12 Years Old

1.

I have read several things today. Firstly, I finished Quotes, by J. G. Ballard. Then, there was the short version of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939. Finally, Josipovici’s preface to Appelfeld’s The Retreat. The following is a peculiar attempt to tie them together; it is only provisional (well, what post isn’t?).

J. G. Ballard was 12 when he was taken into the prison camps of Shanghai. There, he loses faith in his parents, who were imprisoned with him, and, perhaps, with the adult world altogether. It is all imposture, he thinks to himself, and when later he goes to live in Britain with his family, a country he had not seen before, he finds more imposture. As he begins to write, he understands his role is to articulate upon the new psychopathies which have appeared in the wake of Hiroshima. If the first half of the twentieth century belonged to Surrealism, the second half will belong to science fiction, he thinks to himself.

Graham Greene: The place reminded her of a seedy hotel, yellowing mirrors in the bathrooms, broken toilet bowls and dripping taps, where the chambermaids spoke in impertinent voices and the doormen reached out to them with their big, strong hands.

Ballard admires Greene. Why? Because Greene would have disclosed, for his characters, the latent content of the world. Ballard, of course, is thinking of Freud, certainly, but more especially of Surrealism, for which it is a matter of discovering the path desire lays before us – a difficult task because we have been disenfranchised from our desire by the reign of logic, of rationalism, and by a civilisation which requires we are enchained to the work we do to make a living. Ballard admires Greene as an author who shows how the world is already invested, changed, constituted by our desire.

Josipovici, commenting on the same passage from Greene: ‘A novelist like Greene is always out to make an effect; his eye is on the reader. Appelfeld, by contrast, is trying to catch the truth: his eye is on the object’. For Jospovici, truth is a quality of the world itself, of the disclosedness of the world the novelist can accomplish for the reader. The novelist’s eye would be on that disclosedness and not on the reader; he is not trying to seduce or to flatter; he is not intent upon demonstrating his authorly virtuosity or prowess; what he wants is to tell the truth. And to be truthful is to attend to the solidity of the world, the way it stands beyond what you and I make of it. That is to say, the world resists the measure of the ‘I’; it is not constituted by the protagonist of the story but is there before him; it precedes the entrance of the protagonist on stage and will outlast him.

One might say Josipovici understands the way a protagonist inherits a world, is thrown there, and must make his way there, struggling against everything which resists his powers. Only what resists, ultimately, is the world itself – yes, the stubbornness and opacity of what remains as the world after human beings pass through it. Greene’s fault is to have forgotten this stubbornness. Appelfeld, however, turns to the world, to what remains. Josipovici finds him ‘summing up the world in a gesture which is neither quite internal nor quite external …’; we recognise in his work ‘that the miracle of literary art is that by a fusion of the imaginative and the verbal the entire complex tangle of reality which would otherwise remain forever closed to us is caught and conveyed’. Reality is too complex to be reduced to a subjective impression – this, perhaps, is the kernel of Josipovici’s argument. Greene would remain at the level of the subjective.

What might Ballard reply? That the world is experienceable only in terms of the constituting activity of the psychopathologies which traverse us. There have always been psychopathies; once they were called myth; now, having spread across the world, we need no name for them other than reality. Psychopathies alter. ‘Computer punchtape, old telephone manuals, printed circuitry whose alphabets have died, the luminescent bodies of dead spacemen – all these form part of the astronomy of dreams that full our heads’. Whence Crash, in which the fantasies of its protagonists are a deliberate attempt to remake the world.

‘Crash is about the unconscious marriage which takes place between the human imagination and technology, the way in which modern technology offers us a back-door pass into the realm of psychopathology’. A marriage, then, which a kind of speculative fiction can reveal.

‘Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to derive the arts, sciences and industries of the world’. This is why, for Ballard, Greene points a way which other realist novels do not. But Greene only points; new psychopathies are the topic of science fiction. Thus it is that science fiction is the literary art of the twentieth century. The twentieth century would have seen only two genuinely artistic movements: Surrealism and science fiction. A claim I found wholly plausible for many years.

2.

I read almost nothing but science fiction until I was 20. What changed? What changed for me? A great deal is at stake in this question. When I reread what I write, I always think: ‘this could have been written in the 1950s’. When I watch the news, I think: ‘why can’t I write about cloning and stem cell research instead of writing?’ When I visit an art gallery, I think: ‘why don’t I write about new media art rather than literature.’ And when I try to write philosophy, I think: ‘why am I fixated on writing, on the infinitive, to-write?’

In a study on science fiction, Thomas M. Disch recalls claim that science fiction is aimed at 12 year olds. Who else but the 12 year old in you enjoys Star Wars? Is there a time to put childish things aside, to turn from science fiction altogether? It would be interesting to construct a reading autobiography – to tell one’s life through the books I read. When I was 12, The Drowned World, at 13, Barefoot in the Head, at 14, The Terminal Beach, at 15 the short stories of James Tiptree Jr. and Robert Zelazny. At 20, Rilke and Stevens, at 21, Pessoa and Proust.

But it is age 22 that is the great turning point. That year, leaving university for unemployment and sporadic temping, I became a re-reader, endlessly returning to those works in which I discovered an acknowledgement of the emptiness of my life and a door leading somewhere else. A door which was not the finely imagined world of the science fiction, but the heaviness of a prose on the edges of poetry, of a writing which answered to stultifying boredom of adult life. At 20, Camus and Sartre disgusted me; I liked Lawrence. By 22, I knew only a kind of impotency, a vast failure. Even Burroughs, whom I discovered at 21, had become dead to me. Soon Beckett’s Trilogy would open to engulf me. I wandered in its labyrinth. Finally, the miraculous year 1993, a time of the greatest despair and the greatest happiness. What did I write in the cover of Inner Experience when I first came across it? I won’t transcribe it here.

What it was to be rescued by books! Of course, I’d long since forgotten science fiction, even Gene Wolfe and John Crowley seemed unimportant to me – yes, even the author of the magnificentBook of the New Sun. Why? I don’t have an answer. I want to return to these books; I will. Then, busy studying, I stopped reading fiction for many years. When I restarted, I wanted plain prose, simplicity. I wanted a sense of the resistance of the world to human desire. This married with my philosophical interest in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as he writes of the resistance of earth to world – of the drama of what might be called earthing and worlding – and of course, in Blanchot’s work as it was written in the margins of Heidegger’s. Increasingly, I had a sense of the great catastrophes of the 20th century, of the wreckage of the dream of reconciling work and freedom.

It was not that I discovered the hell of Auschwitz in Beckett or of Treblinka in Blanchot. It was never that simple! But there was a sense of shame, as Levi might call it, the shame of being human. And I sought a literature that would have acknowledged that shame understanding that the resistance of the world, its stubbornness, its materiality, would also offer a kind of hope. This is what I discovered in Appelfeld, reading The Age of Wonders last year. In Bernhard’s Extinction, too. What could science fiction mean to me now?

3.

Josipovici notes that Appelfeld has no interest in repeating the story of German atrocities. ‘What happened to the Jews in the Second World War is beyond tragic’, says Appelfeld in an interview, ‘It is impossible to understand it. We are not able to think about the death of a single individual, a close person, a single one. How can we think about hundreds and thousands of people?’ Josipovici comments: ‘Instead, he concentrates on those things that can be imagined, on the temptations of the imagination. His theme is the folly of willful blindness and the inability of imagination to face reality’. Thus the Jews of the town of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 imagine the coming war could pass them by.

Freud did not follow the Surrealists in their great confidence at unleashing psychopathology. Perhaps he was too pessimistic regarding the darkness of our desires. After all, it was Hitler the masses wanted in the years he was writing Civilisation and its Discontents. Ballard acknowledges this darkness: ‘Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatred that could liberate them’. Still, the same psychopathy can permit other ways of breaking out. It drives science fiction; it drives that fiction which does not turn away from the transformation of our desires.

Ballard’s fiction is a turn to inner space, not outer space. He was despised by fellow science fiction writers for that reason, he remembers. But he insists on what he calls mythologisation: that attempt on the part of his characters to make sense of the world through the construction of a private myth. ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’: ‘Already he seemed to have decided that she was leaving him only in the sense that she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and that he might save her by constructing a unique flying machine’.

There is always the possibility of meaning, for Bataille. That possibility lies in psychopathy, in the active embrace of mythologisation. How else does Jim survive in the prison camps of Empire of the Sun? But Jim is a child. How old is he? 12? Are we all to become 12 year olds, then? The drama of Ballard’s stories lies in the way his protagonists will attempt to create meaning, to make the world make sense. They run up against non-meaning: massive trauma, nuclear testing in the Pacific, the Shanghai prison camp and impose meaning on their trauma. Ballard focuses on things which cannot be imagined and shows how imagination works nonetheless. The marvel of The Atrocity Exhibition lies in this.

Still, I wonder whether there is something which resists the imaginative transmogrification of the world. Something remains of the untransformed Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company. Eniwetok endures even amidst ‘The Terminal Beach’. This ‘what remains’ Josipovici would call it truth. Heidegger would call truth what happens as earth and world struggle each against the other. Truth, he might say, is forged in the relation between meaning and non-meaning. Crucially, for Heidegger, non-meaning presents itself in the work of art. It presses towards us, its viewers. Is this what happens in a story by Ballard? What comes towards us? The words he uses and luxuriates in again and again; favourite sentence structures … yes, all this is there, and we are indulged as his readers.

But I have set a whole swarm of questions in motion: When did my desire to be indulged come to an end?, I ask myself. When did I seek a plainer prose and for what reasons? Why did I leave Ballard’s narrative feast behind? I could write, because I was tired of being 12, but this is unfair. There is a better answer: Ballard tries to organize the economy of meaning and non-meaning in terms of what he calls mythology. He allows his characters to come to dwell in the mythologies they make for themselves from the psychpathies that pass across them. They are not sedentary, living in a version of the Heideggerian polis, but move, drifting across a landscape. Think of Kerans of The Drowned World, forever moving South. But even as they move there is something they do not confront: the bareness of non-meaning itself. They move through a world, but what happens when the world vanishes? What would happen when they confront that bareness upon which they cannot project their dreams? This moment is not marked explicitly in Ballard’s text. It is there implicitly, it is true – but I suppose I wanted to read a fiction where it was more strongly marked.

Ballard was 12 in the Shanghai prison camp. He fantasized; he would continue to do so when he returned to Britain, a country much duller than it is today. He fantasized, he seized upon today’s psychopathies, he wrote, and marked, in his own way, that great voiding of meaning which lies at the heart of the twentieth century. He marked it – but where? In the way the protagonist of The Atrocity Exhibition must always be re-named. He is Travers then Traven, then … And in the rhythm, of the repetition of that book and others like it (Crash). At the hinge, articulating this books, is the experience which opens itself to the reader of Ballard as to the reader of Appelfeld: the void of meaning, the need to mythologise again, and again. Yes, but in Appelfeld this need is expressed as such. It is there and it is present. Perhaps.

Ballard has written a great deal. I detect in the repetition of the same cluster of themes the same repetition we find in Freud’s young grandson flinging a cotton reel into his curtained cot with a sadistic ‘ooo’ and then retrieving it with a satisfied ‘aahh’. The child’s mother is dead; for Freud, his grandson seeks an aesthetic mastery of this loss. He hears ‘fort’ (gone) and ‘da’ (here) in the child’s phonemes and interpets the spool-play as a kind of gambling with loss. Every story Ballard writes sends the spool into the cot. When he purposely fails to complete them, allowing one to overlap with another, what is marked is a loss without recompense. Life is only a detour through which death sends life to itself, Freud muses. So too are Ballard’s stories and that science fiction of inner space as they bring us over and again to the disaster areas of the twentieth century. But there is another way in which those disaster areas ask to be written.

Impotency

W. and I are often drawn to discuss questions of sincerity. ‘Why did X write that book? What did it mean for him?’ As if one should only write when everything is at stake in the act of writing. As though writing were tauromachy.

‘… to lay bear one’s heart, to write that book about oneself in which the concern for sincerity would be carried to such lengths that, under the author’s sentences, ‘the paper would shrivel and flare at each touch of his fiery pen’. That was Michel Leiris. ‘To write a book that is an act’: but what would this mean for him? His answer may seem disappointing: to effect a kind of catharsis, to be absolved, to confess …

There is a picture of the author on the back cover of the book. I think to myself: this man is sincere. He is dressed in what I imagine is an English suit; his large eyes, deep set and spaced widely in a bull’s head which rests upon broad shoulders suggest depth, fear and intractability. Here is an obstinate man, a stubborn one, but one who searches. A man of what would come to be called experience (I am thinking of the term Foucault uses for Breton, Bataille and Blanchot in an interview he gave on the occasion of Breton’s death). I recognise in Leiris a fellow Taurean.

Manhood carries the dedication: ‘To Georges Bataille, who is at the origin of this book’. The parallels are clear: both have a fascination with bullfighting completely distinguishable (or is it?) from Hemingway’s machismo. Both speak of their sexual impotence, although both frequent brothels and are drawn to sadomasochism; both orbit the Surrealists and both leave at the same point (Leiris will join Bataille’s circle); both are men of sincerity.

Reading the first few dozen pages of Manhood, I sigh to myself and wonder whether I should trace all the classical references I find there. Who is Lucrene?, I ask myself, Who is Holofernes? But then: I don’t care, and turn the pages rapidly, half watching The Last Days of Disco instead.

Leiris, I think to myself, is like an author of the eighteenth century: his classical prose protects him from that of which he would write. He is a man who wants to be understood; he keeps his paragraphs short; he writes precisely, with an anthropologist’s eye. And he writes of preoccupations that are recognisably Bataillean, and I wonder whether he is just one of those men strongly influenced by others (I am thinking of my disappointment reading the pages Antelme and Mascolo wrote on The Writing of the Disaster; they repeat Blanchot’s formulations without, it seems, being aware of what it might be to understand them, or at least allow them space to resonate, still thinking it worthy of publishing their meditations …) Ah, I think to myself: he links death to eroticism, and writes of the little death of orgasm. I admit, I am bored of these themes.

But as the book continues, Leiris shows what he previously only deigns to state: that conjunction of a death-obsession with a blocked desire to give himself to another; thus will he take his homosexual friend in his mouth and allow himself to be taken in turn; thus his nights of dancing and bar-hopping. ‘Jazz was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colours of the moment‘; Leiris will describe the religious moment of ‘communion by dance’ which led him to the dream of a black Eden and to those anthropological adventures which took him to Africa.

I begin to understand: what appears to be a classical prose is one braced against the experiences it allows Leiris to convey. It is made to take a wrong turn; it drinks but remains upright, it staggers as it dances. ‘I made her and the madam slap me until my face was black and blue; enjoying themselves, the two women, when they saw me grinning, struck me all the harder, saying: "You ready for some more, you old bugger?"’

Leiris’s story speeds up towards the end. And, as it speeds, something assembles itself as the book which recalls me to Breton’s Nadja (it’s closing pages) and even Maldoror (though that book is too exhausting): yes, the book as though spreads itself above me in the sky. The marvel: the confession upon which it would bear is not personal. As Leiris describes the process which leads him to regard writing more highly than any other activity, his prose achieves that great indication which allows it to achieve a kind of life. No longer is a story reported to me; no longer am I referred to what would have occurred outside the text: the text itself speaks, and speaks in every part of itself. The whole text speaks.

I think to myself: anyone could write a text like this. Anyone, that is, who had a friend like Masson to encourage him. And then I think: anyone writes and by writing achieves what the Chinese calligrapher can achieve by one stroke: a life and writing united in a single stroke.

Should one write personal blogs or not? Begin by writing something personal, and something else might occur. Best of all when this ‘something else’ delivers itself by way of the personal and returns there, when it is contextualised so that the leap (or the failure to leap: impotence) reveals itself. Impotence: yes, that is the word as it would refer, now, to the impossibility of letting the book drop away from what it would designate. Manhood does not refer, it is; it is not the windowpane through which one can see the events of which it would report, it is those events itself.

Is ‘impotency’ a word? It should be; let it be the word which remembers the failure to leap and transcend itself that allows a book like Manhood (but how many books are like Manhood?) to as it were collapse into itself and carry its reader with it. Impotency: a sign to the blogger to write while failing to write, to let what is personal collapse even in the midst of the personal, and to confess only the impossibility of grasping an experience that does not so much vouchsafe itself in writing, offering itself to any and all, as keep itself in words and sentences, locked there. Until writing serves neither to hide or illuminate any personal secret, attaining a density which is born of the continual collapse into itself.

Attain that speed which allows writing to become itself. Follow writing as by the same stroke it offers itself to be read and flees that reading, as it passes through what is written as between the shores of meaning and non-meaning.

Rooms

Nearly midnight. I’ve opened a bottle of wine from Marks and Spencers. How could I resist? There were three bottles lined up on the shelf; now there are two. I am thinking of cheese, but, knowing myself too well, I do not keep any food in the flat. Today I went to the gym, but couldn’t manage more than half an hour; I do not deserve a square meal.

Freedom! What it is, even on a Friday night, to write whatever I like! Where will the blind desire to write lead me? How many times the same situation and the same question? A question asked by writing, in writing. I know I’d like to write on the figure of the golem, following some reflections at Charlotte Street a while back, but my notes are in the office. I deliberately stripped my flat of books; there’s only a dozen or so here, kept so R.M. can see at one glance what I bought on my trip to America. They are in the other room, one I rarely use. It is there, open, barely filled, empty as though it were thinking for me, in my place. This room is where everything happens when I am alone. But what happens?

I wonder to myself: what if I were to attempt to uncover the latent structure of my world? What would I uncover? And my first response: rooms, a succession of rooms where writing was succesful or unsuccesful. But why is my memory as though snagged so it is always in a room I think of myself? If I had it to hand, I would reread Flusser’s beautiful essay on architecture, on a house which did not enclose a place but opened it, offered it to the air. I think of Rilke’s Open, too and even as I write the word Rilke, I feel both calmer and as though an animal were watching me.

In Monterey, we sat in the morning sun, my sister, her husband and I, and discussed what animals they were to get when they returned to London. A puppy? A kitten and a puppy? Or – best of all – a kitten, a puppy, a pony and a parrot? Drew said I could keep the parrot, and I thought to myself: I would rather not have an animal at all. To have the eyes of an animal on you is to be interpellated, called, such that writing is difficult. Yes, to write with an animal near is to do so as an ‘I’, as an intact and self-present ‘I’, sure of itself as one who is responsible for animals, who keeps them, tends to them, in that space where he is master.

A second glass of wine. Now I think to myself: you were a reader of speculative fiction, of science and fiction and science fact – what happened? You started this blog to broaden your field of interests, to write on what you had not written, but what did you find? A narrowing – there was an intensity of focus, it is true, but on themes which were already entrenched. Ballard writes his imagination were as though hardwired at age 15; he had survived a prisoner of war camp, of course, where he had witnessed the weaknesses of his parents. His father, he recalls, although physically affectionate, was one to whom Ballard felt less close after the war. He had seen too much weakness! The film-set world of old Shanghai fell apart rapidly.

‘All you can do is cling to your own obsessions – all of them, to the end. Be honest with them; identify them. Construct your own personal mythology out of them and follow that mythology; follow those obsessions like stepping stones in front of a sleepwalker’. That was Ballard. One of the great idiocies of Eco was to claim the novelist is trapped in her memories and her psyche. Why didn’t he understand how our world, for each of us, is full of a latent content which outstrips anything personal? My gratitude to Ballard is immense; I read him at an early age and immediately loved his work. I will not speak of it today, except to note that it attests to the infinite opening of the world to each of us, of a private pathology which breaks all our horizons. It is the key to blogging, do you understand that?

I listen to A Bed of Roses by Lal Waterson and Oliver Knight as I type. I am waiting for ‘The Last Days of Disco’ to start and turning through Ballard’s Quotes. ‘Inner Space: that’s the name to which Ballard linked his fictions in the 60s – as opposed, of course, to outer space. ‘My characters are almost all engaged in mythologising themselves and in then exploding that mythology to the furthest end, whatever the price’. To explode one’s mythology – but what does that mean?

Understand that The Kindness of Women was where I stopped reading Ballard. This book made me shudder. I saw him speak around that time and that ended forever my desire to meet authors. I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books, ‘TIME ZONE’ in capital letters, remembering what he wrote of deep time and archaeopsychic time – of private time systems and synthetic psychologies, of space time and the halfworlds which can be glimpsed in the paintings of the mad.

(I am thinking of the piece of sheep’s cheese I left in the fridge in the apartment in San Francisco. The Fall are performing ‘Blindness’ on Jools Holland. It’s as fine as ‘Sister Ray’. Mark E. Smith is wearing one glove. His wife is beautiful, with the beauty of R.M. whom, as I type, is attending a military ball in London.)

Half past midnight. Today, exercising in the gym, a collection of images occurred to me I did not want to lose: 1) the idea of a turn, or of taking a turn which would turn me over to what is normally missed, 2) the old cliche of the play of nearness and distance, that the near is the farthest etc. This image: a turn which would bring me close to what blazes in the present instant. As though, in that instant, the universe itself was fire.

‘Religions emerge too early in human evolution  – they set up symbols that people took literally, and they’re as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end’. Ballard again. But I am thinking of what Holderlin knew: the sky is empty, the gods flown, and what remains is the time between the god’s absence and their return. Yes, their return, for there are old gods and there are young gods …

Celebrity Cosmology

It seems there really are stars and celebrities really do occupy another realm. The everyday lies beneath the communication networks which wrap themselves around the planet. It abides; meanwhile, there is a celebrity cosmology, a collective dream (or is it an advertising campaign?) alive above us like the aurora borealis. Sometimes a few of us are allowed into the celebrity cosmos; sometimes, a few of us return.

I enjoyed the documentary on Abi Titmuss because I’d known nothing of her origins; she had seemed to appear from nowhere. In fact, this good natured woman was the girlfriend of a disgraced television presenter. She had supported him through his trial for indecently assaulting another television presenter. Titmuss had been a nurse earning the small sum nurses earn. When the trial was over, according to one of the talking heads, Titmuss allowed herself to appear in more revealing clothing. She had an ample bust, an attractive face and stardom was hers almost instanteously. She accepted an agent’s offer; she became uniquitous, earning thousands of pounds an hour for public appearances and hundreds of thousands a year writing columns for men’s magazines. She appeared on the front of dozens of red top newspapers earning money from the photos used to illustrate the latest scandal in which she had been involved.

Who blames her for launching her own career? She is clever enough to know it won’t last; she works hard. Men like her, according to a talking head, because they feel they have a chance with her; she is not a goddess. Titmuss suggests women like her because she is like them, admitting to sexual fantasies (she is launching a series of women’s erotica). Who is she? Each of us, any of us. For a moment, a glorious moment – how I wished I had followed the story from the start – she was no one in particular. Titmuss was no one and nobody but she was everywhere. But then, because a vacuum is intolerable, we needed to know everything about her.

But isn’t Abi Titmuss a media creation? Wasn’t she born from the pages of the same tabloids who, before and after her, will find other young women who will play her role? Isn’t she a placeholder for a privilege each of us would like to grasp for ourselves? If she is admired, it is because she has achieved what each of us would want. If she is despised, it is for the same reason.

True, almost anyone could have taken her role. But it is because she was anyone at all that she became famous. Now she is like any other celebrity: remote from us, separated by limousines and bodyguards, and by the velvet rope which keeps us from spilling onto the red carpet but close to us too, as we become more familiar with her body than our own.

In one sense, the media defines the tastes to which we must conform. Abi Titmuss is part of the vast entertainment empire and celebrity culture risks vanquishing any other claim on people’s attention and imaginations. She is part of that great dream machine of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment which has supplanted any real engagement with the world. Isn’t celebrity culture part of the huge advertising campaign that has replaced reality?

Who is Abi Titmuss? The one the media would want us to want to be. The servo-mechanisms of publicity sell an image of the public back to itself. But what is the image that is being sold to us as Abi Titmuss? Isn’t she as ordinary as we are? Titmuss participated in a celebrity cookery programme to show us she was a nice person, she said. Cue footage of Titmuss being dealt verbal abuse by a cross celebrity chef. Yes, she is likeable, ordinary. But isn’t her ordinariness part of a great sustaining myth of the ordinary which is maintained by celebrity culture?

It is in the name of the ordinary that Heat will picture a celebrity having what it calls a bad hair day, or being issued a parking ticket. Readers send in sightings of celebrities shopping or dining out in the world: they are real, like us, they pass through real streets, like us. Heat even prints photos which bear traces of their passing. Yes, they pass through our world, our everyday; it is glorious. But funny, too – and Heat is good at this – because of the incongruity. How funny it is to see film actor X at Blockbusters!

The celebrity passes through our world. But what happens when one of us without talent, without special merit passes into the realm of celebrities?

Abi Titmuss fascinates not because she has been lifted from the everyday, but because she performs what Husserl would call a reduction of that same everyday as it lays claim to us. What does she reveal? The vacuum that the media rush to fill in almost immediately: a void in the shape of a young woman. Who is she? Each of us, any of us in the interval between the ones we experience ourselves to be and the other who appears on a television screen or on the magazine cover.

Some argue a kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred. Shane Richie says when he is recognised in the streets, it is as the actor he is, rather than the character he plays in Eastenders; this, he comments, is a real change. There is a change in the nature of the transaction between the everyday and the media sphere. Yes, a real change has occurred: it is now necessary to understand the ordinariness of the celebrity. They are just like us. Last night, it was as though Abi Titmuss was an exploratory shapeship sent into the strange cosmos of celebrity: she came, she saw, she reported back. But then each of them, all of them are made to become vessels of this kind when interviewed in a magazine like Heat as it demands we learn something about their ordinary life.

It is that peculiar yoyoing between the everyday and the realm of red carpets that we now require of our celebrities. One which pushes both realms back into themselves, rendering them purer and almost infinitely separated from one another. Earth and heaven, and the celebrity the brave adventurer who can cross that distance. This is why celebrities, now, have to come from the ordinary. To come from there, and to carry our dreams across the great distance. The celebrity does not belong to the spectacle, but is our avatar there. She travels and returns to share her wisdom. She comes back to us, infinitely more glamorous for where she has been. But if she is so, it is only because of the one we knew her to be before her ascent.

Two Dreams

I woke just now after uneasy dreams, but I didn’t find myself transformed into a giant insect. Of Neighbours, which I haven’t watched for many years. I turned on the television and there was … Neighbours (Susan has cut her hair – she looks severe). Then R.M. rang and spoke to me of Darcey Bussell. The best CD to put on to ease you into the day is Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon?; it’s playing now, but I am much too late for the day. Why so late? Because I woke at 3.00 AM and read Leiris’s Manhood for several hours. I thought to myself: I wonder if this is how Blanchot woke to read the books he had under review?

Lightness now the book is done. Confession: last night (this morning), before I read Leiris, I read my first book. Why? Sudden horror, after reading an online version of James Williams’s Lyotard and the Political that it (my book) was all ripped off Lyotard. What does it matter? But the second book is off with the publisher, and that is what is important. Lightness, as I say. Oh there’s plenty to do; I am busy, with piles of administration, reports to write and so on. But beyond that … I’ve ordered two bottles of Tequila. I have a new stack of books to read (the new biography of Kierkegaard arrived yesterday); the gym beckons.

Yesterday, walking in to work, I remembered my plan to write 50 short essays on Smog. I’d seen, by chance, 50 Short Films on Glenn Gould on my first few days in San Francisco, as I finished the book in front of the television. But how would I begin? I put this to R., one of my musical friends. ‘I don’t have any musical knowledge’, I told him, and said I would like at least to know the names of some chords, or what a vamp was (I was thinking of Reynolds’ book on the Smiths). He reassured me, and I dreamed again of an unpublished book called Bill Callahan and the Everyday, in the style of some of the posts here and here.

I had two strong dreams last night. I woke and jotted down some notes in my new Moleskine reporter’s notebook as I imagined Michel Leiris would have done. Firstly, remembering, no doubt, my sister’s comments on having few friends from her childhood who’d followed her through life, I dreamt of the friend who brought with him all of the past. The friend who was your past, such that when you came close to him it was your own past you approached, only now your past had become foreign to you, unfamiliar, the steady burning of a curtain of flame.

Secondly, a dream which was more like a dream of a dream, or a dream which could only be dreamt by one who was insomniac (a waking dream, a half-awake dream): I dreamt of the nakedness of time passing, all of time and feeling a dull fear at its passing. I was old, I thought, and by that I meant: aging is fearful because everything in the world remains the same and meanwhile time passes. Everything remains the same, but time is rushing inside me. And I thought: insomnia is what presses me up against the passing of all of time. But then: it was time pressing up against me. Time spoke. Time murmured through me.

The second dream was an indication of my philosophical intentions this summer: to grasp Deleuze’s general account of time, of being, in contradistinction to that of phenomenology. I told W. I understood it all in outline. ‘Explain then’, he said, mercilessly, ‘tell me about Spinoza’. He’s teaching a course on Spinoza, he told me, 12 weeks long. I had no such intention and I was never any good at explaining anything when put on the spot. But that is this summer’s project.

W. and I are planning our Dogma Philosophy papers for September.  Will it be a fiasco? Of course. What were the rules of Dogma again? I’ve forgotten. But Badiou has beaten us to it. The magnificent preface to the English version of Ethics … it’s like drinking a pure draft of water. Drinking from the highest spring, the head of all waters. Suspicion: that this is itself an effect. That’s it too late to drink from such a spring. Annoyance: why did Derrida never write on Being and Event? Why the book Archive Theory instead of a book on Badiou. But isn’t there an unspoken code among the French not to write a book on anyone else until they die? Lacoue-Labarthe’s haste in producing a book on Blanchot in the wake of his death …Besides, I have it from A. who has it from Paris, from X., that ‘Faith and Knowledge’ was addressed to Steigler, so presumably there would be a way of reading Paper Machine or some other book … Stop! This is the opposite of Dogma Philosophy (or is it Philosophy Dogma?).

Empty loquacity. How nice to write, as Moominpappa would say (a post on the use of the word, nice, as it is found in the translations of the Moomintroll books. Passages on the use of incidental detail in Jansson’s books, for example, ‘mermaids followed us. We fed them oatmeal’ as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to encounter mermaids and that it is the most obvious thing in the world to feed them oatmeal). Today, what will happen today? I have to write a report, fairly lengthy. What else? Plenty of things. But a gentle light is falling everywhere, it is beneficient. All is favourable; I slept and now I’m awake. What’s Next to the Moon? is finished and now it’s time to go out into the world.

Jet Lag

I am now in the state of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, or, as I prefer to think of it, the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes. What time is it? When is it? Night or day? This year or last year? I dreamt on the train coming north that the book was unfinished, but it is finished and sent, though, going over the manuscript on the plane, I found more mistakes.

I arrived home at five, spread my bed clothes in front on the TV and let Richard and Judy play above my head. How did I fall asleep for the Simpsons? – but I did. I’ve piled up the books I bought on my trip beside my makeshift bed. The Borch-Jacobsen looks good; Corngold’s The Necessity of Form.

On the train, I reread Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Stoker’ and then put the book, hearing within me sentences similar to those of Kafka spinning themselves from nothing. How nice it is a book can live in this way! Merleau-Ponty remarks on exactly this phenomenon: to read a novel is to imagine one could write it. Then you see what a novelist must have: the strength not just to begin but to venture at once into the middle of the narrative. How crowded with details Kafka’s narratives are! I thought to myself: he was a great observer of the world. The details are exquisite; everything is there. From where did that strength come? From what necessity?

Thinking about this, I remember Thomas M. Disch’s comments in his history of science fiction on Philip K. Dick. He was a guru, Disch notes, keen to arm wrestle his interlocutors into submission on the issue of the theophany he experienced in 1974. He craved attention, Disch notes, going from one 20 year old girl to another. Perhaps. But there are the books, too. The books written each one of them in a week or no more than a fortnight, which unfolded very rapidly from themselves. Each time a world was born; true, the worlds overlap, but what impresses is the necessity of each birth. His is not the prolix talent which creates first this world and then that, but that ranks the world he creates according to how close they would be to the real world.

That is the lesson of the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: it speaks the truth; it bears on what really happened. Thus Dick’s novel does not lay before us an alternate history but a false one. Dick is always looking for something, but what? The power to fabulate this world, to write of what is simple and close. The truest hero of Dick’s novel (but which novel does this come from? I’ve not read one for more than a decade?): the tyre-regroover, the one who works against entropy to stabilise and order.

The ‘real world’: how naive this sounds? Isn’t it by attempting to reach through the veil of fiction to the real world that Dick sought to leap from his books into the world, our world? He writes to escape writing; fiction is only a means, for him, of coming to the truth. Why, then, not put down the pen altogether? Why another tab of speed and the daily retreat to his writing shed? Dick writes a great deal; four novels a year and dozens of stories. He writes, but why does he write? To find himself on the shore that lies beyond writing. Meanwhile, there are the works in which dark-haired girls and tyre-regroovers multiply themselves …

‘What day is it?’ I asked R.M. on the phone. ‘It’s Wednesday’, she says, en route to the ballet. ‘I thought it was morning’, I tell her, and it’s true, I feel young as I always do in the morning. But I should be feeling old instead – doubly old, having missed a night’s sleep.

Now the summer is spreading out before me. No major projects, a paper here and there, that’s all. For the first time in sixth months, I will have time to write here, but on what will I write? It’s a little too late to write on cruelty, following Jodi’s example at I Cite. And there is the frustration that this blog is not private enough, not secret enough, but this is foolishness itself, for a blog must be public, writing must find its audience and to write is to let that of which one writes to be born anew.

What I’ve written here over the last months appals me. I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe says somewhere about the originary role of acting. You begin with the mask; you are always an actor, especially and always when you write (but this is my extrapolation …) With whose voice do I write? Whose style is alive in mine? I would hope to find a style which is neutral, from which speaks the surprise that there is meaning, sense, that there is language. Yes, that’s what I would like to find, and it is against that which I measure the weakness of what I have written.

But is this, too, not a pose? The desire, like that of Dick to step from a fictional world into the real one? Staggering jet-lagged about the flat, I wonder whether I come close to the condition of the narrator in When the Time Comes (how ridiculous …): close to that point where fiction frays and what approaches is not real, if this would mean the world of ordinary things and ordinary people, but an immediacy which burns up everything but itself. As though all our experiences assembled themselves in that flaming, amidst it, and we live like salamanders close to a truth we cannot grasp.

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.