Travel Notes

The narrator of Cixous’s Book of Promethea (I used to be tempted to call this my favourite novel. I saw a hardback copy here for $10; why didn’t I buy it for R.M.? Because I was afraid if I read it again – if I even glanced through its pages – it would no longer be my favourite novel. And besides, some books should live only in the memory, they are happier there. Do not read them again. They are reading themselves inside you. Their pages are turning in your heart and will always turn there -) is invited on an anthropological trip with her new lover. She doesn’t want to go because she can’t take her books with her. Would it be the books she misses, or the remove into which they would draw her? Before a full shelf of books, how can you feel but ashamed at not writing?

Even with the few books I brought with me to San Francisco (Benjamin’s Illuminations – I read ‘The Storyteller’ on the plane, and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, neither of which I’d been able to read, really read, before. What did I find? Why is Benjamin for me a man who moans because he cannot have a sit down lunch?) and the many I’ve bought here (a bunch of Kafka related materials (a book by Corngold, an edition of ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘The Stoker’ and ‘The Judgement’ called The Sons, in accordance with something Kafka wished (but he did not wish – he was explicit about this – to have the insect of the first story to be pictured on the front cover of the book! For shame!), Lyotard’s Peregrinations, which he wrote in English and about which I wrote a long, botched post which I deleted (better to start from scratch than to redraft – begin again so it all comes together in a single creative gesture), a nice book by Disch on science fiction (he used some words with which I was not familiar, among them: minatory, which I look up from time to time and immediately forget), and many more, I still feel a kind of guilt about not writing (no – better – about not allowing myself to be brought into that remove where writing and non-writing are part of writing, are lived in the space of writing’s demand). Worse for me because I am only able to think – which invariably means to think other’s thoughts again, to allow them to be repeated in me – when carried along on the strong draft of a book. Not to be so carried is to be becalmed, lost from myself. Until I ought to write something if only to remind myself of what it was like to think – or at least, to be carried along on the strong thoughts of others.

2.

Here I am in America. My trip is almost over. On my first day, City Lights bookstore. I noticed with delight they had the last three of Josipovici’s novels. As R.M. knows (she says I repeat it all the time), the sign of a good bookshop is that they stock his novels, which seem to go out of print so quickly. Well, there they were. I bought Goldberg: Variations, and then went back a few days later to get In A Hotel Garden. I was impressed with this bookstore, finding its basement, with its philosophy section only after I’d looked at the European literature shelves, the poetry section (a lovely complete edition of Neruda; a collection of Mandelstam’s prose …) and the new books section (new lectures by Foucault from 76-77). I came away with a Josipovici book each time I visited.

On my second day, Green Apple bookstore at 6th and Clement, very large and rambling, full of interesting secondhand material. I didn’t bring my credit card, so had to visit twice to buy all the books I wanted. Yes, there was Peregrinations, the book Lyotard wrote in English, which I’ve never been able to get hold of. I looked carefully through Perniola’s books, but didn’t buy any, perhaps because at the conference I attended recently, he stayed only to give his plenary address, attending no other sessions; I also looked, as I always do when I see them, through various works of Octavio Paz, although I never actually buy them. I bought some nice things for R.M. and Borch-Jacobsen’s book on Lacan in hardback, at $32. Then The Sons, the Dora Diamant biography, a collection of Kafka’s letters to editors and friends, a little book of his parables in a bilingual edition. Yes, all this was marvellous, but I agreed with my sister, who lives out here, San Francisco is a bit of a dump, and we much preferred dear old Blighty.

Monterey, however, was delightful. A kind of purple moss. A green-blue sea. The sea otters in the aquarium. The trees (but what kind were they? Yews?), the rocky promotories. Houses out of Hopper. I bought Speak, Memory, at a second hand bookshop determined to have a real go at Nabokov at last (I never liked his prose. It wasn’t plain enough). We found a pub in the evening and stayed there all night. Newcastle brown ale American style. Pinot Noir like in Sideways.

That night, I read Josipovici’s On Trust in my room at the Butterfly Motel. I couldn’t go beyond the acknowledgements, which filled me with an obscure distress. The author thanked colleagues at Princeton University and Oxford University for the time he spent there as a guest Professor. I wondered how this was possible. What would it mean to be a recipient of such honorary positions at such grand institutions? I thought to myself: what is it in you that finds this inconceivable? Why is it so necessary for you to think you live in the time of the Great Collapse? Disgust divides you from yourself and in yourself. Remember the line from the gospels: we cannot meet God until we have a face with which to face him. But what if your face had been devoured by disgust? What would you face then? Only the correlate of that disgust: the world become disgusting, the university as festering vileness.

Meanwhile you lead a parasitic existence in the folds of the great beast of the university: if only you can cling on here long enough, then … then what? You could write another bad book – or a whole string of them, blaming their badness each time not on yourself but on the academy. Through clenched teeth: you made me, it’s your fault. How laughable! How absurd! Disgust is funny, don’t you see? My sister tells me the Americans she works with don’t like self-deprecation. ‘It upsets them’, she says.

3.

Thoughts of an idiot: writing when travelling becomes a search for anchorage, a place to hold oneself amidst the streaming of the new. It becomes identitarian, tied to personal memory and to personal desire. The expression I would like to write with: pour down like silver. I would like to write about the contorsions of memory and desire, that great veering where whining and complaint become something glistening and true.

Turning the pages of Bernhard’s Correction in a Monterey bookshop yesterday I experienced it again: here was prose of complaint and disgust. It held itself in the streaming of disgust. I thought to myself: this is just what is lost when you travel. There’s no streaming. The world is too interesting, too charming; the constant change of scenery is distracting. Your attention is held my minor things, like the quality of American service, the smell of sewage in the cities and the curious little flushes on male urinals.

Yesterday, being driven through Big Sur, I remembered the picture on the front cover of Desert Islands: Deleuze had been here once. He walked on the beach. But Deleuze was never one to travel. He stayed at home and underwent another kind of nomadism. Comedy: the Deleuzian nomad stands still (or sits at his desk). But there are other kinds of movement. Deleuze knew nostalgia is always a terrible danger for the traveller. In my first days in America (I’d never been here before) I knew I had to find familiar places in which I could regroup. I found them: the bus which ran down Geary out to Richmond, the Green Apple bookstore and the Chinese cafe on the street opposite, the bar on Union Square. But the desire for places of rest, for consolidation (looking through your shopping bags, placing those infernal $1 notes in order) is the opposite of that which asks for reading and writing.

4.

An idiot repents. I reread what I’ve written above and think to myself: to list the names of these books and authors shows such bad taste. Complacent aestheticism. A thought comes to me, although it is entirely unfounded: Benjamin, unlike Blanchot, did not experience a global despair with culture. Then I say to myself: you, too, have forgotten that despair. Writing this list of names is an index of your faith in culture. A faith which must be eradicated if anything is to begin.

Something terrible happens when you find yourself able to afford lunch sitting down. When you can afford to buy the books you always wanted. Really, why do you want them, these books? What is it you want to become? A man of letters – how repugnant! A man of culture – how disgusting! A collector – there’s nothing worse. To buy books that you don’t immediately want to discard is a sign of death. You have contracted out the desire to read, the books on the shelf read for you. The whole of culture is there, turning its pages before you. Do not think you can recapture what you felt when you first read Mandelstam’s prose (I’ve been thinking a lot about The Noise of Time recently – I even saw it on W.’s bookshelf the other day, in the old Quarter Encounters edition. I thought: it’s a living refutation of the claim that poetry ought not to be translated. Who cares about the original? The strange leaps in the translation could perhaps be accounted for in terms of rhythms, sonorities or wordplay, but I prefer them as they are: this is a text which leaps strangely line to line, from sentence to sentence -). It’s too late to reread ‘The Stoker’ now.

Her workmates, my sister told me, feel a great pride in what they do. They are proud employees, proud Americans. I thought at once of the ape teleported in The Fly. When the door of the teleportation booth opens, there is only a twisted, steaming, mangled thing, turned upon itself. That is the image of disgust, I thought. Thinking is impossible without disgust.

Disgust: that is the great gift of Europe, I thought to myself. Old Europe, and not New America. Old Europe is disgusted with itself in Debord’s millionth glass of whisky, or in the bottle of wine Duras popped open for breakfast. Old Europe contorted, dying staring at dying. American alcoholic writers are boring, I thought to myself (there was a statue of Steinbeck down at Cannery Row; I never cared for Hemingway). But European ones are pickled in disgust, their livers wear out with disgust. And that’s when everything begins. Perhaps Bernhard’s disgust was purest of all, because he didn’t need to drink. Old Europe curdled itself in his heart. That’s what I read in Correction, in Extinction (but which book is the better of the two?)

Wasn’t there a Hal Hartley film – Trust – where the heroine’s father dies of disgust (‘Your father’s dead.’ – ‘What did he die of?’ – ‘Disgust.’ – ‘He had a heart attack. No one dies of disgust.’ )? Ah, but it’s not a disgust which is heavy with European culture and with European horror stories.

5.

Other highlights of my trip to America:

(i) the pictures I saw by Robert Bechtle at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: still cars in still driveways;

(ii) Wholefoods. No better grocery.

Houellebecq Drinking

‘I don’t know where my misanthropy comes from’, I tell W., ‘it’s not that I think I’m better than anyone else. I’m worse, in fact’. Saying that, I remember another reason why I blog: to surround myself with something like a halo of names. To write the word Shostakovich is already to pushed the world away. The word Hamlet is enormous, bigger that the white sky through my office windows.

‘When I feel strong’, I tell W., ‘I can string together all kinds of ideas which usually float around my head without connection’. Yesterday, coming in for the audit, I thought of the glass of pure alcohol of which Bataille writes somewhere. Then I remembered the name of that piece by Messiaen: ‘From the Canyons to the Stars’. ‘From Alcohol to the Sky’. No, not the sky, but that unto which it gives when the word Hamlet is pronounced.

W. is amused I am to be a keynote speaker at an upcoming conference. ‘They’ll tear you apart’, he says. ‘What are you going to speak on?’, he asks. ‘Something very simple’, I tell him. He is amused. ‘Besides I would happily be torn apart’, I say, remembering ‘The Hounds of Love’ by Kate Bush.

W. and I always return to one of the essays Blanchot wrote on the occasion of Bataille’s death. Bataille always spoke with absolute seriousness, Blanchot recalls. Everything was at stake, even in the simplest conversation. ‘That’s what I feel when I talk to X and Y’, W. says, naming two people we admire, ‘but I never feel it with you’. It’s true, of course. So little is at stake for me in conversation. ‘But when I write …’, I begin. ‘We’re no good at writing’, says W. This is true. But there is something there. ‘What?’ asks W., ‘what is there?’ He’s become so militant since reading Badiou.

I know I’ll be happiest when no one reads Bataille. ‘He understood’, I say to W., ‘there’s no one who experienced it as intensely as Bataille’. ‘Understood what?’ says W.

Then I remember the book I bought a few days ago in London. Adventures on the Freedom Road. It’s author is an idiot of course, no question of that, but there are interviews with Klossowski and Leiris. R. M. was with me when I bought it. I kept reading the letter from Blanchot it quotes: ‘I no longer see even my closest friends …’ Then I remember a line from another essay Blanchot wrote, recalling the importance of the word friendship for Bataille.

I won’t rehearse all that again here. The fifth chapter of the first book is undoubtedly the worst. I rewrote it a couple of nights before the book was due in, staying up all night. It was disastrous, but I am fond of my little disaster even now. How well I remember the open contempt to which I was subjected when an earlier version of that chapter was published as a paper. I have always loved contempt; the condition of my specialism in the UK secretly pleases me. I like to imagine that colleagues at other universities look at me with vague disgust, but even that isn’t true. One of them came up the stairs to my office and said: ‘I didn’t know I had brothers at this university’. He was referring to lecturers in philosophy. I left him with someone else and fled to the library.

‘Houllebecq is good, really good’, I tell W., ‘I was surprised’. ‘It’s pure disgust’, says W. And I wonder to myself: what if I could translate the disgust which saturates me into writing? But I lack the strength …

Which one of us hates it all more?, I ask W., who is very good at hiding hatred under a sheen of politeness. I know the answer. Hatred is necessary. Nothing begins except in the midst of the indifference of the world. ‘You have to reach that place where disgust presses out from you into the world and it presses back. The frontier between you and the world becomes rock hard. Then you can retreat and something might begin’. That’s why Houellebecq emigrated to Galway, I tell myself. It’s why Bernhard lived in the countryside.

Kafka is always our model. ‘How could a human being write those stories?’, W says, again and again. It is always the end of the night when he says this. We have drunk a great deal, the sky opens, it is possible to speak of what is most important. It’s hard to speak clearly. I slur in agreement. Drunkenness forces you to experience the difficulty of forming words in the midst of a kind of streaming of language. Words, now, have a price. They are born out of a struggle. To say the word ‘yes’ is difficult. And you can’t remain upright. Remember the great moment in Blue of Noon when the protagonist collapses into an open grave. Above him, the night.

In truth, all words are drunken. Language drinks. This is why Houellebecq drinks. Only then can he feel the half-words streaming through him. All of language runs through him. Is it possible to write? Perhaps; but first, there is the wonderful feeling of immersion.

Somewhere in Galway, now, Houellebecq is drinking. He’s drinking for all of us, for you and for me.

Lear

Why isn’t the caffeine hitting? This is the last full day I have to work on the book. I can send an electronic copy to them on the 11th, the publishers told me. And don’t worry, they said, we’ll get a proper copy editor this time.

Tomorrow, to London and from there to San Francisco. I can proofread on the plane. ‘I’ve read my book 18 times’ says W., proudly. ‘I haven’t even put my chapters together into one file’, I tell him. ‘It’s going to be a fiasco’.

‘Why didn’t you give yourself enough time?’ says W. ‘We had the audit’, I tell him, ‘and the QAA. I wrote the paperwork.’ – ‘You’ve always got an excuse’, says W.

I’ve drank a Frescato, a cup of green tea and a third of a can of Irn-Bru. When will the caffeine hit?

I think to myself: your whole life will have been an excuse for not writing a good book. You’ll never write one, though you may write a lot of books. But what is it that is lacking? W. and I often pose this question to each other. ‘You still want to be a great writer’, W. claims. He has said this on many occasions. I tell him his love of failure still shows a nostalgia for success.

I remind him of what K. told me: his lecturers, active during May 1968, had turned to drink. They were drunk, all of them, all the time. I think of Debord and Duras. This morning it suddenly struck me what I disliked about some Bergman films: it was the sense that the dynamics of the couple were somehow important, worthy of drama. I think to myself: I can’t take these rich Scandinavian couples seriously. They’ve all the advantages. Their anguish is pure self-indulgence.

I listen to my box set of The Fall Peel Sessions. ‘The Fall are never self-indulgent’, I tell W. ‘Mark E. Smith is a genius’, he says. I tell him of the interview with his mum which appeared in a recent biography. ‘She said if he had gone to university he would have become an academic’. I’ve always found this horrifying.

What happens when intensity can find no focus, nothing to do? When it cannot aim itself at political activity, at the revolution, nor console itself in philosophical thinking that would prepare for the revolution? In a letter to Kojeve, Bataille writes of unemployed negativity. The man of unemployed negativity, he notes, can console himself in art or in religion. But Bataille is too honest for that. Debord too.

The difference between Bergman and Duras is enormous. She understands that loving is analogous to dying, the ‘to love’ to the ‘to write’. The Malady of Death breaks with the theatricality which still mars Bergman. Even films like The Silence remain within the space opened by Ibsen: a drama of selves, of individuals on a stage. Strindberg will sometimes point in another direction.

I saw King Lear with Corin Redgrave a few weeks back. It was as wonderful as Hecuba starring his sister was bad. The same in Shakespeare as The Fall: the drama becomes a drama which explodes the limits of the human being. I should substantiate this claim, but there’s no time. You’ll never find me using the word ‘subject’ or ‘subjectivity’. Bloom is wrong: Shakespeare invented the inhuman.

The new book is a fiasco. ‘The first book was terrible, but at least it was ambitious’, I tell W., ‘the new book isn’t even ambitious …’ Youth: the dream that one day you will write a book, a good book. Age: laughter which turns the whole world into the moor on which Lear was lost. It was only with age, with the sense of crushed dreams and laughter at those same dreams that I came to love Shostakovich. The 4th Symphony is already the work of a crushed man whose laughter has dissolved the world.

Brod and Brod

‘Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?’, I ask W. during his recent visit. ‘We’re both Brod’, says W. He is leaving for the South; the audit is over. To keep me amused in long meetings, he imitates me. ‘You look like an ape’, he says, ‘and you hold your pen strangely’.

W., as always, is intruiged by my eating habits. He asks to put his hand on my belly. I had made him do the same when we went to see Plymouth Argylle play. ‘It’s bigger than at All Tomorrow’s Parties’, he said then. ‘It’s even bigger now’, he told me over the weekend. ‘That’s because I’ve let myself off the gym whilst I am doing the book’, I said. W. marvelled. ‘This is just the start. You’re going to get really fat’.

We remember J. C.’s elasticated trousers. ‘Now he really is fat’, I said, and remind W. of eating breakfast with M. N. ‘He had five breakfasts’, said W, ‘he ate everything on the menu’. ‘Levinas was chubby’, W. reminds me, ‘I like chubby men’. We remember the fat singers we admire, drinking wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. ‘He’s angry because they’re fat’, I said of the singer of Modest Mouse to an American. ‘No, he was always angry, then he got fat’, he said. ‘Do you think he minds being fat?’ I asked. ‘He has other issues’.

Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. ‘Yes, but he was ill’. ‘Blanchot was thin’, says W. ‘But he was ill as well’. ‘I bet Brod was fat’, says W. ‘Definitely’. ‘That’s why we’ll get fat’, W. says. ‘Why?’ – ‘Drinking’. – ‘Why do you think Brod drank?’ – ‘Because he knew he was stupid.’

W. and I have drunk too much. We eat at the Sardinian restaurant. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’, I ask him. – ‘Literature. We should have done maths. Have you noticed everyone clever did maths?’ A few names are mentioned. ‘You’re right’, I say.

W. has grown fond of telling me my tank is nearly empty. ‘You have to read more’, he tells me. ‘You were okay for a while, you got by on your personality, but now you’re tank is nearly empty. The needle’s going …’ and he waggles his finger like a needle waggling. I promise to read Spinoza properly. ‘In Latin’, W. demands.

The Outdoor Broadcast

The general election. We are halfway through our audit. W., our external auditor, needed entertaining. I took him out into the city for dinner and then for drinks. ‘Don’t get me drunk’, he said, which meant only one thing.

A couple of days ago he said: you’re Badiou’s worst nightmare. I said to W.: no, you’re Badiou’s nightmare.

Half-drunk, the pair of us, I take him on a tour of the bridges which cross the magnificent river in our city. Eventually, we find ourselves in a deserted place beside the art gallery and the Millenium Bridge. A big screen has been erected by the river. How big is it? How expensive was it? Security guards stand around. ‘What’s going on?’, we ask them. It’s an outside broadcast, they tell us. But there’s no one there.

‘If you want to get warm, go inside’, says a security guard. In we go. Strange sight: about fifty students, each wearing a different coloured vest: blue, red, yellow. We go and talk to the yellow lot. They are aimiable enough. Then we spot a lone blue vested student, all on his own. He’s rather like the weak beast separated from the bigger pack. W. attacks. He is withering. As for me, I’m bemused. Who should I hate here, I think to myself? The students? No, I think: it’s the BBC.

Look at them, I think to myself, the scum. BBC technicians listen to W. haranguing the blue vested students. I don’t help him. Then, true horror: a red vested student comes up to tell W. off. ‘Don’t talk to him like that’, he says, indignantly. I am still bemused, stunned, by the stupidity of this great expensive stunt. And the stupidity of the students? It’s not about discussion. No one wants to discuss anything. the blue vested students don’t want to say a word. ‘They’re full of pure hatred’, says W., ‘all Tories are’.

We go outside and talk to the security guards. They agree with us. It’s all meaningless, a waste of money. What are the BBC thinking? What have these students got to do with our city? Then the students come out: the BBC are filming. ‘This is like a scene in an independent movie’, I tell W. ‘The protagonists wander all night and come across an outside broadcast …’

W. says: ‘What happened to the working class? They should come down here and kick the shit out of everyone’. Of course he’s right. Now we are crossing back over the bridge. I am still bemused, half-stunned. ‘The problem is’, I tell W., ‘I don’t know who I hate more’. I think of the blue vested students, a whole clutch of them. They filled me not with horror, but with dread.

As I type, I have the television on. Now I see a live broadcast from my city. Now I understand what was going on. The students are to take a place on a map of Britain which is spread across the tarmac. Stupid presenters run about. W. and I asked the students why they turned up. ‘Free beer’, they said. But there was no free beer, we asked. Free coffee, free sandwiches, but no beer.

We were not thinking of beer but of W.’s Martini from the bar in Plymouth. Pure alcohol with a squirl of lemon peel at the bottom of the cocktail glass. Half drunk, with another day of the audit to go, we dreamt of a politics as pure as that alcohol.

Will vs. Bill (again)

One might trace the same play of forces I tried to identify in the music of Cat Power in that associated with Will Oldham. Once again a music has sometimes joined itself to the individual who bears the name Will Oldham, but has done so in a way which must make him uncomfortable. I have written before of my admiration for the way he allows the name under which he records and performs to change; this is impressive: it indicates a great modesty before the work. But another manifestation of this same discomfort is manifest in the incautious remarks he makes about Bill Callahan – remarks he should avoid all the more because he knows what it is to become the locus of a terrible and wondrous birth: that if Bill Callahan needs to withdraw Will Oldham above all should understand the necessity of that withdrawal and the strength it gives the music of (Smog).

And then there are the remarks in interviews in suchlike where Will Oldham will speak of his admiration of Beatty’s film Heaven Can Wait or the film trilogy Lord of the Rings. Why this desire to appear normal? And why is this desire already a parody of itself, which does it laugh at the parody Will Oldham makes of himself when he pretends to be a ‘regular guy’. But these are, once again, a sign of an embrassment before the work, which is to say, the movements which traverse him and the others with whom he records (his recordings are a work of friendship). Compare him to Tarkovsky, who is more comfortable assuming the mantle of artist-prophet. But then Russia has a place for such artists (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky …) – we do not.

Then there is a temptation to account for oneself, as Will Oldham did some silly writings recently published in The Observer about the genesis of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (I’ll put in proper links here soon). No explanations are necessary, and I think Will Oldham also knows this, which is why he scatters his recordings over different formats, collaborations and (now) rerecordings, which I have yet to hear. Yes, Will Oldham knows this and this knowledge sits uneasily alongside his public persona, the masks he wears because he is a singer and performer of great magnitude. These masks are not a sign of actorly self-indulgence but of the singular demand to which he has always responded (a response which splinters itself, which necessitates disarray, fragmentation …)

Nevertheless, writing this, I think to myself: I love Bill Callahan more. This is silly – why, after all, should one need to choose between one genius and another? Isn’t it enough that we have two such individuals? Isn’t it a great gift to think: these are my contemporaries? Nevertheless, when I think of (Smog), and particularly an album like Rain on Lens, which is always underappreciated, I think of words like truth and absolute. How spurious! And yet this music is driven, it is pushed out of itself according to some great and awesome force. It is driven, it drives itself – this is a music of a terrible urgency (a music of fragments, to be sure, but ones which are as if magnetised in the same direction; they do not point everywhere, which is what, perhaps, they do with Will Oldham). Bill Callahan is not a virtuoso – and that is his magnificence. In him, there is a need to write, to sing, to perform which is absolute. I will write, without justifying this claim, that the continuity from album to album, from song to song with Bill Callahan springs out of a source that will not permit him to wear a mask. When I think of Bill Callahan’s face I think of a void, the night, darkness without stars.

[repost]

Will vs. Bill

Begin not with what you can do but with what you cannot do, and what you cannot do alone.

In several interviews Will Oldham writes movingly of friendship. He did not, he recalls, bring a big group of musicians together in order to record Ease on Down the Road; the album happened when friends came together. Likewise he does not engage in his collaborations in order to produce a particular piece of music, but to open himself to chance, to see what will happen. He prefers audiences who are not familiar with his work, and above all those who do not seek a personal relationship with him. Once again, this allows something unexpected to occur. It is the trajectory of the songs that are important for Will Oldham; they are linked to personae, to collaborations, to events.

W. O. describes his relationship with one of his heteronyms in terms of friendship:

There was [a period of] two or three months where I was playing in Sp’ain, and then I was playing with the Boxhead Ensemble in Eu’rope, and then I went to Aus’tralia. In that period of time, I had to figure out ev’rything that was negative about the approach, and then try to erase the burden aspect of ev’rything. And in order to that I need a friend, and that was who Bonny Billy was.

The suggestion here is that one needs to invent personas, and to distinguish between these personae and the person you are at a particular point. Somewhere, Will Oldham claims that Beck was spoilt by his earlier success, that, having achieved pop star status with ‘Loser’, he felt compelled to seek out new ways of recording in order to maintain the innovatory edge of ‘Beck’, the persona his success had created for him. ‘Beck’ becomes the straightjacket of a man who has to conform to a certain image; the changes in music style that one finds across his albums, Will Oldham suggests, will always fail to allow him to be anyone but this persona.

Here is Will Oldham explaining why he has changed alias so many times:

The main reason is because it seems like, at the v’ery least, each record, if not each song, has a trajectory of its own. It just seemed better to identify that, rather than think in terms of say, a group like the Rolling Stones, where it seems like the band is the trajectory and it’s easy to go from beginning to end.

Particularly interesting is the way Will Oldham contrasts himself to Smog’s Bill Callahan. Recalling the tour he shared with him, he writes:

With Bill there’s a satisfaction and a desire to be solitary at this moment, which is something that, you know, is not ideal – for me it opposes being alive and it’s a totally rebel-ish idea. I like using music to do things to be with people, to interact. On ev’ry level.

It seems Callahan is not open enough, that he is rebelling from a kind of social interaction Will Oldham thinks is necessary for life. He has fallen short of life by falling short of friendship.

But does Bill Callahan’s solitariness exhibit the movement of friendship in another sense? I remember a discussion I enjoyed a few months ago at a pub. We were drinking, a few of us, and one of us said that friendship was absolutely crucial and that it was our relationships to our friends that allowed us to think and write. I surprised myself by my vehemence in rejecting this claim, because it struck me that my essays, such as they are, were the product of years working alone in a room.

On reflection, I was reminded of Bataille’s retreat to the countryside after a number of years being passionately involved in the attempt to form various groups. In one book, he expresses regret about those attempts: ‘I become irritated when I think of the time of “activity” which I spent – during the last years of peacetime – in forcing myself to reach my fellow beings’. But the next sentence reads as follows: ‘I had to pay this price. Ecstasy itself is empty when envisaged as a private exercise, only mattering for a single individual’.

As Blanchot emphasises, the texts grouped under the general heading, The Atheological Summa, are not, as it might appear, a haphazard compendium of personal confessions, fragmentary poems, notes from unrealised projects and other disparate material. They achieve a unity by and through the movement that attests to the experience that disrupts the supposed unity of the narrating ‘I’. The events that Bataille relates do not constitute an autobiography, but interrupt the movement of auto-affection itself. As Blanchot comments, Bataille’s work is not just the story of certain extraordinary encounters, but is itself act of friendship. In Blanchot’s words, it is a ‘friendship for the unknown [one] without friends’ [amitié pour l’inconnu sans amis]’.

What does Will Oldham understand by the word friendship? Firstly, it refers to his relationship to those musicians with whom he collaborates, secondly, to his relationship for his audience, insofar as they are unknown, thirdly, for his relationship to his heteronyms, insofar as they allow him to lighten the burden, fourthly and this is speculative, for the trajectory of his songs, EPs and albums, which leads him to say at one point that he wishes CDs were grouped by title in the record shop rather than by the artist’s name and fifthly, and this is still more speculative, to a relationship to something unknown in ourselves and in the relationships between us. Here is what he says:

‘I know that ev’ryone, or I would imagine that most people, have some pretty unbalanced or fucked-up aspects’; ‘People feel that there is not a forum for communicating a lot of those things and they get the feeling that things are regular and then that things inside of themselves are irregular. Sometimes it’s suspicious. I have no idea of what’s regular and what’s irregular that goes on inside of myself, for example’.

Above all, the great albums of Smog, like the albums of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Songs and Will Oldham, exhibit a friendship for the unknown. It was this friendship, I feel, that allowed me to write alone. Was I alone? I listened to The Doctor Came at Dawn over and over again. The vanishing point unto which it gave laid claim to me in the same way that I, in writing, was bound in friendship to the future.

What did I learn? Begin not with what you can do but with what you cannot do, and what you cannot do alone.

[1. This is a repost. 2. Typepad has mangled this post necessitating the use of inverted commas in the middle of words and the occasional abbreviation of Will Oldham’s name. Apologies.]

Dogma

W. has finally sent off the typescript of his book. He’s read it 18 times in total; a colleague of his read it twice, it’s been proofread by a professional proofreader, by his publisher and is going out to be read again. It will be the perfect book.

W. still thinks we took a wrong turn. Badiou has got it right: philosophy is about things, not language. Our Philosophy Dogma movement has been pre-empted by Badiou’s book Infinite Thought. ‘I haven’t read anything this good for 20 years’, says W. ‘It’s the same feeling I had when I read Deleuze for the first time’.

What are we going to do now? First of all, amidst all the administrative madness, find time to draw up our Dogma rules. We came up with a few for philosophical essays when we were in Oxford a few weeks back: no quotations. No more than one proper name used once. You love the dogma rules, and not try to trick your way out of them. Tell no one in your audience about dogma.

A dogma conference: three speakers in two days. Papers circulated in advance. Audience present by invitation. Each speaker can invite five ideal interlocutors. The conference organiser pays for transport and accommodation, if possible. Maximum three people at the conference. Each speaker circulates papers in advance. There will be around 3 hours for each speaker to deliver a paper and to engage in discussion. No careerism. No big name speakers. All this is something W. has been running for some time.

A Dogma conference puts all the speakers under constraint. Rules are flexible and can change from year to year. Core rules, though remain. No more secondary commentary. No more will we appear as avatars of whatever thinker we identify with. (More of this later when the academic madness dies down.)

Plymouth Gin

Visiting W. When W. and S. dress up to go out on Saturday night, they look like German terrorists; I call her Elfride Biscuit and him, in his suit, Helmut Omelette. They are part of the Omelette International, because to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

More discussion of Philosophy Dogma. Badiou has pre-empted us. W. passes me a copy of the new Continuum edition of Infinite Thought. ‘He’d hate us’, says W. – ‘Rightly so.’ The whole weekend we have a self-disparagement competition. ‘We’re not creative, we’re destructive.’ – ‘We suck the life out of everything.’ Neither of us has ever had a single thought. I tell W. that I might be on the verge of one. He looks sceptical. ‘Do you think we too a wrong turn with Blanchot?’ – ‘Our whole lives have been a wrong turn.’ It was literature, we decide. Opening The Castle was fatal.

On Saturday nights, dressed up, W. and S. go to the cocktail lounge which is part of the Plymouth Gin distillery. It is members only; you don’t have to pay for membership, but the bar staff have to like you. These German terrorists like the high life. W. likes cocktails which are as close to pure alcohol as possible. He has a Martini. It is served in a frosted cocktail glass with a curl of lemon rind floating in the clear liquid. It is beautifully pure. I taste some, and I know this must be what Debord drank, or Duras: it is the everyday distilled, the essence of boredom in a glass. Only it is concentrated boredom, strong and deadly.

Slowly, Spurious disappears from blogrolls. This is a good thing. ‘I’ve got nothing to say’, I tell W. ‘That’s never stopped you’, says W, and then he says, ‘So what is this thought you’re on the brink of?’ I tell him it has something to do with suffering and writing, where writing can stand in for any infinitive. W. finds this funny. Later he says: ‘At least Blanchot wrote fiction. You don’t have that excuse.’ And I think to myself: perhaps writing fiction is an excuse. And then: what would it be to concentrate all of writing, all of writing, onto a single page?

I flew down to see him; bad weather meant the plane could only go as far as Cardiff. Air Wales puts us on a coach for the rest of the journey; it takes three hours, and I only have a draft of the new manuscript to read. Horror: three hours in the dark with my own prose. I realised, as I read, that it is a long way from ready. I can’t send it off for the 28th, as I intended, whatever the consequences. As I read, I am reconciled to my first book. If it was bad, as it was, this is not because I do better. That was the limit of my abilities, and the second book doesn’t even approach that.

All weekend, W. and I wonder why we are not better thinkers. ‘There is a threshold you have to pass across’, I tell him, ‘what permits that is not intelligence, though that is important, wide reading, though that is, too; it is not even tenacity’. ‘What is it then?’, W. asks, who has newly adopted Badiou’s intolerance for vagueness. But I have no idea.

The Butterfly Notebook

I first read Flusser on a beach in the tropics. When I reread The Philosophy of Design now, I remember the blazing sun (it was winter), the pink beach (ours; it was deserted), the green sea whose waves rose up like the glass side of an aquarium. Parrot fish could be seen as though in aspic. R.M. and I would drink Canada Dry ginger ale, going back and forth to the fridge in the condo.

I read parts of the book to R.M. who was unimpressed. She was reading Proust and had no time for philosophy, she said, on the island where she was born. Later, walking through Hyde Park we came to a gallery, the Serpentine, in whose bookshop R.M. claimed to see the new volume of Flusser before I did. She had no money but wanted the book; I bought it, pointing out she had no time for Flusser when we were in the tropics. But we were no longer in the tropics, she said.

Ever since, R.M. does not like to hear Flusser’s name, but I did not feel as mean buying the book she wanted and thought she had seen first as a few weeks later when, visiting me, she found a hardbound creamy notebook covered in butterflies. R.M. was poor once again, and I bought the book which she had seen first for myself. I stood in on the bookshelf in the office where we could both admire it. But then I thought: ‘this is wrong – R.M. saw it first’ and offered it to her. She gave it back: you didn’t do it from love, she said, and she was right.

A week later, I sent the butterfly covered notebook south to R.M. Use it in your insurance exams, I wrote in the dedication. Would it make up for the Flusser? Was it a gift of love? Remembering the winter’s day when, in Hyde Park, we sat on the deckchairs they put up by the lake (the same day I bought Flusser) I thought: all of this day was distilled into the butterfly notebook.

Alas, the package which contained the notebook never reached R.M. Was it stolen? Today, the same day as the package I sent to R.M. proved irretrievable, I received The Fall’s Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004. Was this the butterfly notebook born again? But R.M. does not like The Fall, so I can’t send her this as a gift of love. The Flusser book is covered in annotations. So what can I send?

Writing, Non-Writing

The dresser crab encrusts its shell with the disparate materials it finds on the ocean floor. Writing, the raw ‘to write’, clothes itself in whatever it finds. The one for whom words will not come, the beginniner who cannot begin, is like the crab without a shell. The wind that rips across her exposed body is writing. She suffers from writing in the form of non-writing.

But to write, too, is to suffer. The sinners Eden suffer because they are nude; the writer suffers from a surfeit of clothing. Every words exposes you; every sentence you encrust in your shell is a sentence too many. You suffer from non-writing in the form of writing.

Admirable, then, the ones who withhold themselves from writing even as they are sustained by its fascination. For them, to write and not to write would be the same. Admirable the oeuvre Guy Debord did not write; admirable, too, the compressed pieces to which Maurice Blanchot signed his name towards the end of his life.

Marguerite Duras was able to maintain the play of not-writing in her writing. Some say she descended into pastiche or self-indulgence in her later books. I know the opposite is true. Rewriting the stories over and again (The Man Who was Sitting in the Corridor becomes The Malady of Death, which in turn becomes Blue Eyes, Black Hair; there are several versions of The Lover) it is the infinitive ‘to write’ which repeats itself in her writing. As if the story (but there is only ever one story) frayed in its retelling and the ‘to write’ was able to speak of itself. No coincidence that in her very late years, Duras would allow herself to call a book Writing. What daring! What splendour! In that book, not-writing joins hands with writing. Writing says: I barely exist and disappears into the white spaces of the page.

Suspended Time

Why blog? To write a dated entry, one might think, is to mark time, to say: I was here on this date and this time, or I am still here, growing older, improbably old, but here nonetheless. Unless it is not to mark time, but its suspension – to break with the demand that you make profit from time spent. The demand, that is, to spend time to give yourself more time; to work hard today for a tomorrow of leisure that is endlessly deferred.

Do not try to mark time when time itself is deferred. Write from tomorrow, as the Surrealists said, from the day after the revolution. Do not try and save time; this is the opposite of giving time. But what would that mean, to give time? To pay attention? Or to train your attention so you can mark what demands attention in the passing of time?

Thinking, for Husserl, begins with the reduction, the epoche, the suspension of time. It is the thought of suspension, of epoche, which draws Heidegger to the moods of anxiety and boredom. You are given time itself in this suspension. Time itself? Rather, we might say, the suspension of time. For boredom is time for nothing, is it not? Boredom is time suffered rather than time lived.

But perhaps with boredom we catch sight of something like the malaise of time, of time’s suffering from itself. What does this mean? It is a way of invoking the way time escapes us. In French, you are said to give yourself death – this is what it would mean to kill yourself. Time would give itself in that oceanic boredom when even suicide would be impossible.

To suffer time – what would this mean? To mark time’s suspension in the passage of time. To divide the instant in itself. To experience time devouring its own breast, like the mythical pelican. Or to see time reborn from itself, as Aphrodite was born from the forehead of Zeus. And to be given time. To be given time in which to mark time’s suspension.

Why Blog?

A cat cleans herself. Put a finger in front of her tounge, and she’ll lick that, too, as though you were part of her. Indulgently, not because she extends to you what she would give to herself but because, with your finger, there is more of herself to lick. You are a furless part of her, for that moment. Then she stops.

Why does this remind me of conversations we have with those close to us when it is as though we talk to ourselves? When, suddenly, something of the way we regulate ourselves, our lives manifests itself. ‘You have to be strategic’: this is what I tell others around me. I advise, I hear myself speak, but to whom am I talking?

To the ones I am advising, of course, but also to myself. ‘You have to be strategic’: I say it with a voice so close to my own I had forgotten I can speak otherwise. I speak with the voice which commands me inside me to work, to struggle, to strategise. The voice I dislike because it is capitalism’s voice in my own.  The voice which tells you what you have to do to get on in life.

How do I interrupt this voice? How does it interrupt itself in me? To the answer: why blog? I would say: to give myself to that power of speech that does not come from me. To let my strength fail against writing.

The cat stops licking your finger: it is not a part of her, it’s absurd, she knows it. Her rough tounge retracts. To write is to let speak that accursed part which has no role, no function. Until writing becomes a gift that is not in your power to give and gives itself through so it can call others to write, to abandon themselves to the abandon of writing in turn.

T minus 8 days

Horror of the afternoon: a blank, white sky. Terrible to be becalmed beneath such a sky. Think to yourself: most of my life has been like this. And then think: that’s why Debord drank, and Duras. This was not a failure or a dereliction for either of them.

Eight days until the new book has to be sent off, chapter three is perhaps completable today, then chapters four and five to revise and the preface to be written. This, I said to myself, is a kind of writing under constraint, my own OULIPO. One of the rules of the new philosophy dogma movement is: love your constraints, don’t resent them.

I put Jason Molina’s The Pyramid Electric Company on the CD player to give myself a sense of urgency and have my first book open on the desk to give myself a sense of shame. I will make sure I am faced with this post as it is exactly the kind of post I dislike. Nothing happens, no work done.

T Minus 10 days …

The new book’s going to be a fiasco, I told W. on the phone. Ten days left and I’m still writing chunks of chapter three. Then you can whine about it for months on your blog, said W. and of course he was right.

W.’s book has been proofread three times – once by a colleague, once by his publisher and once by the publisher’s proofreader. How many time times has yours been proofread?, he asks, knowing the answer. I haven’t finished it yet, I told him.

Stayed up late last night writing. Nothing is possible today, so I tidied the office, readied the paperwork for the Internal Audit and went on an eating tour of the city. I drift towards morbid obesity, which is okay because Guy Debord did too, and I’m reading him in between writing bad prose.

W. and I have had a new idea: philosophy dogma, similar to the Danish film movement Dogme or OULIPO. There are a number of rules which we are still elaborating. I’ll post them here eventually.

W. is a feeder. I write to tell him what I’ve eaten; he writes back for more details. When we met the other day, we had conversations like those of people cleverer than us. 

The Last Days

The question you ask yourself one morning as you are driven to Slough to work as a telemarketer: Am I dead or am I alive? Or is that everyone is alive and I am dead? Masochism: your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. So long as you are alive these are the Last Days.

And when you disappear? History will complete itself, the horizon will fall away and this civilisation will spread across the earth and across the skies. You are a point of absolute negativity. Everyone else is present to themselves and the day, replete. They admit light into their deepest recesses, they have no secret from the day. And each of them, the telemarketers, maintains an impressive balance of the inner and outer, like those peculiar creatures that live in the sea’s depths: they appear delicate, but their strength is such that they do not collapse under the immense pressure of miles of water.

And you? You have collapsed as a star collapses upon itself. Now you are the dark point which will draw everything into itself. The singularity across whose event horizon the world must crawl. Or is this delusion itself – some compensating ideology, some imaginary revenge on a world which has turned its face from you?

God, said Simone Weil, following Isaac Luria, has departed. As he left, the universe opened in his wake. We were born because of his absence and our lives are evidence of our abandonment. You are being driven through Slough. This is the anti-town, the seventh circle of Hell (Bracknell is the eighth circle). You ask yourself: is it that death is everywhere and only I am alive? But then you know that you are hardly alive and this is not life. You know you are the exception: it was your curse to have lifted yourself from this great living. Somehow you broke from it. Somehow it abandoned itself in you.

You are like the living wound across the everyday. Your immense boredom, your death-in-life is the wound wherein the everyday comes to know and despise itself. Now the everyday will seek revenge because it did not want to be known and to know itself. Your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. But you are Gracchus, the one who cannot die which means so long as you exist the world cannot bring itself to an end.

The Last Days: today, tomorrow, and all the days to come. You are Sisyphus, grinding everything into meaninglessness. It is easy to make unmeaning of meaning, says the phenomenologist, but the task is to make meaning of meaning. Yes, but your presence in the world turns everything into unmeaning, which is why the everyday will not tolerate your presence. Now it must set out to crush you and to crush itself in you. But how can it crush the one which allowed it to become self-aware?

You ask yourself: am I dead or am I alive? The answer comes: you are the wound which prevents dying from finding death. You are Parisfal’s wound. Today, like tomorrow and every day to come, you are telemarketing. ‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of Hewlett Packard …’

The Blood of Time

When I wrote letters, I wrote first of the surprise I felt by the date I wrote at the top of the page. Is it really so late?, I thought to myself. What did I expect? Perhaps I thought I lived in the last days, on the brink of the great apocalypse, that unveiling where things would be revealed as they are.

Had I freed myself from that childish desire to know a kind of revenge in the coming of the apocalypse, as if I had always been a kind of salamander awaiting its flames? It was, I felt, as if I already lived like the protagonists of J.G. Ballard’s disaster novels, in the time after the drought, the flood or the great crystallisation of the world.

The great artist writes of the death which precedes writing. I was able to write because I nearly died, said Bernhard, said Selby Jr. But is there a way of living a death which has not yet arrived, of living in the last days, in the certainty of a death to come? I am thinking now of Mishima, who timed his ritual suicide, his small act of terrorism, to coincide with the submission of the fourth part of his tetralogy.

But Mishima’s death was a death of impatience. He sought to take revenge on time, which he confused with a hatred of the Japanese modernity to which he belonged. To truly suffer from time is not to seek to bring it to conclusion. Nor is it to write. Guy Debord knew this, I think, as he kept himself from writing too much. He drank instead. This, indeed, is the reason why writers drink: to avoid the non-writing in writing. To endure great gaps of non-writing which expose them to the malaise of time.

Debord’s drinking carries him to the brink of greatness. He drank until his hands trembled and he could barely stand. His teeth were red from wine. That wine was the blood of time.

Hordes

The clocks had gone forward without my noticing it. I rose at nine, not eight; I thought Popworld was on early. This is a work weekend: four whole days in which to write, following weeks of administration and bureaucracy (and similar weeks to come: the QAA, the audit …) But as with all work weekends, comes a time when you are too tired to work. I read James Lord’s splendid biography of Giacometti instead, which I found in London last weekend with R.M.

I should have gone out last night, I say to myself. That way, awakening, I would still be borne on the memories of the night before. Friends and company are essential to work, I know this now. That’s what Giacometti said to those who claimed his sculpture indicated his more general concern with solitude. Not at all, he said. Of course, he was our many nights with prostitutes. Then friends called at his studio.

What should I write today? A passage on the positive infinite in Hegel and the spurious infinite in Blanchot. A paraphrase of a small section of W.’s book. Finish off that little piece on Gillian Rose. All for the book, which has to be ready very soon. I still don’t have a complete first draft. If I was W., I would spend another year polishing the book, paring it down.

Yes, that’s what I would write, but I’m too tired. I am not in the office yet; the flat is warm but dark; I listen to Beck’s Sea Change, which is much better than I remembered. But my pot plants are shedding leaves, and the kitchen is messy. I haven’t rehung the pictures and mirror I took down when the new wallpaper went up.

New blogs appear. One reminds me of a conversation I have with friends on the phone about the fate of departments of philosophy. ‘So what of Warwick?’ The answer approximates to: ‘it has fallen’, which means the hordes have arrived and taken over. As though I were receiving battle reports like one of the doomed race of men in The Lord of the Rings (what of Rohan?).

I walked to the quayside yesterday, which I never do, and never alone. But I couldn’t write anymore; tired, I thought I’d risk a walk in the outdoors because I was content with what I had done; I was even moved by the introduction to the new book. But I remembered what Beckett said to Van Velde of a new picture of which the artist declared himself proud: ‘there’s no reason to be’.

Horror of philosophy: never a corner in which to hide and do your work. Always the biggest themes: truth, freedom, justice which demand to be spoken of. There’s no refuge. I always dream of escaping to another subject; I spend my time with musicians and with theorists of music and envy the determinacy of their subject matter. With philosophy there’s always too much at stake. And then there’s my miserable hackery: the desire to write, to write and all the while with nothing to say.

Still, the hordes are coming. Polite, well-meaning, they don’t even know they are hordes. They bring with them that facility in speaking, they speak, everything is easy, there’s a framework in which everything is to be done. What was the name of that famous horde member who said to the Chinese: there’s a way of doing philosophy which has sorted out all the basic problems? And then – wonderful irony – the Chinese took to Heidegger instead, or at least that is what I heard.

Plural Speech

But what is called speech in Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. The unknown – but what does this mean? That which breaks with the idea that everything yields itself up to the measure of intelligibility, lending themselves to that great synchronisation through a world or cosmos comes to appear in its seamless continuity.

What does this mean? The relation to the Other is not part of those relations which measure the copresence of things according to the powers and capacities of human intellection. Heidegger voids the substantial subject, presenting instead the ecstatic leap into the future, the stretching out towards death. From where does Dasein leap? There is no ‘there’ understood as a substantial unity. Yet for Blanchot it is as though Dasein has to come to itself such that the leap might be taken, to assemble itself – to be assembled – into that site where existence itself would become possible.

The experience of suffering will always be Blanchot’s model for that experience in which this act of assembling is undone. Suffering should be understood negatively only from that perspective wherein what is most important is to preserve the unity of the self. But there is also a sense, for him, in which the suffering which marks the relation to the Other as it undoes that unity is the condition of hope: as though the interruption accomplished as this relation would permit more than the respiration of the Same as it comes to itself or the labour of identification through which the world presents itself as what is known and knowable.

In this instant (in the suspension it accomplishes), the place I assume gives unto an experience which cannot be gathered into a unity. Who am I? ‘il’: the he or the it: the impersonal ‘subject’ of a detour which will not allow itself to come to term; the suspension of that reflexivity of the self which redoubles that great reflexivity through which the cosmos grants itself to the measure of the Same. ‘il’: not a subject nor the Da-sein which has already and always leapt from its site. ‘il’: the one in contact with the unknown such that the measure of knowing is interrupted. ‘Locus’ of a pathein which cannot be borne by subject or recuperated in what Heidegger calls authentic existing.

Who is the Other? The one I meet in that suffering which turns me from myself. Whose alterity is such that it cannot be grasped in terms of a particular attribute (the Other is not masculine or feminine, not old or young, neither famous nor obscure …) Is this a simple mysticism or theophany: the appearance of the Other as God was said to appear to Moses? But the Other does not appear as to an intact subject; it is not part of that great rushing forward of phenomena which the phenomenologist understands to be met by the rushing of a constituting intentionality. The Other as enigma, as the interruption of phenomenology: concentrated in these formulations is a conception of a relation which may be said to be without relation since it deprives itself of a ‘subject’ term (the ‘I’) and a stable ‘object’ (the presence of the thing alongside other things).

‘il’: ‘place’ of an indefinite suspension, the suffering without term to which nothing appears. The Other is, to this extent, invisible, if visibility is the measure of phenomenon. This means the Other cannot operate as the ‘object’ pole of a relation. A relation without relation: the ‘il’ ‘relates’ to the Other as to the unknown, the outside, the neuter not because it is reducible to, say, another expanse to be worked and transformed into the world, the cosmos, not to a dimension beyond this one – a heavenly place – but to what resists the constituting grasp of consciousness here and now. Here and now the encounter with the Other cannot be grasped. It is marked as a kind of trauma, as the awakening of an impersonal ‘il’, a vigilance without subject. And it is met by what Blanchot calls speech.

With what speech can one associate the ‘il’, a ‘no one’ incapable of speaking? Impossible speech – an address which cannot be traced back to the will of a subject or to an animating consciousness. A speech which erupts to break those signifying practices which allow us to name and speak of things in their absence and to grasp each singularity as a particular which would lie beneath a universal. A speech then which marks the suspension of the speaker and of the theme of the spoken. A speech which, in turn, cannot itself become a theme.

The ‘il’ addresses the Other. There is speech, upstream of the decision to speak (unless speech is understood in terms of the decision of the Other as it were ‘in’ me). Speech which is not met by the Other speaking in turn, as if, here, it were a question of reciprocity of exchange. Blanchot will follow Levinas in claiming the relation with the Other is unilateral and resists symmetry – a resistance which is not that of the master before the slave since the Other is encountered as the one who is vulnerable, as the widow or the orphan, as the proletariat – these expressions to be understood only as they indicate the way the Other solicits not only the speech which would acknowledge the Other’s alterity but also the desire to negate and have done with that alterity.

It is true, for Blanchot, I can become the Other for the one I relate to as the Other, but this breaks with any notion of exchange. What is given in such a criss-crossing of unilateral and dissymmetrical relations, in this redoubled relation without relation in which both parties become ‘il’ and then the Other in turn, is a double interruption. One which is confirmed in those friendships as Blanchot remembers existed between him and Bataille where it is not the content of what is said that is important, but the seriousness of a speech in which each acknowledges the other person as the Other in turn, and both experience, albeit traumatically, which is to say, upstream of conscious individuality, the interruption of the continuity of the cosmos.

Likewise, Blanchot will even allow for such relations to multiply themselves between those who, in demonstrating against injustices, refuse the prevailing authorities and even the measure of power: those who maintain themselves outside the play of those relations which govern the social whole. The community opened thus cannot last or gather itself into a movement of social reform but permits something like a revolution to flash up for a moment. A utopia – but only as long as interruption is permitted its play, leaping from one demonstrator to another. Still, the model of the relation to the Other remains intact: there is nothing mutual or reciprocal with respect to relation in question, not even in its redoubling or multiplication.

Lament

On the 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up from his family home by the French police; he was taken first to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. His daughter writes:

When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.

How is one to understand the echo of the lament in the sobbing of the children?

Plato’s objections to tragic art are ethical; it is said to bear upon a crisis which only the individual can suffer – upon, that is to say, the sphere of the private which Plato always distrusts insofar as it is set again what for him are the interests of the common. Why else does he advocate the distribution of children among members of the polis?

The danger, for Plato, is always that of the attachment to particulars rather than to the whole; the individual soul is always too protean, too unstable; loss of one to whom one is attached threatens instability; if it is to attain harmony this is only by relating itself to the common, to no one and to everyone, to attain that ideal distance which Alcibiades discerns when Socrates refuses his embrace.

Grief, then, is the danger. A danger which pushes forward in tragic art where, and Antigone is the most obvious example, grief is born of ties of kinship. ‘The law presumably says that it is finest to keep as quiet as possible in misfortunes and not be irritated….’ And the law of Plato’s ideal community will be such that it forces apart ties and attachment in order to eliminate the relations which, as Freud knew, were at the seat of tragic drama.

Tragic art calls forth that part of the soul which is ‘far from prudence [phroneseos], and is not a companion and friend for any healthy or true purpose’. And with the child who gre up to write Smothered Words? What becomes of the companion, the friend revealed in Kofman’s mourning? One might say: hers is not a private mourning; she mourns not only for her father, but for all those who died.

Yet the ones who died, she reminds us, are emblematised by the figure of the Jew, the one who over and again will have been excluded from our community. ‘Auschwitz’, this ‘senseless breaking of the human race in two’ was, Kofman writes, ‘desired by the anti-Semites and the Nazis so that the Jew would signify repulsion, the Other in all his horror, the abject who must be kept at a distance, expelled, exiled, exterminated’. A distance beyond that which Plato advocates but which permits a different reflection on the polis, on the common.

Kofman, after commenting on Antelme’s The Human Race, will allow herself to write of a new humanism, a new ethics, of a ‘”we”’ that is ‘always and already undone, destabilised’. Plato sought to expel the tragic poets, more dangerous even than the figure of the tyrant, from the city. Kofman will discern a community who are always so exiled and which reveals itself even amidst grief. The childrens’ ‘oh papa, papa, papa’ lament their father. What kind of friend or companion is born in this lament?

Bereck Kofman was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. ‘My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted’.

Infinite violence: it is this dying without measure and without recompense that keeps the child awake in Kofman. A child she would awaken in each of us, insofar as her book never contents itself with a private act of mourning.

The Call Outside

I’m indulging myself in writing some notes on Blanchot and Judaism. This continues from the last posts.

Speech, in this sense, is the promised land where exile fulfils itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself’. To acknowledge the relation to the Outside in the relation to the Other prevents me from taking the Other to be another like myself.

Speech opens the Jew to the promised land in which one might live without that land becoming one’s own. There is no dwelling for the Jew.

To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority and estrangement

are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all “positive value.”

The last phrase, positive value, is to be contrasted with the values which are impugned in nihilism. At the outset of the essay, Blanchot has already claimed the question of what is specific to Judaism receives answers which determine the Jew negatively – as in the case of Simone Weil, in terms of a deficiency with respect to the clarity of Greek thought. He wonders whether this fear to affirm the words which begin with the prefix ‘ex-’ is that of ‘playing into the hands of nihilism and its most vulgar substitute, anti-Semitism’.

It is true that a certain anti-Semitic rhetoric will suspect what they take to be the deracination of the Jews – one which Blanchot will present in terms of a relation to what he calls the origin rather than the beginning, using the former word to refer what separates the Jew from the interiority of any particular state. The origin is what breaks any myths of the place – the same myths, of course, upon which Nazism would draw – returning each time as a call outside, as the experience of an insecurity which disrupts the relation to being in a place, to dwelling.

The call outside, God’s call, breaks not only the relation to the place, but also the mediation which would allow experience to be measured according to the security of this place. To contrast, as Levinas does, Ulysses to Abraham, is to separate one who remains himself throughout his vicissitudes, who seeks only to reach his birthplace and his wife and his son from the one who simply goes outside, who passes into the desert, that ‘between the shores’ which escapes interiority.

The response to the call assembles a people who are joined in a limit-experience, in the border that broadens and becomes desert. Above all, for Blanchot, it maintains ‘that Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating’. And again: ‘Judaism is the sole thought which does not mediate’. How should one understand this? The Writing of the Disaster:

Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is a Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation. Judaism is the sole thought that does not mediate. And that is why Hegel, and Marx, are anti-Judaic, not to say anti-Semitic.

Judaism maintains a point of indifference between the ordinary notions of interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside and the ‘other’ exteriority and the ‘other’ outside. It watches over this difference. 

What is refused with speech is the possibility of what will be called the master and slave dialectic which permits the mediation of the struggle between two self-consciousnesses such that a form of society is possible and eventually even the triumph of a universal state which bestows recognition upon all. Blanchot will grant ‘the dialectical fulfillment is at work, and this is necessary’ even as, alongside the dialectic, there is the relation to the outside which Judaism maintains. ‘My relation with the Other is irreducible to any measure, just as it excludes any mediation and any reference to another relation that would include it’. And it is so because it is also a relation to the outside, to the ‘other’ exteriority.

‘Jewish Thought’

A few more notes on the ‘other’ exteriority. Considering to Pasternak’s question, ‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ Blanchot responds:

I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimating movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.

What does it mean to step outside? Simply to cross a border – to move from one space into another? Blanchot: ‘the Hebrew Abraham invites us not only to pass from one shore to the other, but also to carry ourselves to wherever there is a passage to be made, maintaining this between two shores that is the truth of passage’. To pass, passage: to ‘affirm the world as passage’ as exodus and exile sets the Jew apart from the Christian for whom the here below is scorned and from the Greek who allows this world to be measured by the transcendence of light (‘truth as light, light as measure’). It is by passing beyond the horizon of light that the Jew relates ‘to what is beyond his reach’: to that of which God is a figure.

Abraham takes his family from Sumeria. Where do they pass? Into the desert that is between spaces, between sedentary states. Nomadism, migration brings those who pass in relation with what Blanchot calls ‘the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance’; when Jacob wrestles with the one he will later call an angel, he is said to become the ‘partner’ of ‘the inaccessible outside’. Jacob is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God. And the word Israel, too, will name his progeny.

Israel remains outside. The Jew is the one who maintains a relation to what is unknown, to the foreign even as this prevents the foundation of a state, which is to say, an interiority like any other. This is why Blanchot can affirm what Neher writes: ‘How can one be in Exile and in the Kingdom, at the same time vagabond and established? It is precisely this contradiction that makes the Jewish man a Jew’. The desert is not a dwelling place but the world become passage. 

But what is called speech? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. To speak is to acknowledge the Other as someone who breaks the horizon of Greek thought, who breaks with the measure of light. What does this mean?

Greek, says Levinas, ‘is the term I use to designate, above and beyond the vocabulary, grammar and wisdom with which it originated in Hellas, the manner in which the universality of the West is expressed, or tries to express itself – rising above the local particularism of the quaint, traditional, poetic, or religious’. It would thus include philosophical terms and concepts such as morphe (form) or ousia (substance) which constitute ‘a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility’.

Perhaps the most essential distinguishing feature of the language of Greek philosophy was its equation of truth with an intelligibility of presence. By this I mean an intelligibility that considers truth to be that which is present or copresent, that which can be gathered or synchronised into a totality that we would call the world or cosmos.

Blanchot will often draw a contrast between the cosmos and the disaster, naming with the latter a continuous discourse without the interruption which speech implies. What he calls Jewish thought would expose the desire for continuity it attempts to render everything intelligible and illuminable. Such a desire is predicated upon a model of intelligibility as the attempt to render everything present, to represent everything that has occurred here and now. Truth and presence and conjoined such that its terms can be presented as simultaneous and commensurable.

The acknowledgement of the Other that is called speech cannot be thought in these terms. Blanchot will draw on Levinas’s vocabulary of height and of the dissymmetrical relation whereby the Other is not measured by what I take myself to be (a subject, a citizen, an ego). The relation to the Other is a relation to the unknown, to the outside. Speech affirms the dissymmetry of this relation and hence the elevation of the Other.

The Burrow

The badger of Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ wants to bury himself so he cannot be found. He constructs a vast system of interconnected tunnels in the earth. Can he escape the predator who awaits him outside?

The inner space protects us from what is outside. We are cosy in our dwellings with our televisions and the internet which present us with a simulacrum of what is happening outside. But the outside, here, remains distant. Outside there are the streets where strangers lurk. We instruct our children not to talk to them and drive them to school in 4 X 4s. What matters is safety, and safety is inside.

But what if the interior defines the outside in such a way that it, too, remains parasitical upon the economy of interiority? Even as it is outside, exteriority, according to the conventional understanding of this word, is interiority’s other and can be measured by a common spatial unit.

What would it mean to think an exteriority that is not so interiorised – an exteriority which is never simply outside the interior? No longer is it a question of what can be withheld by a border which maintains the spatial limits of an inner domain. Think instead of the ‘other’ exteriority, one which is no longer organised by a logic of places, by the topology which would keep everything in its place.

Unfold the ‘other’ exteriority of which interiority is only a series of folds and upon which a whole tradition of interiorisation depends upon. What does this mean? The border which would separate the inside from the outside depends upon another border, a limit internal to the articulation of interiority itself. Less clearly defined, hidden in the inner space itself, is a place of struggle against the ‘other’ exteriority upon which it depends.

How should one think this place? Is this akin to the space between tectonic plates from which lava – a figure for the exteriority in question here – would well? This tempts us to think the ‘other’ exteriority spatially, losing precisely what would allow it to remain ‘other’. What, then, if we sought to understand the ‘other’ exterior non-spatially? This would mean we are in the position of Descartes trying to understand how non-extended mind comes into contact with extended body. His solution, which satisfied no one, was to claim the pineal gland permitted a mediation of extended body with non-extended thought.

A third alternative: what if the ‘other’ exteriority were understood to produce interiority? What is the outside if it cannot be so understood – as what, indeed, organises the very economy of spatiality? This drama of interiorisation, its secret struggle, occurs at the heart of interiority. The ‘other’ exterior is not a hidden place but an opening implied in the very interiorisation of the interior. It is ‘there’ as a matter of structure, of constitution. Interiority is inscribed in an exteriority it cannot control. Interiority itself is only a fold of the ‘other’ exteriority.

On this account, the whole complex of tunnels dug by the badger is no more than a series of convoluted pleats. The burrow is only contorsion of the ‘other’ exterior, its invagination. The ‘other’ exterior, then, is ‘within’ what is both inside and outside the burrow. Within both, but also outside both. It is the outside inside. Or rather, it shows there is no interiority which can ever exclude the ‘other’ exteriority. This means the badger is as exposed as he was outside his burrow. Considered in relation to the ‘other’ exteriority, he is on the plain, in the expanse of the desert, with nothing sheltering him from his enemy.

One might go further. Recalling the novel by Philip K. Dick (Eye in the Sky) whose protagonists are turned inside out, is it not that the badger himself is only an invagination of the inside? That at his heart, too, or perhaps in his stomach, there is an ongoing struggle against the outside (the stomach is an excellent example of a kind of internal frontier against exteriority. It cannot digest itself: it remains inside the body, of the body. It digests what is outside the body and allows itself to be incorporated by the body. But what if the stomach itself was only a pleat of the outside?)

Descartes writes of the idea of the infinite which is included within the finite in such a way that it reveals itself to have originated from without. It is the idea of God. Here we have a glimpse of the way in which the outside inhabits the inside. This is not to be conceived on the model of Ridley Scott’s alien, which, after a period of incubation, bursts through the stomach and into the world. It would be the glistening wall of the stomach inside and out as it is only an involution of a single smooth space.

The infinite inside the finite. This is strange to think. But only if the finite and the infinite are thought oppositionally. Perhaps the finite is only a fold of the infinite.

Caffeine

Caffeine is the greatest temptation when I work but it is also a great hindrance – yesterday’s espresso makes me feel tired today; halfway through my workday and I am already drained. How to resist going out to buy an Irn-Bru so that at least some of the afternoon is salvaged? But that would only make me tired this evening. Best to endure these hours instead, but doing what? My friends are also working, but it is a beautiful day …

A lovely vignette from a little book on Kafka. It is 1922, he is in love with Dora Diamant, a nineteen year old girl from a Hassidic background. Kafka himself has just turned forty, but they are in love and no longer does he seek to remain a distance from her as he did from Felice. ‘Felice had talked about furniture; Dora read him the royal verses of Isaiah’.

Kafka was a changed man; he broke with Prague, moved with Dora to Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, into a small apartment where his prized solitude was not possible and never missed. Dora reports how he liked her to stay with him while he write and how, at times, sitting on the sofa she fell asleep when he worked very late.

I transcribe these lines a little sadly, knowing that the idea of creating a weblog to assemble such vignettes is of little use. I will have forgotten I wrote this before a week has ellapsed. I always wondered what it would be to come across pieces I had forgotten writing; this happens often now. When did I write, say, that little piece on Antelme? I have no idea, and even though I can read from the bottom of the post what date I wrote it on, I can remember nothing of the circumstances.

Sometimes, happily, I can incorporate such posts in the book I am writing. The prose of the book is enlivened thereby – a sudden change of pace, of formality, of tone makes the text more fresh, more unexpected; something happens in the text – a leap, an acceleration, a swerve…. Still, more important to me is the silence which surrounds each post: when was it written? On what kind of day? What was it that allowed those words and not others to coalescene? Or even for words to have been formed at all?

The last of these questions is important. Plenty of posts go unfinished. A strength is required to leap from paragraph to paragraph, or even from sentence to sentence. Sometimes words themselves do not come together; a fog descends, nothing can be thought. At others, usually after caffeine, great leaps occur, ideas, half-forgotten, call out to other ideas, a little  swarm is formed. Happiness: one paragraph gives birth to another and the whole post rises shakily into the air like the Wright brothers’ aeroplane (that’s something Steve wrote to me once of a post I deleted that same day (R.M. didn’t like it); does he remember? Have I remembered rightly?)

No caffeine for me. I will have to last until tomorrow morning’s coffee. Gradually, over the next hour or two, the withdrawal symptoms will cease from the half cup of green tea I always allow myself at noon, and it will possible to return to the book.

Essential Writers

One-and-a-half hours before I meet friends for a drink and a film, I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

It is six o’clock here in the office. I arrived hungover at ten this morning; I set to work with the aim of finishing a draft of the first chapter of the book, suffice to say this was not possible. Besides me, a pile of CDs. I listen to the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies. And besides me, too, two printed out drafts of lectures W. intends to give. ‘It is not because Pascal is unhappy that he writes, he is unhappy because he writes …’

What did I do today? Any answer I give betrays the feeling that nothing happened today, and that it happened such that this nothing became tangible, ever-present, there in the blank whiteness of the sky. What I do? Nothing happened and I remember the conversation W. and I have when we are in our cups: what does it mean to write as a philosopher? What does it mean for Heidegger to write, or for Blanchot? ‘For all that he wrote on boredom,’ one of us says, ‘Heidegger knew nothing of boredom’ – ‘By writing on boredom rather than with boredom,’ says the other, ‘he betrays it.’

Steve’s new essay on Auster’s Oracle Night sent me out on the street to look for the book in question, not to buy it, but just to look. I found it in one of the two Waterstones. I wanted to confirm what Steve reported of Auster: that he is unafraid to use cliches if only to release himself from that movement of writing which would have been halted if he had paused to rephrase them. That it is writer’s block that he would avoid by so writing. Then I remembered placing a star in the margin of Josipovici’s article ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’. Here is a part of that passage:

[Johannes de Silentio] can make us feel vividly that he – and we – cannot really understand Abraham, but the implication remains that so long as he goes on writing about Abraham he himself will never be a Knight of Faith. This is Kierkegaard’s problem. He cannot remain simply ironical, like his beloved Socrates. Times have changed[….] he is committed to writing in order to make people see the lies they are telling themselves, but so long as he goes on writing he remains in the subjunctive mode and so cuts himself off from the life he most desires.

Life! Kierkegaard is like Kafka in wanting to leave writing behind. Should he stop writing?, Kierkegaard asks himself, should he take Holy Orders? Is this what God wants for him?

One could say that Kierkegaard’s personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to take pleasure in the writing process itself, but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith.

W. and I speak of a thinker we admire. ‘He is always absolutely serious’, says W., ‘it’s just as Blanchot said about Bataille: something serious is always at issue when he speaks’. I agree, remembering that W. always says the opposite of me. ‘You are my id’, W. says, ‘nothing is ever serious in our conversations’.

Does it change when we drink? I remember what Bataille reports of a drunken reading session with a friend. Drunk, they take it in turns to read aloud from a book. It is as though drinking changes the relation to the book. As though something becomes possible in the act of reading.

W. is an advocate of philosophy as friendship, as face to face contact, intimate groups of discussants, impassioned talk. I remind him of what he already knows: when Blanchot praises the seriousness of Bataille’s conversation, he is referring not to the content of what Bataille said, but to the seriousness of speech itself. What does this mean? That there is a way of communicating which interrupts the great circulation of words, which allows there to be felt a contentless declaration, a thundering silence, even a kind of call.

Blanchot had friends whom he never met. He sent short letters to them in a beautiful hand. Asked if he wanted to meet by a friend such as Edmund Jabes, he demurred. Derrida reports a dream where, speaking to Blanchot at the door of his flat, he tries to peer inside to see what is there.

Interruption. This post is growing rather long, so I will note simply that great writers, great thinkers have also sensed those interruptions which divide the facility of writing from itself. Mishima cursed the fact that a rain of words had never stopped falling within him. Bataille needed to break the smoothness of philosophical discourse. Hasn’t friendship, philosophical friendship something to do with this interruption?, I want to ask W. I am thinking of Bataille’s drunkenness, of Blanchot’s retreat, of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. I am thinking of another kind of boredom and of writing with boredom, rather than making of boredom one theme among others.

The last line of the Josipovici essay follows the last sentence I quote above:

But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call ‘essential writers’ to distinguish them from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us.

The Sound of the Crowd

What boredom may permit, it may also make impossible: bored, sick of the world, you are too bored to seek out others who are bored (and they are too bored to seek you). You’ve fallen to the bottom of the world, exhausted your strength and lost even your relationship to yourself. Bored, no one is bored in your place. An impersonal attention sees the indifferent sky above the congested streets and the flies who circle until they die in empty rooms. Bored, you watch television to assuage boredom. Never do you dream of leaving the privacy of your dwelling place for the streets, those same streets where others may gather in their boredom  and where flames the trail which might bear you to the future.

And yet boredom can volatilise into a stubborn refusal of constituted powers – those dangerous, spontaneous movements which hover between revolution and surfascism, between the great overturning that would bring a fiery new world into being and the desire for a leader to capitalise upon the excess that has been unleashed.

Surfascism: this was the accusatory word thrown at Bataille after his attempt alongside the Surrealists, to turn French workers away from fascism by drawing on the same forces to which fascism unleashed. Contre-Attaque, as it was called, attempted to turn the enthusiasm of the crowd onto a legitimate target – to awaken that great refusal which was also a refusal of capitalism. It finds its analogue, Blanchot is right to argue, in the Events of May 1968 in Paris.

What is the call that is heard on the streets? What is it that opens me to the future? Already Heidegger points the way with the call of conscience: it calls silently; it awakens me from the anonymity of Das Man, Dasein is called to its authenticity, to resolutely bring itself into relation with its death such that it lifts itself from the others. But the anonymity Dasein departs is a figure for the anonymity of the crowd, of those who cross the threshold that would allow each to become responsive to the Other in a new way; where each shares a response to a kind of speech. Once again, it is a silence, a kind of hole in apparent completeness of the babble of the world.

A silence? But listen closely and you will hear a murmuring – similar, perhaps, to what K. hears on the other end of the telephone line when he seeks to speak to the castle – a thundering silence that cuts through all speech which would reduce the other person to a cultural category. Who awakens? What awakens? Not authentic Dasein, summoned to itself, living each moment as a moment saved from death – the Dasein bound to itself and to being in the relation Heidegger calls mineness [Jemeinigkeit] – but the no-one-in-particular, the anyone-whatsoever who is each member of the crowd. The danger is clear: without the resoluteness, the will to which Heidegger appeals, there will be dissipation, the crowd will fall back into blandness before anything is accomplished; it remains an unruly magma and not yet a Volk.

Still, one would also have to ask what Heidegger himself fears in the same magma. What is the call that is no longer a call to authenticity, to the assumption of finite existence? Perhaps it comes not from Dasein itself, but from others, but others of the crowd. Perhaps the call is what happens when one bored individual has found others, too, who are bored, and that boredom hardens into a refusal. The thematics of mood in Being and Time is subordinated to mineness – to the attempt of Dasein to bring itself to itself, but the indication is there.

When, shortly after Being and Time, Heidegger will write of an anxiety which suspends the relation of Dasein to itself, to its world, but which yet also reveals the condition of Dasein and the world: bare Dasein in its bare transcendence, he is close to a reflection on the relation to being which sees it, from the first, as interrupting the relation of the self with itself. An interruption such that the being-there of Dasein reveals itself as an usurpation. Dasein is no longer, it is true, rooted in itself, cleaving unto itself, but ek-static, futural, it is launched at its death, but this is because of a reaction in it has closed itself to what boredom might reveal: the anonymous crowd as the field in which a kind of circulation occurs such that each takes the place of the Other, as that zone where the great usurpation reveals itself in its ignominy.

Those who are brought into the condition of responding to others out of the same experience of boredom, the same experience of the nullity of the quotidian, the same nihilism hear, witness the relation to a turning over of being and nothingness which outplays nihilism. Who calls me? If I am interpellated, it is only by what calls the ‘il’ forward in me. If I am called, it is by what dissolves me as a consumer, as a vendor, as a client, as a worker. This is the holiday of the crowd, its spontaneous festivity.

The call of conscience and the related notion of witnessing sees several metamorphoses throughout Heidegger’s career. By the mid 1930s and ‘Holderlin and the essence of Poetry’, it has transformed into the call to a Volk to come which resounds through the poem. When Blanchot writes on Holderlin, it is to reveal that the condition of modernity is the impossibility of assembling such a Volk. In Adorno’s words: ‘You can build a temple, but you can’t bring a god down to haunt it’.

Of course in his youth, too, Blanchot himself dreamt of a return to the proper body of the nation. Was this was his moment of surfascism? Perhaps the formerly right-wing monarchist Blanchot was disingenuous when he presumed in The Unavowable Community to speak of his and Bataille’s history in the 1930s as if they were parallel (‘notre historie’ …) Yet when Michael Holland worries there is a return to the same kind of rhetoric in Blanchot’s anonymous writings of May 1968 he passes over the fact that the idea of revolt, of uprising and refusal is no longer linked to a father or a fatherland. Thus Blanchot’s Lenin: the one who calls us to go outside …

But the thematics of the crowd are only a manifestation of what Lenin called spontaneism: an uprising will achieve nothing without organisation. Zizek has recently reminded us of this; recalling the Events of May 1968, Derrida will also voice a similar concern: he disliked ‘vibrating in unision’, he says, and even then, the Events are not yet a politics. Communism remains etiolated unless it joins the call to go outside with a determinate political programme. But the word might name a way of linking the common presence of the crowd with a political party, a spontaneous refusal without limits to the revolutionary fire which would sweep the old world away.

The Critique of Everyday Life

If I have made a discovery through writing here it is only one of what I have always tried to suppress: empty time, unemployment, watching dust motes in the air.  Why did this come to me? Because I write here when I cannot write elsewhere; this is a fallen writing which cannot assemble itself into a whole. Sometimes I fantasise that this same experience of inadequacy, of inadequation, but above all, of what might be called the quotidian might have some strange political force, that boredom and lassitude place strange weapons in our hands.

The quotidian (there’s a bug in Typepad which is preventing me using the word in the title of this post): who would look to it for liberatory force? Is it not what reveals itself in the stagnant provinces of Chekhov’s plays? Or in the pettiness of life in the midst of the vast bureaucracies of which Kafka writes? The quotidian appears to be superficiality itself; it is that experience of nullity that reveals itself in tedium and boredom. Whence the desire to escape from the quotidian through the busyness Heidegger calls Erlebnis, the active seeking of sensation. Heidegger considers the quotidian under the heading of inauthenticity; this is not intended as a moral category, he insists, but this is disingenuous. When he writes of idle curiosity and aimless chatter his tone is unmistakably condemnatory.

There is no question that the quotidian can lapse into the most grave depoliticisation: we watch television by ourselves in the evening, each separated from another in our houses. But the quotidian also contains the potential for a repoliticisation: the streets from which revolutions are born are part of the same ordinary life. ‘The quotidian is not at home in our dwelling places’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is not in offices or churches any more than in libraries or museums. If it is anywhere, it is in the streets’. In the streets: in the essay from which I am quoting, Blanchot is writing of Lefebvre’s studies of the  quotidian and wondering to himself what sense there might be in calling for a critique of quotidian life.

What would such a critique imply? For Lefebvre, the quotidian is an untapped political reserve. The fluidity and contingency of quotidian life is always made to conform to an overall order, a system of purposes, meanings and values. Yet there is always a deviation, always unintended deflections which no longer aim to produce an outcome linked to the social whole. Such purposelessness appear spontaneously in quotidian life. To dream idly, to read, to write: such actions are undertaken for their own sake; they have a dynamism and fluidity which escapes the attempt to bind quotidian actions to what is productive or efficient.

This is why the quotidian is always suspect: it is the breeding ground of ideologies. This is why the secret police keep files on everyone, why Mandelstam’s friends had to memorise poems of which no written copy could exist. An analogous fascination drives the market researcher: what is that determines why it is this product that is purchased and not that one? When politicians use focus groups, it is in order to predict and contain the quotidian: to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups in order to target them by specific methods.

You’ve see someone on the street you half-recognise. Who is it? She resembles your friend, and yet she is an anonymous passerby. Yet in the moment of non-recognition it is as though you caught sight of the anonymity of the quotidian itself. Here is another experience of the image of the Other that would allow the relation to any given human being to become indefinite. I have experienced the nudity of the Other – of the other person who no longer presents herself within the cultural categories which allow me to determine my relations to others. The Other, now, keeps me at a distance, at her distance.

The philosophical suspicion of the quotidian lies in this same anonymity. The quotidian human being is anyone at all. I am Heidegger’s Das Man, never yet myself, always distracted and dilatory, ill-disciplined and irresolute and unaware, above all, of the fact I will die. But Heidegger’s recipe for authenticity betrays something telling: what is feared is the limitlessness of the quotidian, its indefinite expansiveness. After claiming the quotidian is capable of ‘ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity’, Blanchot observes:

Day-to-day indifference is situated on a level at which the question of value is not posed: there is [il y a] the quotidian (without subject, without object), and while there is, the quotidian ‘il’ does not have to be of account; if value nonetheless claims to step in, then ‘il’ is worth ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ is worth anything through contact with him. To experience quotidianness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is something like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, quotidianness does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique.

Such nihilism (see the posts at Philosophical Conversations) suspends the relation to death what would allow us to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity. It suspends values, meaning and truth. It is experienced as a wearing away of the power to decide, to resolve, to bring oneself into relation to oneself. The ‘il’, the companion is the ‘subject’ of the quotidian, understood as the locus of experience of the il y a.

What does this mean? In his early writings, Levinas writes of the impersonal “il” as the locus of an an exposure, an opening to what Levinas calls existence in general, existence, as he puts it, without existents: the il y a. The il y a is not linked, unlike Heidegger’s “es gibt” according to Levinas, to “the joy of what exists” but to “the phenomenon of impersonal being,” or what he calls in another essay, “horrible neutrality”. If the “I” opens from the “il” , it does not leave it behind; the il y a may always return. If it does so it is as a horrifying eruption of chaos and indeterminacy. But why does the ‘il y a’ need to be horrifying? Could this ontological insecurity permit the world we share and the others with whom we share it to bring us into relation with what escapes determination?

There is the quotidian : the quotidian is without subject or object; the locus of the experience of the quotidian is the ‘il’: Blanchot presents the quotidian itself as existence without existents, as the il y a and as, here, what is called nihilism. Yet it is not horror he links to the ‘il y a’ of the everyday, but boredom. It is boredom which plays the role of the Grundstimmung which opens up the quotidian.

There is the quotidian: each in the quotidian exists, through boredom, in relation to what is called the ‘il y a’ – to the there is of chaos and indeterminacy. Comes the moment of critique when it is such boredom that brings us together: when we respond to the summons of the Other such that it brings forward in each of us what is called the ‘il‘, the impersonal opening. Critique comes as the everyday allows there to awaken the sharing of that great reserve named by the ‘il y a‘. Thus it is that shared boredom causes there to be born the great movements of rebellion, where each is the passerby and the utopic space of the street bears us towards the future.

The Double

Remembering Sartre’s analyses of Giacometti’s sculptures, as well as thinking of the relationship Charlotte Street draws between the double and the uncanny, I wonder whether Giacometti might be said to reveal not the movement of the living, but a strange restlessness which belongs to the dead. What if Jesus’s command, ‘Lazarus, venture forth’ brought forward not the living Lazarus but the one who was still dead, the corpse still wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of decaying flesh? Perhaps it is this command to which Giacometti’s sculptures would have responded.

Blanchot remarks of Kafka’s The Castle that it is as though the distance the reader normally has with respect to the text had withdrawn into the text itself. As though the distance which is normally permitted to readers had been withdrawn and the reader is pressed up against what might be called the materiality of language. What if one were to understand a similar withdrawal of the normal distance a sculpture permits into Giacometti’s sculpture itself? (Sartre has begun to understand this …)

Blanchot writes of a ‘passion for the image’, that fascination which reveals to us a kind of shadow of an real thing. It is as though what was revealed came before the thing – as though the image were its condition of possibility and not the other way round. Strange priority. The image is what a thing is when it turns from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it: it is what resists the very impulse of our existence, that is, to create meaning, to as it were ‘exist’ things into being, bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. No longer is the thing what offers itself to be deployed; no longer, indeed, does it exist at any distance from me at all. Fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing up against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.

The corpse would exist in the manner of the image of the human being such that, with the cadaver before me, I see what life dissimulated: the presence of the familiar other as it is caught, implicated by a kind of unfamiliarity, an uncanniness. I have lost my bearings with respect to the one who died; I am fascinated, instead, with the indefinite, senseless opacity of a body. Such is the situation where, for Blanchot, a corpse begins to resemble itself: it is the image that, at the heart of the living body, hides itself insofar as the living are caught up in our existence in a manner analogous to things. For the most part, cultural categories mediate our relationships: you are my colleague or a vendor, I am a patient or a service provider; each of us disappears for others into the roles we are made to perform. But what happens when the body holds me at its distance? What happens when I confront the image of the other person?

‘Each living man, really, does not yet have any resemblance’, Blanchot writes; ‘each man, in the rare moments when he shows a similarity to himself, seems to be only more distant, close to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and in some sense his own ghost, already having no other life than that of the return’. One should understand by analogy with Blanchot’s remarks on the image of the thing. The image confronts us when the thing is put out of use, when it no longer has any value with respect to the tasks and projects which occupy us. The thing fails, but even as it disappears from our world, it brings us into contact with the image that as it were keeps its distance at its heart.

What is the image? One might think of it as the materiality of the thing, as its silent weight or presence as it fails to offer itself to the light of meaning. Then with respect to the image of the other person, it is as though the cultural categories which organise our relationship to others in a manner analogus to the way in which our tasks and projects organise our relationship with things have failed. But if these categories can no longer guide us, if it is the other, finally, who is to be revealed, it may appear to have happened too late: the one before me is, on Blanchot’s presentation, is a corpse, or is close to being one.

Perhaps Giacometti’s sculptures remind us of this other. This is because they do not, as Sartre writes, ‘inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’, but indicate another movement, a kind of restlessness. The image is the ‘other’ Lazarus who responds to the call ‘Lazarus venture forth’.

Dust of Space

Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’. But how will be do this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands …’

Giacometti’s workshop is full of dust, everything is covered in the dust of his tenacious carving. Still, if he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments. ‘Giacometti’s substance–this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face–is the dust of space’.

The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect the monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’ Everything is function: reading these lines is to be reminded of the terms Sartre sets in motion in Being and Nothingness: projection, transcendence, the struggle to exist …

Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.

How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to realise blocky substantiality, imposing presence: to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance, but it is the absolute that is lost. For he carries with him the presumption that the human occupies perceived space as would any object.

Then how might one sculpt the absolute? When Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective – when he as it were pushes the sculpture back into an indefinite space, it is at the same absolute he aims. Sartre emphasises that for Giacometti, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure "ten steps away" or "twenty steps away," and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster–the liberation of Art.’ The image is liberated from the material; it becomes art insofar as it is released into the indefinite.

What does this mean? For Giacometti, certainly, sculptors have been guilty in not sculpting what they see:

Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.

He goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdin, which has a realistic look’. Giacometti also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’. The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.

For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’. The sculptor is able to close the gap between that great bursting forth, existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What is seen is what we live.

Of one sculpture, Sartre writes:

The martyred creature was only a woman but she was all woman –glimpsed, furtively desired, retreating in the distance with the comic dignity of fragile, gangling girls walking lazily from bed to bathroom in their high-heeled shoes and with the tragic horror of scarred victims of a holocaust or famine; all woman–exposed, rejected, near, remote; all woman–with traces of hidden leanness showing through alluring plumpness and hideous leanness mollified by suave plumpness; all woman–in danger here on earth but no longer entirely on earth, living and relating to us the astounding adventure of flesh, our adventure. For she chanced to be born, like us.

Our adventure, our existence, our life: we see ourselves in his sculpted woman. What is doubled, what I see, is the springing forth of what, in me, is as yet undetermined. Would it be possible to say, for Sartre, that before Giacometti’s sculptures I come face to face with my freedom?

Passing

Talking to W., who is the great scourge of careerism, makes me ask myself: am I a careerist? I say to myself: when you first began to study as a postgraduate it was only as a ruse to allow you to —–. But what word should I write there? But there is no word – it was a question of a future, a stretch of time in which to be no one in particular. What did I want? To pass across philosophy as a stone is skimmed across water (the word passing is a lovely one; it reminds me of some lines in Char …) I think of Belle and Sebastian’s ‘A Summer Wasting’: a song about time that goes nowhere, the time of river banks and wandering. W. tells me how hard he studied: I never drank, I never smoked, I spent all the time in the library.

Comes a time when you have to begin to write what are called primary texts. When does it come? When through some strange leap you gain the courage to begin. But what kind of courage is this? From where does it get its strength, its conviction? Zizek says if it were not for Lacan, he would have remained a dabbler, writing on Derrida one day and Deleuze the next. He committed himself; he leapt. I’ve always told W. that it’s a matter of writing, writing – write enough, I tell him, and ideas will come, and then the leap can be made. But then I think to myself, you do not have the strength for such a leap, you’re too weak and all this writing disperses you in too many directions …

Zizek remarks that film was his first love; philosophy came after. I’ve often wondered whether those for whom philosophy was their first love are paralysed by that love; they cannot begin to write. Yes, I write, and soon I would like to begin a primary text (laughter as I write this). But this is, as I always tell W., born from an empty desire to make a book. A desire to make something pretty, dense and writerly. And to sing/speak of those few themes which make my blood rush. You have to become a name, W. reminds me, to write such a book. He means the book would have to sell.

‘What if I wrote a book on Smog, or on Will Oldham?’ I ask him. ‘You’d need to prove you could make money to the publishers.’ – ‘How many copies would I have to sell?’ – ‘I don’t know.’ – ‘Five thousand copies?’ – ‘Something like that. Do some research.’

Passing. The book I dream of, as I have written before, is called Common Presence. It will include essay/dreams on Tarkovsky, Shostakovich, each only five or six pages long … and what else? I have little idea of what its pages will contain. And I dream of another book, too, a kind of phantom autobiography. A book about a life with the name: a life …

Always the dream of passing, of moving without disturbing anything in the world. And I remember Deleuze and Guattari on becoming-infinitesimal, and the last lines of The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I say to myself: pass between the molecules. Write a book on the blank pages of the sky and the earth …