that Ulysses, becoming, as Blanchot images, Homer, and sitting down to write his memoirs, cannot help but use to speak of his trials.


Beyond everything he narrates, beyond his personal history, language speaks of itself, and therefore of his drowning. Language speaks and subtracts author and narrator from the tale. Language speaks and who speaks – no longer Ulysses, no longer the hero, but the narrative voice that conceals itself as a récit in the telling of literary works. It is this voice that attracts the writer, and that attracts readers, too.


Attraction, then, is what draws the author to realise a work, and holds sway over the reader. For Blanchot, creation depends upon a dispossession; the work has a double sense, naming the completed artefact, and the relation to language as the outside upon which the literary work depends (there is also a sense in which the outside can be used with reference to plastic art).


What, then, of the figure of the companion? Ulysses is lured from himself as hero, as the writer in the first person … and the ‘il’ endures in his place (endures the vacancy of his place, as it waits eternally for the ‘I’ to return. Waits as the lapping of the ‘I’, like the ‘subject’ of Klosswski’s eternal return, reborn eternally as no one …)


The companion names the double, the other, drowned Ulysses, the other who takes my place, being close to me, attracting me, fatal but also alluring. But repelling me in the same movement, pushing me back so I can preserve myself as ‘I’ – both at once, once and the same and neither one nor the other (ne uter).


Foucault:

The movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language. A language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold. A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet. It opens a neutral space in which no existence can take root.

A neutral space, the space of the ne uter – the alternation between ‘I’ and ‘il’ where existence can never be sure of itself, of its own power: this is what resounds in the language of the récit and makes of the narrative voice no more than ‘a grammatical fold’. A fold, a pleat of a single surface – interiority is only that pocket hollowed out in a prior, seamless field, and that, as hollow can also be turned outside, its crease ironed away. Interiority as the alveoli of the lung, a glove finger that can be unfolded and smoothed out …

Francis Bacon interviewed by David Sylvester:

In the complicated stage in which painting is now, the moment there are several figures -[…] on the same canvas – the story begins to be elaborated. And the moment the story has been elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint. This is because we are actually in very primitive times once again, and we haven’t been able to cancel out the story-telling between one image and another.

A little later, he says almost exactly the same thing:

… so many of the greatest paintings have been done with a number of figures on a canvas, and of course every painter longs to do that. But, as the thing’s in such a terribly complicated stage now, the story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own.

I wonder what Bacon means by claiming things are more complicated now than before? On another occasion, Bacon notes he doesn’t so much want to avoid telling a story

but I want very, very much to do the thing that Valery said – to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.

Bacon explains how he seeks to ‘concentrate the image down’ ‘to see it better’ by drawing in rectangles and cutting down the scale of the canvas. Heads and figures painted within a space-frame are not supposed to evoke figures trapped in a glass box – Eichmann at his trial, for example. There is never any illustrative intention in his work. Asked about the breaks between the canvasses of his triptychs, he notes, ‘They isolate one from the other. And they cut off the story between one and the other. It helps avoid story-telling if the figures are painted on three different canvasses’. This is the case even with his Crucifixion triptych – there is no explanation of the relationship between the figures, Bacon insists.

This is why Bacon so deeply regrets painting a swastika on an armband on one figure, and a hypodermic needle piercing the arm of another: each time it was the image that was important, not the illustration it was supposed to present, or the narrative it was supposed to unfold.

… I wanted to put an armband to break the continuity of this red round the arm. You may say it was a stupid thing to do, but it was done entirely as part of trying to make the figure work – not work on the level of interpretation of its being a Nazi, but on the level of its working formally.

Likewise for the titles of his paintings – his ‘Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes’ was entitled thus by his gallery, who had asked him what he had in mind when he painted it, for identificatory purposes only.

Francis Bacon in conversation with Michel Archimbaud.

When I begin, I might have some ideas, but most of the time the only idea I have is of doing something. There’s nothing well-ordered in my head; I respond to some kind of stimulation, to a mark, that’s all.

[Clarifying the notion of instinct:] … in the first version of painting of 1946 […] I was doing a landscape and I wanted to make a field with a bird flying over it. I had put a whole heap of reference marks on the canvas, then suddenly the forms that you see on that canvas began to appear; they imposed themselves on me. It wasn’t what I set out to do. Far from it. It just happened like that, and I was quite surprised by what appeared. In that case, I think that instinct produced those forms. But that’s not the same as inspiration. That has nothing to do with the muses or anything like that; no it happened quite unexpectedly, like an accident.  I set out to do one thing, and then, in a completely astonishing way, something quite different happened. It’s both accidental and at the same time completely obvious. That, to me is instinct …

[Note too Bacon’s hostility to what he calls ‘metaphysics’ and his cautious welcoming of the notion of the unconscious. Above all, he declares himself an enemy of ‘mystery’ and ‘mysticism’.]

The artist’s studio isn’t the alchemist’s study where he searches for the philosopher’s stone – something which doesn’t exist in our world – it would perhaps be more like the chemist’s laboratory, which doesn’t stop you imagining that some unexpected phenomena might appear; quite the opposite, in fact.

Bacon notes, with respect to artistic ‘knowledge’ that it isn’t cumulative, as it is in science. What matters is style; great painters are not better than one another. The questioner reminds him of what Braque used to say, ‘Echo replies to echo, everything reverberates’. This meets with Bacon’s approval.

[I’ve always liked what Bacon says about the contagiousness of art and images:]

What the great writers have produced is a sort of stimulation in itself. Reading them can make me want to produce something myself; it’s a sort of excitement, perhaps even like sexual excitement, like something very strong anyway, a sort of very powerful urge, but with me that doesn’t take the form of attempting to illustrate texts in some way.

You are bombarded by images all the time. There are only a few, though, which stick in your mind and have some influence, but some do have a considerable effect. It’s difficult to say anything about this effect because it isn’t so much the image which matters, but what you do with it, and what effect some images have on other images. It’s possible, for example, that the fact of having seen the image of the Sphinx could change your way of seeing a man who passes you in the street. I think that every image, everything we see, changes our way of seeing everything else. My perception is completely altered. Certain images, perhaps even everything that I see, might imperceptibly modify all the rest. There’s a sort of influence of image upon image; it’s a great mystery, but I’m sure that’s what happens.

Certain works of Picasso have not only unlocked images for me, but also ways of thinking, and even ways of behaving. It doesn’t happen often, but I have experienced it. They released something in me, and made way for something else.

[Bacon notes he copied the works of the Old Masters when learning to paint.] It’s true that many painters have taught themselves in that way, but I didn’t. I’ve never felt the need. I’ve always believed that one cannot take on the genius of others, unfortunately. [Bacon goes on to disparage his own obsession with Pope Innocent X by Velazquez.]

[An interesting aside:] … I’ve never liked Surrealist painting. I’m not interested in Dali or Ernst. I think it’s the writers of this movement who were the best. All the texts, manifestos and reviews that they wrote, dreamed up and published and the great interest in reading and writing amongst Breton and his circle – that, in my opinion, constitutes the most interesting aspect of Surrealism.

Obsession and Neurosis

1. Neurosis, understood as one of the three main clinical structures or diagnostic categories of Lacanian analysis, can itself be divided into three further structures, each of which is defined not simply in terms of different symptoms, but different subject positions. These subject positions, in turn, must be thought in terms of the fundamental fantasy, considered by Lacan as the staging of the position one takes with respect to an early, sexually charged and traumatising experience.

Freud already provides an account of trauma in his early thought, exploring the consequences of a kind of surplus or overload of sexual feeling in a specific incident in one’s childhood. If you are revolted by what occurred, you may become a hysteric; if you feel guilty, an obsessive. Sexual sensations of this sort exceed the pleasure principle, and give rise to what Freud calls ‘satisfaction’ and Lacan jouissance.

In these cases, the position of the subject is given in terms of a defense against the excessive pleasure in question, and is reflected in the fantasy that stages desire.

Since it is a defensive feature, it is no surprise that desire, awakening in this context, abhors sexual satisfaction. Fantasy, says Lacan, ‘provides the pleasure peculiar to desire’ – a pleasure in which fulfilment of various kinds is hallucinated rather than sought in the real world.

For Lacan, we often gain pleasure simply from imagining satisfaction. The drives are thereby reined in so that the pleasure of fantasy can be indulged. For their satisfaction would entail an overwhelming, excessive experience that would kill desire, smothering it, whereas fantasy allows desire to continue its play. As such, desire operates as a kind of defence, and the subject likewise, as it holds itself against jouissance.

2. We can distinguish hysteria from obsession, the two most important clinical subdivisions of neurosis at the level of fundamental fantasy.

The main source of satisfaction to the infant is the mother’s breast which, initially, is not considered by the infant as being separate from him or her. There is, at this point, no sense of self; subject is not divided from object, self from other; one experiences not separate entities but a continuum. Once the infant becomes aware of itself as separate from its mother, the breast is no longer thought of as being ‘possessed’ by him or her. Weaning involves separation, and the child loses the breast, the ‘object’ that provided it with pleasure. Thereafter, the child attempts to compensate itself for its loss.

The obsessive’s fundamental fantasy sees it attempting to overcome separation as he (obsessives are characteristically male) constitutes himself in terms of the relation to the breast. It becomes what Lacan calls the cause of his desire insofar as it seems to promise that wholeness or unity that was lost with separation. But the obsessive will not acknowledge that the breast is part of the mother – that it comes from an Other.

The hysteric’s fantasy sees separation overcome as the she (hysterics are typically female) constitutes herself in terms of the object the Other is missing – she is concerned not with the breast, then, but what she feels her mother has lost. Her loss is understood in terms of the mother’s loss of her, the child, considered as the object she was for her own mother. The child senses her mother to be incomplete because of her separation, and thereafter constitutes herself as the object that could make her mother whole or complete.

The hysteric, in Fink’s words (and I have been paraphrasing his work very closely here)

constitutes herself as the object that makes the Other desire, since as long as the Other desires, her position as object is assured: a space is guaranteed for her within the Other.

The hysteric, then, does not take the object for herself like the obsessive, but to become the object that fulfils the Other’s desire. She seeks to constitute herself as the object a for the Other, divining what the other desires by way of her. As Fink sums it up,

the obsessive attempts to overcome or reverse the effects of separation on the subject, whereas the hysteric attempts to overcome or reverse the effects of separation on the Other.

3. Lacan characterises the  fundamental question with which the neurotic is concerned is the question of being: ‘What am I?’ It is an answer to this question the child sought from its parents – ‘what do they want of me?’; ‘why did they have me?’, but the answers it received were characteristically disappointing (‘to be a good girl’; ‘because mummy and daddy loved each other …’), letting the question remain in its urgency. The child attempts to finds an answer to this question in its own way, by focusing on the inconsistencies in what its parents say and do.

Here we find the key to the neurotic’s fundamental fantasy: it is an attempt on the child’s part to constitute itself with respect to the desire of its parents.

The hysteric and the obsessive can be distinguished with respect to the questions they relate to being. The obsessive asks, ‘Am I dead or alive?’, being convinced that when he stops thinking he will also cease to exist. Lapsing into fantasy, musing, or gaps in thinking that might happen, for example, during the ‘little death’ of orgasm carry with them for the obsessive the threat that he might die; he loses what Fink calls his ‘conviction of being’.

Above all, the obsessive wants to remain an intact, independent ego – a conscious, thinking subject who struggles to bring to light thoughts and desires that concealed from his conscious awareness. He does not acknowledge the lack present in his psychic economy, nor his own dependence upon the Other, maintaining a fantasmic relationship with a cause of desire that is detached from the Other of which it is a part (the breast detached from the mother, and, thereafter from any particular woman).

The obsessive usually achieves sexual satisfaction from masturbation, or, if sexually involved with women, treats them as exchangable repositories of the object a, being interested in them only insofar as they embody the cause of his desire. In the case of a more permanent partner, the obsessive will transform her (assuming a heterosexual model of sexual relations) into a mother figure who provides maternal love and commanding filial duty. Alongside this Madonna, other, dangerous women will embody the object a for the obsessive; the cause of his desire lies elsewhere.

4. By contrast, the hysteric’s question is ‘Am I a Man or a Woman?’ How is this to be understood? She seeks to make herself the object of the Other’s desire (in heterosexual relationships, the male partner) in order to control that desire. The hysteric will typically attempt to leave the Other’s desire unsatisfied, granting her a permanent role as object. The hysteric would thus maintain herself as desire’s lack, as the object that can never be grasped by the Other.

Fink emphasises the hysteric also identifies with her male partner, desiring as though she were him. The hysteric, in his words, ‘desires if she were the Other’. Whence the hysteric’s question: is she the male Other with whom she identifies or the woman he desires?

At the same time, the hysteric seeks to keep her own desire unsatisfied, often deliberately depriving herself of what she wants (as Fink notes, the pleasure self-deprivation affords the hysteric is particularly evident in anorexia). This is not something of which she is unaware – she consciously desires to remain unsatisfied.

This can manifest itself by her keeping her male partner’s desire alive even by frustrating his desires. Lacan: ‘Desire is sustained [in the person who incarnates the Other for the hysteric] only by the lack of satisfaction [the hysteric] gives him by slipping away as object’. The hysteric thus arouses a desire in the Other and then frustrates his satisfying it.

She is often driven to do more than this, constructing elaborate love triangles involving her partner in which she is able to maintain herself as the master of his desire, its cause, even as she attempts to avoid being the person with whom he satisfies his desire.

5. Interestingly, the hysteric typically finds the Other’s sexual satisfaction distasteful, and carefully attempts to avoid being the object which sexual excites the Other. There is a fine distinction to be made: she wants to be the cause of his desire, but not of his jouissance. Even as she engages in sexual activity with a man, she will imagine to imagine that another woman, not she, is in bed with him – because, in thought at least, ‘she is not there’, emphasises Fink.

The hysteric, Fink notes, may well find sexual satisfaction with women (‘the Other sex for both men and women’), in masturbation, in eating, in drug or alcohol use, or in other activities. In relationship to her partner, however, she wants to keep sexual satisfaction and desire apart. It is not the goal of the analyst, Fink advises, to bring them together; as Lacan suggests, love, desire, and jouissance occupy structurally different levels; a problem may lie in the analysand’s sacrifice of desire and sexual excitement in favour of an idea such as ‘the perfect love’, but the analyst must treat the patient’s overall eros.

6. A pattern is emerging: both the hysteric and the obsessive may be seen to refuse joussance for the Other. The hysteric does not want to be the cause of the Other’s jouissance (even as she wants to be the cause of his desire). The obsessive seeks to annihilate the Other by masturbation or the treating his sexual partners as indifferent repositories for the ‘object a’.

Neurosis in general, Fink suggests, can be understood in part ‘as a strategy regarding jouissance – above all, the Other’s jouissance’. As he writes, ‘both the hysteric and the obsessive refuse to be the cause of the Other’s joussance’. And yet, says Fink, we must not be too quick in drawing this conclusion. Lacan suggests that the neurotic’s fundamental fantasy ‘takes on the transcendental function of ensuring the Other’s jouissance’.

How should we understand this apparent rehersal? The pages in which Fink explores this question are thorny and dense. He notes that the fundamental fantasy of the neurotic forms in response to the Other. It is in response to the Other as the symbolic father or as superego who seems to prohibit desire that joussance awakens.

Prohibition eroticises what it forbids – the symbolic father thus eroticises what falls outside the law. At the same time, however, there is a kind of threshold within fantasy, Fink explains, ‘beyond which it turns to horror’, and claims is familiar to us in dreams in which what we are pursuing seems to turn into something horrible. Desire finds itself unexpectedly drawn towards a kind of obscene jouissance (Zizek, of course, has written a great deal about this.)

This is linked, says Fink very quickly, to the superegoic injunction which, far from forbidding us to enjoy, actually commands it, in order to satisfy the sadistic Other within us. Such satisfaction does not unfold at the level of the ego – certainly we are seeking jouissance, but it is not, in this case, for ourselves, but for the Other.

Here, Fink’s account, tantalisingly and frustratingly, breaks off.

The general point seems to be that the subject’s position in the fundamental fantasy of the neurotic may seem to be one of refusal of the Other’s jouissance, but in fact forms in response to the Other, understood as the symbolic father or superego who lays down the law.

Our desire is always in accordance with the law, certainly, but an obscene jouissance can break out at any moment, causing desire to veer unexpectedly towards something that horrifies us. Is it in these moments that the neurotic understands how his or her jouissance is always in some sense for the Other?

Repression, Thought and Affect

Why do patients come to analysis in the first place? Sometimes they are overwhelmed by the power of a particular affect, be it depression, anxiety or guilt, without knowing why they feel this way. They may experience aches and pains dismissed by the medical profession as psychosomatic, or diagnosed as stress-related. Or they may be haunted by nonsensical but nonetheless frightening thoughts. In the case of neurotic patients, diagnosed thus through the important ‘preliminary conversations’ that take place face to face between analyst and patient, it is by understanding the role of repression that the missing cause of particular thoughts and affects can be discovered.

In psychosis there is, properly speaking, no unconscious at all, since the unconscious is the result of repression. In the neurotic, however, the motor force of repression leads, as Freud said, according to Fink (whose work I am paraphrasing here) ‘to a separate inscription or recording of a perception or a thought that once passed or flashed through one’s mind’. Repression happens through the acceptance or affirmation of a particular reality (a witnessed scene, for example) that is then pushed away. Whereas the psychotic excludes out the reality in question, never affirming or admitting it, the neurotic has always already accepted it, albeit attempting thereafter to push it out of his or her consciousness.

‘What is essential in repression … is not that affect is suppressed, but that it is displaced and misrecognisable’, writes Lacan. The analyst takes the patient’s symptoms as ‘proof’ of repression because, as Lacan says, ‘the repressed and the return of the repressed are one and the same’. The repressed idea is the same idea that reveals itself in unconscious formations such as bungled actions (‘accidentally’ staining a dining table) or particular slips.

The repressed can return as a ‘conversion symptom’ – that is, as it is expressed in the body, for example, in a convulsive movement of the arm or in the contents of one’s thoughts. Hysterics will typically experience rapidly changing physical symptoms of this kind. But the repressed can also return in the compulsive, disturbing thoughts that characterise obsession. .

But there can be no absolute distinction between hysteria and obsession in these terms since, in psychoanalysis body and mind exist in a single economy. For Lacan, it is one that expresses itself by means of linguistically expressed thoughts. ‘The first thing to say about the unconscious … is what Freud says about it: it consists of thoughts’, he writes. Even the body, he argues, is overwritten with signifiers – the symptom always takes the role of a language [langue], insofar as it expresses repression.

Fink gives the following example from Freud:

… Anna O. […] developed an occasional stiffening of her right arm, because it was that arm that refused to protect her father when she believed (in a ‘waking dream’) that he was being threatened by a snake. In other words, her physical, bodily symptom spoke of’ a relationship to her father and a possible death wish she had toward him that she was loath to admit to herself.

Thus conversion symptoms, which are extremely various, must be understood psychosomatically as they are part of a language through which the unconscious addresses us. The unconscious is a language, says Lacan, which, through analysis, the analysand must learn how to read.

Here, we might recall Freud, for whom dreams were symptoms which would permit of an interpretation that would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The manifest dream, that is, the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient, conceals the true, latent meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the supergo.

For Freud, it was necessary to understand the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attest to the play of latent desires. This is what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which latent thoughts operated according to prelogical ways of thinking. In what Freud calls condensation, for example, latent dream thoughts are combined into a single manifest element. In displacement, an apparently innocuous detail in the dream can become highly significant, and vice versa. Plastic representation sees important people in the dreamer’s life being replaced through a stock of common symptoms (the king = the father, for example).

Crucially, the manifest and latent content of dreams are described by Freud as two different languages. For Lacan, the unconscious is a language; it always involves linguistic symbolisation. In this sense, repression concerns a perception or affect that has been symbolised in some way. The unconscious consists of thoughts that are expressed or formulated in words.

Note, then, that what is repressed, says Lacan, ‘is neither perception nor affect, but the thoughts pertaining to perceptions, the thoughts to which affect is attached‘. Repression works by actively severing affect and thought. Thus, affect can remain when the thought to which it is linked is repressed. This is often what is found in hysteria, where the affect persists when thought has been ‘forgotten’. In obsession, something similar may occur, where the thought – as it pertains, for example, to a childhood event – is available to consciousness, but the affect is not.

In both cases, the link between thought and affect, at the time of they were originally found together, has been broken. The analyst will attempt to allow the patient to transfer the missing affect onto the analytic relationship. It is by playing the part of the man or woman without qualities that the psychoanalyst can bring the patient to project the dissociated affect upon him or her, however negative this projection might be (the analyst as toreador).

This is how the repressed can be managed, allowing it to come forward as it is combined with other, related thoughts in the analytic session. The repressed will be revealed as such, in the analytic session, and be worked through by the analysand so that it no longer exerts a painful claim on their lives in the present.

Symptom and Structure

Lacan’s list of clinical structures or diagnostic categories may seem small: psychosis, neurosis and perversion, neurosis being divided in turn into hysteria, obsession and phobia. It may also seem arbitrary: why are there not 4 fundamental structures, or 6 subdivisions of neurosis?

Of course, Lacan inherits his diagnostic categories from Freud, and there may be a sense that he is continuing to elaborate the key terms of a rich and productive legacy, in a manner someone who writes on a figure like Deleuze aims not simply to produce critical commentary on his work, but extend it into new domains.

Lacan, on this account, would be a kind of Freudian. But what of the groundedness of the terms inherited from Freud? As a philosopher, Deleuze provides arguments for the ideas and structures he puts forward: his work must be phenomenologically compelling, in the case of appeals to experience, and deductively so, in the case of appeals to the conditions of experience; it must also be logically consistent; it is incumbent on the philosopher to provide demonstrative and sometimes verifiable grounds for for his claims.

With Freud, however, so much depends upon clinical work, upon working with patients as an analyst and, of course, upon being analysed oneself. As such, much that is central to psychoanalysis must remain closed to those of us who have been neither analysand nor analyst. This is so even for those who have a sense of its enormous ambition – psychoanalysis, as Sinthome said somewhere, can be understood as a transcendental account of the symptom, exploring its conditions of possibility.

As such, the clinical structures Lacan identifies provide much more than a cursory mapping of particular symptoms encountered in analysis. He does not seek, for example, to continue to the multiplication of clinical categories Fink, commenting on Lacan, finds among American psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychologists: ‘depressive disorder’, ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘panic disorder’, ‘hyperactivity’, ‘hypnoid states’, etc. None of these categories is able to excavate the determining structures that account for the symptoms they map, being content merely to analyse each pattern of symptoms to its smallest constituents, and targeting it with drugs or specific therapeutic techniques.

Psychoanalysis does not take a symptom-by-symptom approach, since the same symptoms can actually be found in disparate kinds of people. Fink gives the following example:

A woman who is anorexic can legitimately be categorised as having an ‘eating disorder’, but then we already know this as soon as we are told she is anorexic. If, however, she is diagnosed as hysteric, we can begin to situate the role of her ‘eating disorder’ within the larger context of her psychical structure. This may allow us to see, for example, that the same role played by her anorexic in her teen years may have been played by vomiting when she was a child, shoplifting when she was in her early twenties, and high-stress, high-volume trading as a stockbroker in her later years.

Then the classificatory scheme to which Lacan appeals has the advantage of being able to understand what unifies those symptoms the patient manifests. The practice of psychoanalysis appeals to a transcendental account of symptoms that cuts across the specificities of their manifestation in particular patients.

This account cannot be presented detachedly in the manner of a philosophical treatise, since it depends upon clinical practice – upon the analyst’s experience as a practitioner who comes to the use of Lacanian diagnostic schema over a considerable period of time. Fink refers often to those analysts who are under his care; presumably, the analyst him- or herself will need to be watched over and guided. Over time, however, the schema will take on usefulness and significance for the practitioner, as he or she begins to intuit common features of patients in the same diagnostic category.

Here, the analyst must not be misled by the appearance of symptoms which overlap from structure to structure: obsession and hysteria can manifest themselves, for example, in compulsive rituals and somatic symptoms; hysterical traits like conversion can be found in obsessives and obsessive traits in hysterics. It is no surprise that Freud sought an absolutely definitive account of hysteria, since this would allow the analyst to lay bare the fundamental mechanisms that regulate the patient’s psychic economy. But Freud was unable to find one, leaving only provisional definitions of hysteria and obsession, which as Fink notes, are often internally inconsistent.

‘In his lifelong attempt to formalise and extend Freud’s work’, Fink writes, ‘Lacan provides the basis for a structural understanding of obsession and hysteria that Freud did not provide’. His account of the diagnostic schema is supposed to open up the key structures that account for symptoms; as such, he may be taken to have produced the transcendental structure Freud looked for, but was unable to produce. But this structure can reveal itself only to those who are analysts themselves, and have undergone a lengthy period of training.

The Last Neanderthal

Overwritten, overwrought, a prose grown too thick with itself, that is no longer quick, no longer speaks with assurance. An old prose, Byzantine, wandering abandoned corridors, lost in some inward dream. A deserted palace covered in jungle. The last missionaries in a plague-stricken outpost. Soldiers who have forgotten their orders and all orders. The army who do not know that the war is over. All this, I think, is what refuses to die in the prose I would like to write and that I would like to read.

What decadence! What Alexandrianism! And everyone can tell but me. Everyone can see it, and only I cannot, lost in some ox-bow lake, cut off from the onrush of cultural forms. I am old Europe lost in itself. Old lost Europe that has forgotten its culture and all culture and whose dreams without depth are projected onto the blank screen against which I write here.

And it is only for that reason you can write, that you are allowed to write, I tell myself: because nothing you write is of any consequence. Because writing here is itself delirium, the dream of a culture already dead; fetid air, and soon the doors will be opened, soon the new will come along and sweep you away with what remains of the old culture.

And in the meantime?, I ask myself. In the meantime, a private writing, a writing to yourself, to reach yourself – but that, too, is impossible, on the last shore of old Europe, like the poor Neanderthals who died on Gibraltar, the last ones, facing West, facing that as yet undreamt of America …

To reach yourself – but you were never anything, there was nothing there. A kind of kink in the history of Europe. An ox-bow lake going stagnant in the sun. Nothing finds itself in you. As though you were the dream of another, insubstantial. As you were only the circuit through which something else passed, a message, clear to everyone but you: old Europe is dead, old culture is dead, Literature is dead, even literature that proclaims its death, and a bright new morning is gathering itself to begin – a white new star to regenerate the swollen red giant of the old sun.

From now on, sentences will be swift and sure. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, there will no great authors, no books. Writing will stream along like a shoal of silver fish, owned by no one, moving in unknown directions.

A Big Dumb Object

I excuse my own taste in public. Ah, it’s not so interesting, I’ll say of this or that book. He’s a writer in whose works almost nothing happens, I’ll say, and by doing so keep his work more deeply in its own secrecy, in the distance it seems to draw to itself and maintain. And it’s true – I wonder at the journey that led me here that is scarcely a journey, but a kind of slowing down, a walking in place, until I discovered – what? A narrative that does not move; a telling that catches everything up and nothing.

Books in which telling seems to summon itself from a lost darkness. That seems to recall the epic form – even the parody of the epic, its becoming comic as in Handke’s rewriting of Cervantes in Crossing the Sierra des Gredos as he allows his protagonist journey back to the village from which Don Quixote set out. Recalls it but by halting it, drawing on that breath upon which Homer drew. Drawing deep on that power of inspiration granted by the Muses. And speaking from them – from the gods, the half-gods, from that darkness the gods conceal. As if that were enough, the wind from another time, the divine afflatus. From another time, but as it fills the sails of a modern story, a contemporary one.

I excuse my own taste – nothing happens in the books I like I will say. Dwelling, my Visitor calls it, and laughs. She is amused by my films in which nothing happens and my books in which nothing happens over again. She makes the daft gestures of Pocahontas from The New World and laughs. And I wonder whether the power of telling that I want is not a kind of kitsch and what remains of the epic, as Handke presents it, has not hollowed itself out to nothing. Or that its repetition is a postmodern gesture, without commitment, without depth, in the flashing impermanence of the present. And who are the gods, anyway!

Sometimes I shrug, ‘it’s just my taste …’, or ‘reading … what does it matter, anyway?’ And laugh at the idea that to read a modern work – a book for which narration itself is a problem (but then Cervantes is already a modern …) – is to find oneself in the position of its author: without a model. I am struck reading Anne Atik’s exceptional memoir of Beckett, How It Was at the depth of his acquaintance with an older, ‘classical’ culture – with Schubert, say, with Dr Johnson …

Beckett had stars to steer by, I tell myself. And Handke too, with his translations from ancient Greek. Stars to steer by – but isn’t a book like Crossing the Sierra des Gredos what the Greeks (how laughable – to write ‘the Greeks’; to be able to write serenely and all at once: ‘the Greeks’ …) would call a wandering star?

We call them planets, those errant stars the Greeks identified, and know they only seem to wander across our skies. They, too, are in orbit just as surely as the disparate matter that makes up the asteroid belt. Even a comet moves in orbit of the sun. By what, then, is my reading steered? By the fantasy I project back as the Greeks, as old India … and by the fantasy of the origin from which the gods would come and disappear: the starless darkness from which nothing shines. 

Sometimes I think I lack a vital faculty – that my taste has failed (perhaps it fails because I can still speak of taste, of the unity of taste) in some central way, and I’m drawn to books at the end of something rather than at the beginning. That Crossing the Sierra des Gredos is also an aberration of a book, a wandering that is not a planet, but that cuts across all orbits and will lose itself in the darkness beyond the last planets.

Who would read such a book? Who would have waited for it, advance-ordered it? Who would keep it book-marked beside his bed? Who would think of it as an anchor, who return to it in search of something, of some lost power of telling, or some power that never manifested itself, that the Greeks could not find, nor the Indians. The power of telling, of narrative that gives itself only now, when history seems to have ended, a million rivers spilling into the same indifferent sea?

What would Bourdieu say? What kind of distinction am I trying to establish? From what would the book protect me? What spell does it cast, by what ward does it prevent others crossing its threshold (my threshold)? What private space does it keep ring-fenced? What measure of time does it preserve even as it sits there, the book – lies there, heavy, 400-paged and patient?

No stars to steer by. Only the uncertainty of this body (science fiction readers call them Big Dumb Objects: Vejur of the first Star Trek film, Rama of Clarke’s novel …): what’s it for, what does it do? As it reaches me without context, wrapping itself spuriously in a whole history of the epic, of telling? How can you actually like this book?, I ask myself. Because you are a reader without culture, I tell myself. Because you read without history and without understanding.

Vejur was of course Voyager – the first probe to leave the Solar System (as a child, I would know where it was, waiting for 1986, say, for it to reach Jupiter, 1990 to reach Saturn, 1995 to leave the orbit of Pluto behind …) Rama was a spaceship sent by another civilisation towards our own sun. But what sent Crossing the Sierra des Gredos to me? How could I receive it as something sent? Who are you, unqualified for modernism?

Perhaps it is only in reading the book that I know certainty and a kind of repose. I am at home in this book. The sentences bear me along. It doesn’t get better than this, I tell myself. Relish it, I tell myself. Read more slowly. And then, invasively: who could like such a book? who are you, without culture, to like it?

The Still Point

Does it matter what story Handke tells? Crossing the Sierra des Gredos has familiar elements – a walk to an airport (Across), the protagonist’s enemies (Repetition, and all the others), the salvific power of the image (No-Man’s Bay) … but does it matter? There are books you read for the power of telling, rather than what is told, as though this power were a wave that gathered everything up and brought it back to you; as though that wave was already gathering itself there behind you, there years ago, in the German original (published in 2002), in the other books by Handke it recalls (the first published in 1966) – as that wave that began as the universe began and that retakes it all now, giving everything again.

That voice, that power of narrative: how is it that Handke sets his stories into the order of things, into the movement of stars or the arms of galaxies, in the great wheeling of the milky way as it trails stars through our night sky? There’s a kind of patience to his telling. The strength of patience, the strength of time as it turns the seasons. As though the book had found Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’ – that pole around which everything revolves.

How hard it is to explain! And what’s the point! Read! Be read! The still point of time is looking for you. The power of telling wants to install itself at the still point of your life. What does it mean to read thus? To be read? To be the black hole at the centre of a galaxy, and around which it turns in its entirety?

I’m familiar with everything in Handke’s book; he’s told it before. A character almost at the same as the others. A traveller, a contemplator, a searcher for images. With enemies like his other characters. Who converses with a narrator like the chemist of One Dark Night … who breaks from an old life like The Left-Handed Woman (the photograph above, at the top of this page bears this title). The same, the same and that is where Handke waits for us, at the still point from which the same is turning. In the kingdom of reccurrence.

The Unworthy Reader

Can you be unworthy of a book? Halfway through Bernhard’s Frost I thought I was – and now, 60 pages into the new Handke, I wonder again. I began instead Coetzee’s Slow Man – a quick read, pages turning rapidly, plenty of white space on the page, each exchange in a conversation taking a new line; I’m 150 pages in; I’ll finish it today.

But Crossing the Sierra del Gredos with its small font, its large pages, its bulk sits beside my bed, a pencil keeping my place on page 60. I’m unworthy of it, I think to myself, I cannot give it enough time – cannot, that it is, let the time of reading find me, the time of the book, its time, as it changes the time of my days. Cannot give it my time then, offering myself up to the strong arms of a book, or to the pages that turn as if it were the sky turning, of events that slowly change like the weather.

And beyond that, before that, Frost – I’m halfway through. Halfway, and – stalled? No, not that. But I felt my reading could not press deeply enough into its pages; that the gorge I should cut was but a furrow. Oh to open a valley by my reading! To tear open the closed earth of the book! And Slow Man? Coetzee-by-the-numbers to start with, as if he could hardly be bothered. And then the interposition of Elizabeth Costello and the book becomes an exercise.

I need it to finish. To close the book so as not to be closed by it. And in the meantime the halfread Frost – ghostly book, begun months ago, unfinished, calmly blue in its duskjacket – stetches me across the sky. And Crossing the Sierra del Gredos … is the earth upon which I look down.

In the Middle of Summer

40 … 50 – what day is it now? We’re back from our trip. Whitby, then Robin Hood’s Bay – an afternoon in Scarborough, too, which we tried to escape almost as soon as we there. My Visitor wanted to find the grave of Anne Brontë, but we had no guide to direct us; I wanted to visit Seaworld, so we went to see the otters and the seals but, walking back to town, fell into a malaise: we were in a town as horrible as Robin Hood’s Bay was lovely (hidden cobbled streets following the shaded stream down to the sea versus the concrete promenade in full sun; fossil hunters tapping hammers along the soft sea cliff versus deck-chaired ice-cream eaters burned red raw on the narrow strip of brown sand  …)

We rounded the hill crowned by the ruins of the castle (and, unbeknowst to us, by the graveyard in which Anne Brontë’s resting place could be found) and walked rapidly through town to escape. Then the bus back to the fish and chip paradise of Whitby, where I’d found Nadezdha Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope in its original English edition, in hardback a few days previously. And didn’t I have to debate whether to buy the first and third volumes of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in hardback from the same shop?

I bought Under the Volcano instead – a new copy, though discounted, and it became scuffed from stuffed in my rucksack on our walks through the countryside. It was the introduction that swayed me to want to rebegin the book: it said Lowry’s novel was as difficult of access as Conrad’s Nostromo. Well then, I must make another try, I thought to myself, and bought it for £5.

In Robin Hood’s Bay, there were three small bookshops. In the last, I saw Keith Sagar’s Life Into Art, on D.H. Lawrence. Old style literary criticism, my Visitor and I agreed. Should I buy it? £7, and it would have to carried alongside the hardback Mandelstam and the softbacked Lowry through the countryside. No, I thought, though it seemed like the gods had put the book on that back shelf for me to buy.

That evening, we walked among the exposed rock of Baystown, as the locals call it, and ate at The Bramblewick. Later on, read a few pages of the Mandelstam about the poet’s bookshelf and marvelled: Osip had learned old Italian to read Dante, and the second largest section of his bookcase was reserved to the Italians: Aristo, Tasso; the prose writers Vasri, Boccaccio and Vico; there were the Latin poets too: Ovid, Horace, Tibullus, Catullus and the Germans: Goethe, the Kleists, the Romantics. The French too: Villon, Barbier – with his wife (the author of Hope Against Hope), he translated Sinclair Lewis and other English-language authors; and didn’t he have a go at producing a Russian Mallarmé?

He didn’t keep copies of the books of his contemporaries, Nadezhda notes; she also rejects the story of Osip reading Petrach in the Gulag under the light of the stars. Her voice is tough, unsentimental: what she has lived through! I read in the eaves of a Baystown B&B, the pub Ye Dolphin almost directly opposite, the view of the sea, the hills rising up …

The next morning, rising late, we take breakfast and then lunch at The Swell, and I tell my Visitor my life has peaked, for we had 5 Hellos to read, and cups of good coffee, and a Ploughman’s Lunch each. ‘It doesn’t get any better than this’, I said, though that night I think it did get better, after we had returned by bus from Scarborough (our daytrip) to Whitby, and ate at the superlative White Horse and Griffin, I having learnt to order the same as my Visitor who has an instinct about these things (she ‘s re-educating my tastes …)

This is a Sebald-style trip, I said to my Visitor. Wandering from place to place, with the vaguest plan. I’ll bet the real Sebald didn’t wander alone, I said. His wife was with him, I’ll bet, just like Naipaul’s wife was with him all along in The Enigma of Arrival (all the secondhand stores are full of Naipaul, but the wrong ones: The Mimic Men, Half a Life, and never the ones I would buy …) An Osip has a Nadezdha, and a Virginia (whose Diaries only turn up in secondhand shops in the most tatty condition) a Leonard. No one really wanders alone, I said.

We’re the living room, a sunny midmorning, tea in two mugs, the louvre doors newly painted and the fireplace creamy white now, not brown; the damp a distant memory and only the cliff-like walls in the kitchen and the bathroom to be painted. In the middle of summer – that’s where we are. In the middle, as from where grass grows in all directions – into the future, but into the present too, and into the past.

In the middle of summer – and the middle of life, there from where life spreads out, illuminated from this sole sunlit source. Not as if it reached a peak here, not really, but as though it was from here burned the light that glowed all along and hereafter under everything.