White Fire, Black Fire

The Jerusalem Talmud: the Torah ‘was written with letters of black fire upon a background of white fire’. According to Rabbi Isaac the Blind, father of Kabbalah, two Torahs, it is in the white fire one finds the written Torah; the black fire is the oral Torah. Perhaps Moses could read the white fire; the prophets, too, were able to glimpse a little of the white flame, but only when the Messiah comes will it be legible for all.

The testamentary book that the Jews call the Tanakh is unread and unreadable, except by a few. But what of those theologians who argue the Messiah has come, that he is there among the lepers and the beggars at the gates of Rome. Strange thought: he is recognized; someone asks him: ‘When will you come?’ Strange question, for this is already to know he has come; that he is there by the gates.

He is here – but is he here? What if he replies to the question: ‘Today’? ‘When will you come?’ – ‘Today’. There he is – but there, too, he is not. But he adds: ‘Now, if only you heed me, or if you are willing to listen to my voice’. Now? But perhaps it takes a kind of prophet to listen to the one who is the tomorrow-in-today.

Love’s Nudity

Lovers like to feel themselves similar to one another, to have shared parallel histories, to have led lives which let their encounter become fateful. But in the end, what do they share? Perhaps only the strangeness of love itself: it is as though love has no content, or if its content were solely the affirmation of love as love, in its surprise, its novelty.

Is love an egoïsme à deux? There is a kind of lover’s narcissism: love traps one with the other, nothing matters except the beloved. Is there a relationship which does not draw the lovers together but turns each apart from the other? This is also what love is: the chance of an encounter that does not enclose each lover in his or her love or enclose the other, the beloved, as the one who is known and who is understood.

Is this what it would mean to claim that love is also a relation to the outside? Perhaps. But this is a precarious relationship. It disappears; it is lost in the onrush of that living through of that affirmation that love is: telling one’s friends of new love, introducing one’s beloved to others, all the while being surprised at love’s bounty, at the depth of the gift that loving is.

But something disappears. This is because the gift of loving, love’s giving, usurps another kind of gift. When Duras will allow love to come close to hatred, when love for her comes close to a madness which turns each of us from the world. Somewhat foolishly, I will link one experience of love (love’s plenitude) to a D.H. Lawrentian vitalism: the living universe, everything alive, everything there in the presence of the beloved. Certainty. Nothing from the depth of passion can be wrong, all that.

And the other experience (love’s nudity)? Not plenitude but horror. The tearing apart of the world. Not a possible love, not the opening of a world, but impossibility. The impossibility of loving. The impossibility of a world, of a world’s coherency. That is Duras, and all of Duras, from beginning to end.

Even the late books, which I like to imagine are not so highly regarded because the idea of protecting books – of books which need protection – is close to me. Build an ark, put the books in, carry them about as you would your own heart… These late texts are important for the nudity of the story they contain.

I want to write with the word nudeness – yes the nudeness of those stories which bear so nakedly on the impossibility of loving. The story of her brother in The Lover from North China, the one whom young Duras (is it her?) and the servant Thanh (he did not appear in the early versions of the same story, including The Lover) wanted to preserve as a kind of miracle.

And what of Hélène Lagonelle (a fellow pupil of the young narrator with whom she has an affair)? There is the objection (I’ve never heard it, but I want to imagine it in order to draw these books closer) that Duras becomes la Duras, a brand, a style, a way of writing akin to a way of dressing (and remember that la Duras also named a way of dressing).

The Lover from North China, Yann Andrèa Steiner (have I put the accent in the right place?): these books, written close to her death (like the other naked book, Writing) come close not to the Duras whose wrinkled face looks out of us from the backs of her books and from books of photographs, but from the other Duras, Duras’s other: the companion whom, ‘in’ her, stepped forward to encounter the one she was able to love.

She loved Yann Andrea , a young man, a homosexual (read The Slut of the Normandy Coast, read L’Ête 80) the relationship with whom, perhaps, allowed her to write The Malady of Death (others claim that is a rewrite of The Man Who Sat Down in the Corridor). She loved him from the other who loved inside her, her companion. The one whom she could draw upon to write, with whom she wrote. The other who wrote with her, inside her, and across her.

Write so as though to have no face. Is there a way of loving, too, which would allow your face to be torn from itself?

The Law

What was the name of that story by J. G. Ballard gathered in a book (The Day of Forever) I lent out many years ago (to M., in fact, whom I wrote about in my last post)? I’ve forgotten its name and its details, but something of it has remained in my memory, wrapping itself around me. A man comes to a house where he lives with his executioner. These are his last days, aimable ones, by the sea and in the sun.

When will he die? He doesn’t know; but his death will come, he knows that. The executioner is kind, and this is the point: he speaks with infinite solicitude and patience. What he does not doubt, the executioner, is that he must enact the penalty (what for, we never find out). Death will occur, but meanwhile … why not be kind? Execution is a job like any other; you – the one to be executed, and I, the executor, are bound as client is to vendor. The functionality of the relation clarifies our relationship.

I will kill you, not now, but soon, but meanwhile there are a few hours, a few days, weeks. I am waiting for the order and you will die by my hands. What can we do about it? I, after all, am an executor; you – for some reason, and one I may never know, what does it matter, must be executed. There is no room for clemency. The sentence must be enacted. It’s my job. Both of us bend, in our own way to the law, and the law is mighty. What are we compared to the law? It’s humble servants. For the law rules over life and death. It spreads its wings around us, protecting us, holding us, saving us from ourselves, but it rules us. And who am I, the executioner? Only the one who enacts the law, who allows its course to be followed. A crude, too crude instrument of the law.

I do not love the law, I have no opinions regarding its justice or injustice. It is the law and that is sufficient. And the law pays no heed to me, who am only its servant. Nor to you, the one who will be killed. Come, let us be realistic and put the thought of the death sentence out of our heads for as long as we can. That unpleasant business lies ahead of us, meanwhile, there is the sun, the sea and this quiet house.

Hope

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward. The metaphor is the only means.

That said, I am not reading either.

– from This Space

Abandonment

Blanchot:



We must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering: a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.



The truth of suffering? But we are protected, some of us at least, by a horizon of values which, if hypocritical, keep us from the truth in question. And when it does not? When death takes place, as Levinas writes of the war, in the absence of a shared horizon? ‘at least the victims know whither to lift their dying gaze’, writes Levinas of post-war racism, imperialism and exploitation, ‘their devastated areas belong to a world[….] What was unique between 1940 and 1945 was the abandonment’.



Abandoment. Recall that the word ‘abandon’ was Levinas’s suggestion for a translation of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, thrownness. Abandon: isn’t this also the state of the family of Bereck Kofman when their father is taken from them? And of Bereck Kofman when he prays on the Sabbath at Auschwitz?



Abandonment. As he reminds the readers of Existence and Existents, Levinas spent the war in captivity in Germany. He does this, he claims, only to account for the absence of any discussion of the famous works of French philosophy published over those years, but he also reminds us that it was in the stalag he continued the work he began in his earlier study, On Evasion.



Who can resist the conclusion that the analyses of Existence and Existents reflect the conditions of his captivity? There is the emphasis on physical pain: ‘physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being’. ‘In suffering there is an absence of all refuge. It is the fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating’. Exposure to being? What does this mean?



Abandonment: the tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion. She is dashed to pieces – but for a time, she brought herself into a splendid freedom. She laments, but to lament, one has to detach oneself from the instant of existence; being is not irremissible; she finds a refuge.



For Levinas, however, it seems no such rebellion is possible; the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity. She comes up against a limit, against which she runs up inexhaustibly. It is because he thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that Levinas invokes what he calls the ‘tragedy of tragedy’ in Existence and Existents.



But what does he mean? Hamlet, for Levinas, is exemplary. Why this play? Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.



‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore. 



In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.



A., one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, writes in the first part of Either/Or



Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way, that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.



The locus of the modern tragedy has changed; it no longer concerns the torsion between family and state but the plight of an individual. An individual who, moreover, is responsible for herself, for her existence – who had taken on the burden of creating herself.



What specifically characterises ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed only from character, that the action itself has a relative admixture of suffering. Ancient tragedy, therefore, did not develop dialogue to the point of exhaustive reflection with everything merged in it; the distinct components of dialogue are actually in the monologue and chorus.


But Levinas’s Hamlet is not a tragedy of subjectivity; he does not speak as a subject and Shakespeare’s tragedies do not differ from those of Sophocles simply because he presents an interior monologue. ‘To be or not to be’: who speaks? Hamlet? Perhaps Levinas would say it is being that speaks. Being? Blanchot would prefer to write the neuter, designating by this word what is neither being nor nothingness (ne uter: neither one nor the other). Who speaks? What speaks? Vacillation; abandonment without refuge.

Tragic Philosophy

The uncanny is many-sided; nothing, however, / looms larger than the human in strangeness. / He travels on the effervescent tides / driven by the southern winds of winter, / crossing peaks of ravaging waves. / The gods, even the most sublime ones, / he wears down, and / the earth – indestructible and tireless – too / overturning her from year to year, / plowing back and forth with stallions.

– Sophocles, Choral Ode from Antigone

What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.

‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.

Schmidt provides three indications as to why this fate leads Kant’s successors to retrieve the question of tragedy. There is, first of all, the antimony of reason itself (with special reference to the third antimony between freedom and nature). Secondly, there is the dignity accorded to aesthetics in reflection on ethical life. Thirdly, there is the renewal of the notion of the sublime. True, for various reasons, Kant did not take up the question of the tragic himself; it was left to Schelling to indicate in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) how tragedy, as a literature of crisis, of agony and incommensurability, might be retrieved to mark the experience of the limit in post-Kantian philosophy.

Szondi: ‘After Aristotle, there is a poetics of tragedy, only after Schelling is there a philosophy of the tragic’. For Schelling, tragedy indicates the way in which the contradiction between freedom and necessity might be thought; the lesson for post-Kantian philosophy lies in the way aesthetic experience, specifically the artwork (no longer, like Kant, does Schelling place emphasis on nature) can think, endure, the contradiction in question.

To deinon is the word Heidegger isolates from Sophocles’s Antigone. How might it be translated? Gewaltige, powerful, that was Hölderlin’s first translation of this word in 1801; in 1804, he translates it as ungeheuer, monstrous. Heidegger will translate it Nicht-geheuren, the non-familiar. What does it designate? The power of the human being to transform the world confronts the overwhelming power of death; freedom shatters itself against necessity.

Freedom, necessity: for Hölderlin, writing to the philhellene Böhlendorff in 1801, the Germans have fallen too far from the experience of fate, from the ‘highest’; they must be brought into confrontation with the Greeks. This is the task of art, perhaps a renewed tragic art, but it is, he writes, dangerous for German art to imitate the art of the Greeks.

Why then labour so hard over his translations of Greek tragedy? The task: to attune the German language to what he calls Greek sorrow and thereby to bring it into the conflicted space which exceeds the power of philosophical cognition. ‘We learn nothing with greater difficult than to freely use the national’, he writes to Böhlendorff. If it is ‘the clarity of presentation’ which is natural for the Germans, it is the ‘fire from heaven’ that is natural to the Greeks. Yet for Hölderlin, to use the national is not play to the strengths of one’s nature. It is, rather, to test oneself against the foreign – and what is more foreign for Germany than Greece?

The Greeks are less masters of sacred pathos, because it is innate to them, whereas they excel in the gift of presentation from Homer onward, because this extraordinary man was sufficiently soulful to conquer the Western Junoian sobriety for his Apollinian empire, and thereby to truly appropriate the foreign.

Hölderlin’s task? To surprass the Greeks in ‘beautiful suffering’, in ‘sacred grief’. But it this possible? Greece names for Hölderlin a fated experience of overwhelming power and strangeness; the German confronts in fate and destiny what exceeds its power. It is the task of the poet to reawaken that torsion, to affirm the shining forth of the disclosure to which the human being belongs. The poet thus watches over both freedom (‘the free use of the national’) and necessity (the fateful encounter with the Greeks). This was the mission which emerges for Hölderlin.

Heidegger, too, is drawn to this strange reciprocity between Greece and Germany; once again, for him, it is a question of poetry, Dichtung, of the inaugurating poetic act this time to be accomplished by Hölderlin the poet, in dialogue with the thinker (Heidegger) and perhaps, at least in the early 1930s, the statesman (Hitler).

What is the fate of tragedy in those years and after? Perhaps it collapses in the sorrow beyond sorrow of those same years such that the tragic life of the ones the Germans called the Greeks no longer rises to exemplarity with respect to the experience of the limit. It was the Greeks’ relationship to pain which was his central concern in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote. But what happens when the pain is closer, more immediate – when it can no longer be a question of attending to what Heidegger calls the katastrophe, the turning around of the human being which is still understood in terms of the heliotropism to Greece, but to what might be called the disaster?

On 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up by the French police; he would die at Auschwitz. 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’.

Kofman’s father was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. Sarah Kofman writes:

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: but what does this mean? A reinvention of tragedy – its transformation, just as it was transformed after Kant? The quest for a new dispensation of freedom and necessity? ‘Auschwitz belongs to a sphere beyond tragedy’ – Lacoue-Labarthe.

Out of Play

October 4th 1926. André Breton wanders aimlessly toward the Opéra with a newly purchased book by Trotsky under his arm. The offices and workshops are emptying out, and Breton muses to himself of the workers leaving for home ‘it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution’.

Then, as he crosses an intersection, he sees a young poorly dressed woman ten feet away; she carries her head high, ‘unlike every one else on the pavement’, Breton notes; but if she has a kind of pride, she is also delicate (‘she scarcely seemed to touched the round as she walked’). There may have been, he remembers, a ‘faint smile’ on her face (better: ‘wandering across her face’); she was made up strangely, her eyes are emphasised.

She comes towards him, the young Surrealist, smiling ‘mysteriously’ and ‘somehow knowingly’. Breton is entranced; she begins to speak of her poverty and he asks himself: what was happening in her eyes? ‘What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?’ She tells Breton the name she has chosen for herself: ‘Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’. Then she asks Breton a question echoing the one he asked himself in the opening lines of the book: ‘Who are you?’

Who are you? Margaret Cohen’s beautiful book about Benjamin and the Surrealists, she notes of those same opening lines that they make play with a French adage ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes et jet e dirai qui tu es’, tell me whom you haunt (in the sense of frequent) and I will tell you who you are. Breton makes it apparent that he appropriates this expression in other than its colloquial sense in the following passage (the fourth paragraph of Nadja):

I must admit that this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, less avoidable, more disturbing than I intended. It says much more than it means, it makes me play while still alive the role of a ghost, evidently it alludes to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.

As Cohen observes, ‘Breton goes from suggesting that haunting is related to the places and persons that one frequents to reflecting on how this dependence starts to undermine the integrity of the I itself’. But this undermining is marked in the first lines of the text and sets its problem. This is why, Cohen points out, the translation of différentiation as ‘difference’ in the following quotation is so misleading: ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to know in what my differentiation consists, if not what is responsible for it’.

Differentiation, not difference: when he asks ‘who am I?’ the answer comes: ‘a series of ghosts’. Ghosts of a self, a subject? Of course, Breton’s book is full of ghosts. But when he asks himself, ‘who am I?’ we know Breton is after something unique to himself: ‘What matters is that the particular aptitudes that I discover slowly down here distract me in no way from the search for a general aptitude, which would be my own and which is not given to me’.

What will he find? How will Breton answer his question? Will he answer it at all – or does it reverberate through every sentence of his book, a question which turns in itself, a cold whirlwind, asking with quiet insistence over and again: ‘Who?’: scarcely a question, then, but a kind of demand, and scarcely a demand for it as though it was spoken from that frightening reserve into which Nadja herself will disappear. As though the question was born out of the same madness that would claim her – or as if this were one of the question’s risks. Nadja itself – the book that bears the young woman’s name, which uses it to name (but it cannot be named) that same madness – is Breton’s answer. Nadja is a psychoanalytic session, a free association (‘I will speak of these things without pre-established order and according to the whim of the hour which lets survive whatever survives’); as such, it is also given to us, his readers, to decide what his answer to his own question might mean.

For many, Breton is too dominant; he is callously indifferent to Nadja’s incarceration, to her madness; he toys with Nadja and then discards her. He cuts a pathetic figure: the surrealist researcher, supposedly committed to the Revolution is indifferent to this impoverished young woman; the writer who would give himself to the blind play of chance cannot follow her all the way to madness. Yet there is a hint that Breton’s identity is itself unstable – that he will lose himself just as Nadja is lost. The narrator’s encounters form a series whose contiguity cannot be resolved into an underlying identity; it is as though both Breton and Nadja have coalesced from the Parisian night mist into which they will disappear; as though the book which bears her name were written in mist and will likewise disappear.

This, at least, what suggests itself in the many ghost-stories which fill this book. Recall the humorous story of Monsieur Delouit, the amnesiac who asks a clerk in the hotel lobby for his room number and then, having gone to his room, jumps from the window and questions the clerk once again. Recall, too, the fugue which allows Desnos to take on Duchamp’s personality, or Eluard’s mistaking Breton for a deceased friend. Then there is the story of the thriller in which a Chinese man replicates himself thousands of times and invades New York; and the painting by Watteau in which the same couple is shown over and over. Finally, there is Nadja herself, who appears to be only one of a series of women, real and unreal (Madame de Chevreuse, Mélusine, Solange and the actress Blanche Duval, who plays her, the young woman who recites Rimbaud to him in the rain -). And what of Breton himself?

Who am I? Breton asks; shortly after, he will call himself a phantom, seeking to learn of his identity by exploring the places he haunts and the encounters which haunt him. Breton seeks himself in the ambulism which would allow him to follow a path in the world which is dictated by the subliminal desires of the phantom. Above all, these phantasies entangle him in a complex realm in which the real historical significance of, say, the sculpture of the Porte Saint-Denis and the statues of Etienne Dolet on the Place Maubert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Place du Panthéon were bracketed, put out of play. As though such a bracketting permits him to see a beauty linked to their now massive uselessness (what do they commemorate? Nothing – not anymore -). This recalls Breton’s celebration of the perverse objects of the flea market and perhaps even what he writes of the Surrealists themselves …

Differentiation: is it this that is unleashed once the scuptures and objects are torn from their contexts, their worlds? Or when the Surrealists themselves, besuited young men, conservative in so many ways, practice their sleeping experiments and their seances? Or when the question, ‘Who am I?’ is allowed to reverberate without answer as Breton encounters in Nadja the one who, for a time at least, demands he forgo any attempt to answer his own question? His book will bear Nadja’s name, not that of Breton’s unnamed lover. So it is that Breton is caught out and that it is his book – even the very title of his book -, not he, who speaks the truth.

Nadja, a text which bears the name of hope, of the first part of the word hope, is marked above all by a restlessness, a wandering; here is a text which must be understood according to its own avowal to record everything. But perhaps it records too much for it is as though Breton’s phantom wrote Nadja and that what is related is the story not only of Breton’s own adventures but those of a double who wandered in his place; as though Breton was himself put out of play.

Cat and Mouse

From Kafka’s Diary:

On the way home, I said to Max that on my deathbed, provided the suffering is not too great, I will be very content. I forgot to add, and later I omitted this on purpose, that the best of what I have written is based upon this capacity to die content. (December 1914)

What does this mean? Writing depends upon the exertion of a kind of mastery over your own death. No longer is it the limit of what you can or cannot possess – the extreme to which you cannot bring yourself into relation as a sovereign equal – and this is the point: such mastery is tempting because of the very extremity of death. The strength required to realise a book demands the author must summon every power, must become control itself, the literary toreador. Then it is against death that the author must test his will. But this is not right. Kafka is not Hemmingway or Leiris; writing is not a bullfight.

What, then, is the contentedness Kafka seeks? What would it mean for him to enjoy his death? One suspects a kind of ruse: Kafka, after all, dreams of leaving writing in order to emigrate to Palestine; he puts down his work to take up carpentry. Yet he fills his notebooks, page after page, not with sketches and plans of future stories like Henry James or Dostoevsky, but with tales which launch themselves with apology – which begin and then break off, never to be completed. There are pages of such fragments.

It may appear, from this fragment in his Diary, that Kafka is playing with death, that it is his toy. It is as though his alleged contentment in death recalls Hegelian wisdom: the conversion of negativity into positivity; the transformation of death into a condition of possibility of truth and the world. Death gives form to the formless and definition to the indefinite.

But Kafka is not concerned with truth or the world. Reading the pages of the Diary, it becomes clear that his insistent appeal for a content death is a mirror of his dissatisfaction with life; who has written more eloquently of the difficulty of their relations with the world? Such dissatisfaction does not afford him mastery over death, but it makes death into a refuge. A refuge from what? From the office, from the demands of his fiancée and his difficulties with his family. But also – surely- from writing, from the uncertainty of writing. From the man who created Gracchus, we understand what a contentedness in death would mean: a still pen. Kafka dies content when he joins his characters in death. He writes; he dies – but then, when the character is dead, he is given back to his dissatisfaction. And then? He begins writing again.

‘If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully’. Poor Kafka begins anew. Why? Because contented death is his wage as an artist; it is the aim of his writing and its justification. Blanchot: ‘The capacity to die content" implies that relations with the normal world are now and henceforth severed. Kafka is in a sense already dead. This is given him, as exile was given him; and this gift is linked to that of writing’. One recalls the passages in his Diary on ‘the merciful surplus of strength’: the gift of writing gives him strength to as it were live on in this deathly condition; it is born from his suffering – this surprises him – and it outstrips it. Literature begins when Kafka begins to ring changes upon the suffering that has befallen him.

But what kind of literature does he realise? The passage from the Diary comes just after he read ‘In the Penal Colony’ to his friends. It is cruel tale; one might wonder whether Kafka plays with his characters as a cat does a mouse. And what of the characters from other tales? Do they not, in some way or another, inhabit death’s space (I’ll have to substantiate that another day)? Is it not the movement of dying which claims them as they seek vainly for the castle or the trial?

It is as though, like Kafka, they seek a way to come to death, to find contentedness. But what do they find? Death ‘like a dog’ in The Trial; the incompletion of The Castle (death without terminus). Either way, Kafka himself survives the death of the characters who die; as for those who do not, he breaks off the tale and begins another. Burn my books, he tells Brod, and he means: burn what cannot bring itself to the end. Burn what survives me in the stories I wrote to find my way to death. Burn everything in me that cannot die.

Elsewhere in the Diary Kafka writes: ‘Write to be able to die, die to be able to write’. Write to be able to die – write in order to discover the contentment of departing a miserable life, a kind of safe suicide. Die to be able to write – this is the other side. What does he mean? That Kafka is in lieu of what he seeks and of the power of seeking. The work fights back; Kafka becomes the work’s mouse; his cry is Josephine’s: pathetic and piping.

Broken Clocks

I dreamt about you, but of whom did I dream? Was it you? Yes – you were present, you were there more strongly than you ever were: there, but with a presence which exceeds all presence, as though there with your presence was also the presence of everything understood now as a kind of shadow of the world, a shadow that spreads from each particular thing to join itself in a greater darkness. Not the night behind the day, but the night in the day, the day’s opacity.

I dreamt about you; I woke early and thought: why her? why now? and then: but you were only a mask the shadow wears. More: there is only the shadow and only masks and the world, the visible world is itself only the shadow of a shadow. I knew that the dreamer only resembled what, in me, escapes that self-relation which brings everything back to the same. The dreamer, the one who remembered ‘you’ had already forgotten ‘me’. Or the other way round: I had forgotten you in ‘you’ and remembered what is lost in the unity of the one who lays claim to his experiences, who would have it that life is lived in the first person.

In the end, the dreamed encounter repeats the encounter which occurred outside the dream. As if it was in the failure of a relationship – failed friendship, failed romance – that one learns of what hides itself in a relationship’s success: the encounter which takes place away from the world, which calls another forward in me as it calls another forward in you. Who is this other? What reveals itself in failure? The precarious encounter which tends to reveal itself when we are up against the most crushing power: the power of political oppression, of shared misery, or the power of death (as one of us comes close to death).

Ghost of the ‘successful’ revolution (the seizing of the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille): the encounters between us, protestors, demonstrators: ‘between us’ such that each is no-one in particular, that each, encountered, is the shadow of the man or the woman of power – of the one with a name and with a job, who bears his or her identity on the card of identity. The revolution’s ghost awoken when, as Benjamin remembers, the clocks are fired upon by revolutionaries. Do not entrust yourself to failure, Blanchot writes, for that is only to evince nostalgia for success.

Broken clocks: do not think of a future any other than that of the encounter. Graffiti on the wall in May 1968: ‘it is forbidden to grow old’. Become young again in the space of encounter. Forget me and I will forget you; forget the event which disjoins itself from the present.

I dreamt of you – I dreamt thereby of that common presence the revolution will awaken.

(Common presence – this phrase, title of an anthology by René Char, is the title of a book I would one day want to write.)

Blanchot’s Vigilance

Scholars trace transformations in Blanchot’s vocabulary – he places inverted commas around words here (‘presence’), he reformulates expressions there (changing worklessness to the absence of the work), ‘writing’ begins to supplant ‘art’ or ‘literature’: no doubt. Scholars give these transformations a kind of teleology: Blanchot is refining his conceptual vocabulary, they say; he is moving from the thought of worklessness to that of the neuter; he no longer speaks of an excess of being, but of an experience which is neither that of being nor nothingness; he loses all patience with ontology.

Some of this is true – there are patterns which invite such readings (even Derrida is tempted – see Resistances). But how can the scholar account for disruptions in these same patterns? The word ‘presence’ returns without quotation marks in the very late works; work and worklessness are mentioned on the last page of the same work (The Unavowable Community) not to mention the complex interlacing of terms in the fragmentary works (The Step Not Beyond, The Writing of the Disaster).

The scholar’s ruin: what is important is the way such words are kept in motion, never settling into the fixity of a system: the fleetness of a movement of research which never pauses to rest, which goes out into strange lands, taking on the customs of those places and giving birth to itself through them just as Vishnu was said to have taken on different avatars in which to incarnate himself. But is there a Vishnu who would remain the same in those same rebirths? Only if the god gives up his place and the possibility of taking place: if he becomes a vigilance that watches over a difference at the heart of thought. A difference which will not allow him, the god, to be grasped in his unity: not Vishnu, then, but Proteus – and not even a God, but a river, Cratylus’s, in which it is impossible to step even once.

Understand that each of Blanchot’s essays undoes itself into the same river, that it is not a question of remaining the same, of the stubborn attempt to preserve itself despite its encounters, like Ulysses returning to Ithaca. It is not Vishnu who is reborn in each essay-avatar but the dispersal the form of a god cannot preserve.

Who was he, Blanchot? Who is he? Only a kind of vigilance, a watching over a difference which required his withdrawal from the world – a retreat which was again a kind of vigilance, which bore witness then and now to the dispersal at the heart of the world, to the darkness of the river beneath the crust of ice. That is also what he was, Blanchot, besides the one who lived in retirement near Versailles and it is what remains of him, watching over us in his writing.

The Glade

I think to myself: You can never tell the effect of a book until it has lingered in the memory. But this is wrong: memory is not an indifferent receptacle – it works, it labours for itself, struggling against forgetting, clearing a space in the midst of forgetting. Only it never knows, memory, whether this space is real or imaginary – whether the ‘past’ it seizes is the same as the event which unfolded then or there, a long time ago or more recently.

Memory: what happens when I remember the scenes in the pages of Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders? Of the narrator’s relationship with the domestic servant whose room he would visit as a boy – the scent of her perfume, her comforting presence in a feminine space within his home, a young woman’s space, from which she launched herself, perfumed and pomaded into the world of dates with young men? Or of the scenes in Roubaud’s Destruction (it is only the first part of the phantasmic Great Fire of London) where he comes to London to walk and to read? Of the walks through London parks with the nameless interlocutor of the narrator of Josipovici’s Moo Pak? And then of the tremendous onward roll of Bernhard’s Extinction, with its last extraordinary page – extraordinary because of its brevity given the length of what has gone before, because of the surprising resoluteness of its narrator and because, too, this was Bernhard’s last novel?

All books I have read recently, books which do not grow in the memory so much as estrange the power to remember from itself, forcing spaces, strange glades, open in the memory, but also, in those spaces, foregrounding a kind of forgetting – the darkness of the trees, the stillness of the lake – yes, making forgetting present and tangible. As if the glade which opened marked not just disclosure, but loss. As though it was also this loss which presented itself in those enchanted spaces which open in the memory (which open memory itself and bring it close, very close to forgetting).

I do not remember, the book remembers for me. You, book, keep a memory for me in your closed covers. That’s why I keep you, why I keep too many books, transporting them from place to place, and why I mourn those books I sold because I had too many books. You keep a place for memory, but also for forgetting, for what haunts me in your pages is something like a life I never live and could not live.

I do not forget, the book forgets for me. I saw a ghost in the glade as night fell. It was my ghost. Only it was not me I saw but another in me. One who wore my face but whose face was not mine. One who forgets for me, who bears the power, the unpower of forgetting. Reading draws me towards youth, towards a childhood which is not mine. The child: a wheel which turns upon itself, says Zarathustra, the yea-sayer, the affirmer of the world.

Magnetic Fields

Who speaks in the automatic text, in the poem of the Surrealists? Who speaks in the most profound magnetic fields which open themselves to the automatic poet (each of us, any of us)?

One evening, just before André Breton falls asleep, he perceives a phrase which was something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’; this is accompanied by ‘the faint visual image […]of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body’. A strange image, which Breton wants at once to use as for a poem. But as he does so, it was succeeded by a whole series of phrases which, he writes, ‘surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’.

Breton confides in his fellow surrealist Phillippe Soupault; they decide to practice the technique. A single day yields fifty pages; comparing their work, Breton and Soupault find it to be similar; the difference of the texts, Breton decides, lies in the different tempers of the men. Who speaks? Something which would say itself through any of us, were we able to open ourselves to automatism. Which would allow each of us to become a poet and liberate poetry itself from the poetic field (from the preserve of literature, of literary culture). For it is now a question of the surreal, which is to say, of existence, of life in its totality, of the total human being.

Who speaks? Guard against the interpretation that automatism excludes premeditation and conscious control; that it would be the simple flowing of a verbal tide. The Surrealist does not simply allow the pen to wander across sheets of paper; it is not a matter of mental relaxation, as if one would merely have to passively wait for the treasures of the unconscious to reveal themselves. Active consciousness has a role; great effort is required to clear the way to experience the claim of the magnetic fields. It is necessary to keep watch over the desire to create a literary work; the Surrealist experimenter must not reread what she has written – must not fall victim to the images that are conjured by the words on the page, but must remain at the edge of the writing as it pushes forward into the unknown.

Then automatism requires a new mode of interrelation between consciousness and the unconsciousness – passivity is required, but so too is activity; if the unconscious holds the initiative, consciousness is required such that its message can be transcribed. The spontaneous dynamism of the unconscious must be rendered explicit; it is not merely sleeping philosophers that we must become, but thinkers who can make a synthesis between our dreams and waking life.

But what role does consciousness have? One has to allow oneself to be brought into a state of receptivity. But vigilance is also required against the temptations which befall the automatic writer. Automatism is never simply unilinear; it takes effort to maintain an attunement to the unconscious. There is the risk that attunement will tempt the writer to a kind of branching – that two or more thoughts will present themselves simultaneously such that recording becomes impossible. There is a danger in the very visibility of the poetic images which risk distracting the experimenter by their imaginative charm. Most broadly, the researcher has to resist the conditioned reflex which allows the uncontrolled élan to be brought exclusively under conscious control.

A kind of vigilance is required, then, to maintain the play of consciousness and the unconscious. To watch over their interplay. But to watch over what? Not the dialectic, but its undoing – not the overcoming of the immediate, but a tearing which opens across the surface in language. What arises? The immediate. The power to speak – yours’, mine – falls back into an origin without form, without determination. I do not speak, and nor do you.

What speaks? What is it the locus of that vigilance which keeps watch over speech? The answer to both questions is the same: that magnetic fields which quivers through our depths. Our depths? But it is as though, speaking, it turns each of us inside out, delivering us into that speech which requires that its speaker disappears as a determinate entity. Then the ‘who?’ of ‘who speaks?’ finds no answer; automatism resounds when the no one who speaks and watches is brought into contact with the human power to speak, to act.

Wake Up!

Am I capitalist who dreams? Or is it capital that dreams in me?

I thought I saw you working in the Sales Team. It looked like you – looked like the one I remembered from school, the one who was obsessed with sex, who spoke of nothing else, but who also spoke of the Bible (you brought it on that fieldtrip and read it at night). It looked like you, but was it you in a suit and braces? Speaking with a salesman’s voice? Was it you?

I think it was you. Between the one I knew and the one I no longer knew I saw the difference on which identity always depends. I saw that difference, that virtuality which gave itself in you to be seized by the movement of capital.

Capitalism captures difference. How then to recapture it – or at least to draw anew on that difference, that virtuality, in order to stop capitalism from dreaming us?

The Heart of the Dream, The Heart of the World

Am I dreaming of a butterfly? Or is a butterfly dreaming of me? Michel Leiris recalls a dream of a dream which comes to an end not because the dreamer has awoken, but because he has been invited to exit this dream by entering into a sleep which is yet deeper and more hidden. As if there were a sleep somehow below sleep, or a dreaming which plunges the dreamer into the dark waves of a sleep without shores, without end.

Who dreams? In this other sleep, it is not just the waking life of the dreamer which is placed between parentheses, but his sleeping life – it is his life as a dreamer who would stand beneath and as it were support his dreams as the Cartesian thinker is there beneath its thoughts which is now suspended. It is as though the other sleep only watched over itself and in place of a subject of dream there was only a dispersal, a vigilance without subject which can never wake into individualised consciousness.

Who dreams? No one in particular – not this dreamer nor another. Who is the ‘I’ of the dream? There is a distance between the protagonist of the dream whose face and name are those of the one who sleeps and the sleeper himself – a distance which is the correlate of the distance between the sleep which provides rest for the one who will rise to work the next day and the sleep ‘beneath’ such sleep from which no one ever awakens. Or, again, between the dream which is part of the course of ordinary sleep and the dream of that other sleep which takes dreaming itself as its object. But then one wonders whether such a distinction can be drawn at all – whether indeed dreams are ever just an interval within sleep which leaves that sleep undisturbed.

Perhaps every dream is dreamt by another in me and that this is why we are eager to recount our dreams, speaking them to a friend, a lover as though to proclaim them our own work, the product of a nocturnal labour (‘I had a strange dream last night’). Yet this eagerness is only evidence of a kind of fear. It is as though the dream was something we came across by mistake – as though we were the voyeur of a scene we should not have seen. It is not ours – whence the attempt to grasp it and make it our own; it does not harbour a secret about our particular psyche so much as about the secret heart of the world.

Who dreams? Neither you nor I. What shows itself? Nothing that is bound to either a subject or a substantive. Dream without centre, eccentric – dream from which we cannot say we are absent either. But how to write of the exposure of the dreamer? How to write not of the thinking thing, res cogitans beneath the cogiatones, but of a thought without a thinker? True, there are figures with whom we can identify in the dream (‘that was me’; ‘you were there too’) – but this work of identification belies the uncertainty of their presence (is that me? is that you?) Are the dream’s protagonists identifiable with particular individuals in the world like the real people who appear jumbled up in Dorothy’s dream in The Wizard of Oz (‘you were there Aunt Em – and you – and you –’) or does something stranger occur?

Perhaps the dream places particular identities in parentheses, granting a familiar face to the figure who simultaneously introduces a difference between that face and itself – a kind of haunting whereby we are made to unrecognise the ones we knew. It is akin to that experience wherein the passerby on the street resembles someone we know and yet is not that friend – wherein the face of the friend is sent on a peculiar detour. So too with those we think we recognise in the dream – even the protagonist we identify too readily with ourselves. A dream that dreams itself, which turns back on itself such that it is not the dreamer who rests beneath each dream, but a place of opening and exposure. A dream that dreams of a difference that haunts the work of identification – in which that difference presents itself as it is woven into the coming to presence of the world. A dream in which difference dreams of itself.

The Open

What does Rilke mean by the Open? Certainly it is not unambiguous presence; it needs to be approached with caution, with patience, with the relinquishment of the desire to possess and of the measure of possession, the rejection of security and stability, of the desire for certainty. Then what we call the real must be rejected in its entirety; a profounder intimacy beckons to us – a connection to things that stills the desire to do and to act. This is what it would mean to become ‘as fully conscious as possible of our existence’.

The Open. Is this what Rilke experienced at Capri and Dunio: the Weltinnenraum, the inner space of the world: our intimacy with ourselves and with things? Rilke: ‘Through all beings spreads the one space: / the world’s inner space. Silently fly the birds / all through us. O I who want to grow, / I look outside, and it is in me that the tree grows!’

What is this experience? There is a purification, an interiorisation through which things lose their falsified nature, their narrow limitations. In a letter, Rilke wrote of ‘becoming as fully conscious as possible of our existence’; ‘All the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share’.

Then the experience Rilke seeks is the attempt to approach the source of meanings, an enhanced, deeper consciousness. Though this great conversion, this inward-turning, the exterior realm is regained; the world is transmuted; the visible is taken into invisible and is reborn. ‘We are the bees of the Invisible. We ardently suck the honey of the visible in order to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the Invisible’. ‘Our task is to impregnate the provisional and perishable earth so profoundly in our mind, with so much patience and passion, that its essence can be reborn in us invisible’.

Beautiful lines. But how do we achieve this task when the Open, for the most part is closed to us? One approach: the movement of love. But only when your beloved is only the focus through which another space can be discerned. The risk is that love is always drawn back to the beloved. Perhaps the Open only reveals itself in our childhood (but isn’t there a way of awakening a childhood in our adulthood?) . But Rilke writes ‘the young child, already / we turn him around and force him to look backwards / at the world of forms and not into the Open, which / in the animal’s face is so profound’. The child is not innocent enough.

Is it left to the beast, to, the one who exists unreflectively, who lives in proximity to the Open? Perhaps. But what does the Open mean for us? Rilke writes in a letter of February 25, 1926 that it is by virtue of a low ‘degree of consciousness’ that the animal can enter reality. The creature belongs to the Open.

By Open we do not mean the sky, the air, space — which for the observer are still objects, and thus opaque. The animal, the flower is all that without realizing it, and has thus before itself, beyond itself, that indescribably open freedom which, for us, has its extremely short-lived equivalents perhaps only in the first instants of love — when one being sees in the other, in the beloved, his own extension — or again in the outpouring to God.

Human consciousness is closed upon itself. The animal’s look reaches out into the things; it is where it looks. ‘With all its eyes / the creature sees / the Open. Our eyes only are/ as if reversed’. We lose the thing through our representation of the thing; making of it an object, fitting it into an objective reality, it answers a utilitarian demand. (It is as though what Husserl called the reduction was possible only for a child within childhood, an animal within the animal. And yet is there a way to recover this childhood, this animality, in our own lives?)

How to achieve this? Rilke invokes that death which opens its eyes in our own such that ‘we look out with a great animal gaze’, so that we gaze upon ‘the world’s inner space’. ‘Death is the side of life that is turned away from, and unillumined by, us’. Death is not a beyond; it is not removed from life so much as turned from it. We are turned from death, from a relation which now appears impossible for us. We are limited; the limit turns us back to ourselves.

My consciousness may seem to leap beyond me, to go about among the things of the world, but I can encounter nothing other than myself. Death must become transparent (Rilke: ‘For close to death one no longer sees death, and one stares outward, perhaps with a great animal gaze’) – but is it not, in so doing, volatilised out of existence?

Death must become transparent, the authentic yea-saying; death must only say yes. But what does this mean? Recall Rilke’s prayer: ‘Oh Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life where he found love, meaning and distress’. The effort is to return death to itself, to raise death to its proper level in order to maintain a responsibility towards things and the world.

Death is what Rilke calls ‘the pure relation’ – a purified relation which leaps beyond consciousness. Through death it is possible to achieve a new intimacy with things, replacing the imperious desire to master the world, the purposive activity which allows us to be content only with results. To save things is to turn towards the invisible, to allow death to affirm itself. What is this death? An enlarged consciousness – the broadening which reinstates a lost unity, a larger understanding. It reassures our faith in the oneness of things. Would this be the experience which would lead us into the profound intimacy we seek?

Death is our chance. Yet Rilke will say the animal that lives in the Open is ‘free of death’. We are not free; our perspective is limited and this is the point: ‘Death, we see only death; the free animal always has its decline behind it, and before it God, and when it moves, it moves in Eternity, as springs flow’. But then what chance does death offer us?

Death, for Rilke, is double. On the one hand, it is delimitation such that our freedom must be a freedom from death. And on the other? If, for Rilke, death no longer provides the passage for a soul to the heavenly beyond, it retains a kind of transcendence. There is, in Rilke, a movement to purge death of its pain, its brutality. But how is this to be achieved?

Poetry provides one approach. Rilke’s Orpheus, of the Sonnets which bear his name, is a mediator. A task which resonates with that of Hölderlin. To recall: for Hölderlin, the poet’s destiny is to expose himself to the undetermined and to endure its extraordinary force and violence, such that he might, in his poems, give it form. For Rilke, similarly, the poet’s task is to determine the indeterminable, to give it exactitude and form, rendering it decisive in order to speak the Open in a determined form.

Rilke: ‘To sing in truth is a different breath \ A breath around nothing. A stirring in God. The wind’. The poem breathes, it becomes passage, it lets resound a kind of song in which the Open sings. This is how poetry saves things, lifting them out of oblivion, preserving a world from representation. Poetry accomplishes that conversion, translating things from a debased, exterior language to an interior one – to a kind of silence within language, a kind of silent space through the poem. A metamorphosis of the visible into the invisible, a speaking that allows us to settle back into our intimacy with things. A language of the silent and the invisible when the Open has become the poem, when the depth of being reveals itself in the poem’s space.

Patience

I gave R.M. a copy of Rilke’s Malte Lauridds Brigge for her birthday. She now works in the City, in London; I remembered when I too worked – although not in such an elevated position – and how I would read Rilke in my lunch hour.

Unpleasant memory. Another memory: my edition of Malte was given by a friend on my course in my first year as an undergraduate. A daughter of a well known artist, Beckett was her godfather; she knew him as ‘Sam’; he died that same year; it was Manchester, 1989. She put Malte in my hands; I had barely read anything (Fitzgerald and Joyce on the train home from work the year before; Lawrence …)

A few years later, I read Rilke again, and this time it was with an understanding of that great sense in his work of the immense patience one should have before death (it is similar in the last, wonderful poems of Lawrence …) I read Rilke in the sadness that such patience was impossible and that the world whose appearance he mourned was my world and that the invocation of a true relation to things, to the world, to death had disappeared. The wonderful Charlotte Street quotes a favourite passage of mine:

To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered . . .

‘O Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life in which he found love, meaning and distress’, writes Rilke, shocked by the suicide of a young man. Take your life, seize it for yourself and you join the anonymous dead of the big cities.

Recall Malte’s anguish at the murals which had been stolen from their original context. Murals, artworks moving to the exhibition space just as human beings have departed the places of their birth and made their way to the city. Just as Malte, this itinerant Danish poet, is a wanderer and an exile.

Malte is lost as the tapestries are lost, whence his anguish. But for what does he reserve his true horror? That death has become banal; it has become null, that is, mass-produced (why do I think of the wanderer Malte alongside the Russian poet of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia?) Now death is a product like any other; one size fits all; the exchange value of a life is measured in its end, which is the same for everyone who inhabits the big city.

Malte reflects:

It is evident that with accelerated production, each individual death is not so well executed, but that doesn’t matter much anyway. It’s the quantity that counts. Who still attaches any importance to a well-wrought death? No one. Even rich people, who can pay for luxury, have ceased to care about it; the desire to have one’s own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one’s own.

By contrast:

When I think back to my home (where there is nobody left now), it always seems to me that formerly it must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew — or maybe one guessed — that one had one’s death within one, as the fruit its core. Children had a little one, adults a big one. Women carried it in their womb, men in their breast. They truly had their death, and that awareness gave dignity, a quiet pride.

Yet there is hope, or at least a kind of hope: the artist, celebrating this authentic death, remembering things that have disappeared into the past, restores the dignity of death. Is death to be engendered by each of us? Or will our death come into the world as a stillborn child? ‘And grant us now (after all women’s pains) the serious motherhood of men’. To write, to die, for Rilke, is to mature like a fruit, to grow like a child; it is to be patient. Death must be formed; it forms itself in patience.

But what if death fails to give itself to us in this way? Rilke: ‘Be satisfied to believe that it is a friend, your profoundest friend, perhaps the only friend never to be alienated by our actions and waverings, never’. But what happens when this friendship becomes impossible?

There’s an autobiography in this, unreal, unwriteable pages as beautiful as Malte. A task I set myself many years ago: rewrite Malte replacing the Danish poet with a temp at a computer company (I was working at Hewlett-Packard). But I’d forgotten Pessoa had created something like this temp in his heteronym Bernardo Soares, clerk at a firm in Lisbon (I gave R.M. The Book of Disquiet, too …) I never wrote a line.

Was this a way to seek a death as authentic as the one for which Malte yearns? To discover an intimacy with things as I wrote the blazing pages of a great work? What foolishness! But I was never innocent enough to think this act of composition was possible. Even in 1989, I had already worked, I knew what had dissipated in the skies above the new industrial estates. It was, rather, to write an anti-Malte, to rid myself of anything left of the faith the Danish poet possessed …

Outside Thought

In 1924, a young poet submits his work to Jacques Rivière, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. The editor rejects his work but, finding it interesting, seeks to make acquaintance with the poet; they meet and a correspondence ensues. That poet is Antonin Artaud; the correspondence has become famous.

These questions as I reread the Correspondence: Does Artaud want to write poetry? Or is it, in contrast, to plunge literature into a kind of incapacity, the ‘uncan’ [impouvoir] such that it speaks not of the world in which we live happily or unhappily but a kind of tear which passes through this world, a privation which divides the world in itself such that it calls for a writing that is likewise torn? An eroded writing, half-destroyed, a writing which is cracked and fissured whose refusal to bring itself into a finished and well-rounded form is an answer to what calls it into being: this is the work – To Have Done With the Judgement of God, The Theatre of Cruelty – for which Artaud will be celebrated; at this time, however, even Umbilical Limbo and Nerve Scales are ahead of him. The poems he submits are relatively polite and well formed; yet what he wants his correspondent to grasp is that this poetry corresponds to his own mental ruin.

I suffer from a fearful mental disease. My thought abandons me at every stage. From the mere fact of thought itself to the external fact of its materialisation on words. Words, the forms of phrases, inner directions of thought, the mind’s simplest reactions, I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus, when I am able to grasp a form, however imperfect, I hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought. As I know I do not do myself justice, I suffer from it, but I accept it in fear of complete death.

Artaud complains he falls short of thought; yet he seems to have the faith that such thinking, were he to receive the power to determine its form, would be possible. A view subtly different to that of his correspondent.

At first Rivière wants to comfort his correspondent by telling him he will one day come into the full possession of his powers: Artaud’s suffering will be part of that work he will one day realise; the fragmentation of his mind will be overcome. Yet it is not reassurance Artaud seeks; in his acute and patient letters, Artaud watches over his own poetry as it attests to the impossibility of thinking.

Why, though, express this impossibility? Why not take refuge in silence? Artaud: ‘Well, my weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself. I am a man whose mind has greatly suffered and as such I have a right to speak’. A right to speak? But what permits such a right?

Artaud links his name to Tzara, Breton and Reverdy; all of them, he writes, are touched by a ‘weakness’ that is similar to Artaud’s own ‘physiological weakness’ – yet what distinguishes him is his relationship to what is ‘outside thought’. Whatever the source of the malaise of a time, it is only Artaud who suffers, who physically suffers. ‘Speaking for myself, I can honestly say I am not in this world and such a statement is not merely an intellectual pose’. Then it is the extent of this suffering that lends him this right. It is the truth of the testimony that he, Artaud, can give in his ruined, unpublishable poetry.

What becomes visible in these letters is that it is the ruin of literature that such thinking demands. Thus he will claim for himself a ‘profound faculty’; he has the capacity to write, except ‘at the instant the soul proposes to coordinate its riches’ this capacity is interrupted; Artaud remains in perpetual pursuit of such coordination; the imperfection of his poems are attributable to the necessities of this pursuit: when he finds, however fleetingly and unsatisfactorily, a form for his thought, he must ‘hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought’; this is the significance of his poems.

This is not a matter of the retreat of poetic inspiration; Artaud is not a writer who is blocked, but a writer dispossessed of the means of writing. ‘This is also why I told you I had nothing further, no work in the offing, the few things I submitted to you being the vestiges of what I was able to salvage from the utter void’, he writes; what he seeks is for Rivière to understand his that his poems, however unsatisfactorily, manifest his mental existence.

Wha, then, does poetry matter? ‘I am unattached to poetry’, he realises in May 1924, yet it is in poetry nevertheless that Artaud was able to give form to the void. The problem is the poetry itself: it remains too weak; it falls short of the experience to which it would belong. Is this why, later that same month, he responds affirmatively to Rivière’s suggestion to publish their correspondence? ‘Why lie, why try to put something which is life’s very cry on a literary level? Why fictionalise something made from the soul’s ineradicable essence, which is like the complaint of reality?’ Artaud agrees to publication on condition that nothing is changed; the correspondence must stand as it is.

Still, one might suspect a sleight of hand: it is as if the poems require supplementing – such that, with an account of their composition, of the vicissitudes of their author, Artaud might overcome their inadequacy. But it is the other way round: it is so they will stand in their incompletion, in the impossibility of thinking to which they answer, that their correspondence must swirl round the poems.

Why did Rivière seek to publish Artaud’s correspondence? I wonder whether he sensed that Artaud’s work answers to one of the fundamental experiences of modern literature, wherein the poem bears upon its own emergence. Here, of course, it is not the splendid realisation of the Dunio Elegies that is at issue, but poems which Rivière deems unpublishable. But this is another side of modernity: broken works can now be understood as issuing from the same source as splendid ones; what matters, perhaps, is a kind of experience to which even the ruined poem would answer. After Surrealism, this experience is linked to a new kind of thinking; a mode of poetic research which supercedes philosophy.

‘Outside thought’: that is Artaud’s expression. Isn’t it the outside, thought’s outside, that Foucault and Deleuze will celebrate?

The Everyday

The everyday: you can’t fight it, not if you’re unemployed or half-employed. Music of the everyday: Half Man Half Biscuit (first two albums: Back at the DHSS and Back at the DHSS Again), I Ludicrous, Felt. Music made by people like you. The skint, the invisible. Disappearing in and out of obscurity.

Compare The Fall: Mark E Smith does not inhabit the everyday. It doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t experience its corrosive force. He is too intransigent; this is admirable, I have always admired it. Andre Breton, too – and Bataille: these figures are too strong for the everyday. They barely need to struggle against it.

I have absolute awe for those writers and artists who endure the everyday. Imagine Giacometti, up all night, working, working, making sculptures and destroying them. And Bacon, hungover, but up every morning, painting, destroying paintings he didn’t like (I was amazed to see a poor Bacon at a gallery in Edinburgh over the summer, it was terrible, a picture of a hat, some gloves hanging in a stairwell from the 1950s … almost as bad as those execrable portraits of Mick Jagger …)

Duras, however, she is different. I would like to write of her alcoholism, but sometimes I set myself this rule: quote only from memory, and if necessary, inaccurately. But I think of Duras as a woman who drank because of the too vast presence of the world. It was unbearable for her, and drink was a way of bearing it. Drink was another way of coping with the vastness of the everyday.

(Forgive these vague notes. I’ll come back to this another day.)

Slavishness

Have you ever heard yourself speak as a master? You recognise it: it is the voice with which you berate yourself; it says: work harder, account for yourself, time is running out. It speaks in you and you hear as you speak the masterful voice which reaches to the heart of what you are. Which repeats itself such that you present yourself to the world as an orderly, responsible individual who finishes tasks on time and gets the job done. The voice of a master? Rather the voice of a slave who would make a slave of himself. But is it that simple?

Castells claims the new social movements are movements of identification. Doesn’t militancy require that vigilance, that work of autonomy such that a group can maintain itself in the demand around which it forms itself? But I wonder whether such identification doesn’t endanger another kind of relation – not work this time but what is called worklessness (Bataille, Nancy, Agamben …) Another kind of militancy (but is it a militancy?): the group that labours to keep a difference intact, a lapse in the work of identification. Why? Because work was complicit in what makes the world too boring, too serious, a world of masters and slaves …

Is this what Surrealism sought to overturn? It called for a revolution of thinking, of everyday life as much as a determined political project (campaigning against the Kif war, contributing to journals of the far Left, collaborating on intellectual work with Trotsky). The same, perhaps, in some of the groups in the Events of May 1968 (the Movement of the 22nd of March).

Two kinds of militancy: the struggle to overcome the contradiction, the public struggle to destroy the present injustice. Then a private struggle – intense communication: the life of men and women struggle to overcome the model of interpersonal relations (the friends at the rue Saint-Benoit …) (But also, somewhere else (but is it private or public?): the artwork.)

The public, the private: Surrealism holds the dream of struggling on both fronts. On the one side, the public presence, a life lived on the streets and in the cafes; on the other, the encounters between the Surrealists (and Nadja …) What holds them together? Is it possible to hold them together? The transformation required: the subordination of the voice of identification – that voice you sometimes hear in yourself speak, stern, impatient – to a kind of difference. Where it is a matter of working such that worklessness does not disappear.

Perhaps it is to this play of work and worklessness to which the work of art already attests. Now I am thinking of the peculiar forms of art which question their own conditions of possibility – the poem of the poem (Holderlin), the poem as the Open (Rilke), but then also the novel that is a search for itself (Kafka’s The Castle, Blanchot’s The One Who was Standing …) (And then, why not, films that are looking for themselves (Tarkovsky’s Mirror)). But what kind of examples are such works to any kind of militancy?

Literature in Pianissimo

I’ve dismantled the bookshelves in my bedroom. Walls of books, so comforting, have now disappeared, replaced by the books in the imaginary museum of all the books in the world – books I can order from the library. What is lost: singularity, specificity: that edition of Rilke’s Malte, that blue smooth-sleeved copy of Finnegan’s Wake, that puckered copy of Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Lost from my bedroom: the presence of what is called modern literature, the vast presence of books each of which turned another literature towards me: literature become dark, unreadable: literature which says ‘I will not serve …’: literary books become monuments without access, obscure monoliths …

Yet it paralyzed me, too – something had come to an end; a culture had withdrawn. These destructive books, book-explosions seem to call now for a literature in pianissimo – a quiet writing, prose bound in no more than one hundred and fifty pages, prose with few adjectives, unlyrical, restrained, because of a suspicion of literary lushness which you still find in the new books in the bookshops. A modest prose, modest in the wake of the big books which destroyed literature, modest as they speak in quiet voices, liable to be ignored as if they each included no more than the piping of the mouse-singer of Kafka’s story.

These are the foolish thoughts I have as I read Aaron Appelfeld.

The Heart of Childhood

As a child I would dream of stuffed toys that I had lost – of the woollen dog, youngest member of a ‘family’ my grandmother knitted I left on an aeroplane and then of its older ‘brother’, thrown onto the schoolroof. Early memories: wanting the plastic lamb left in the playgroup to return with me. I wanted it to be mine – one of the first things I wanted to own.

A couple of years ago I saw a second hand book I should have bought: Winnicott’s Transitional Objects which concerned stuffed toys. There was one on the cover: a blank-eyed teddy bear with its stuffed arms splayed.

What is the relationship a child forms with these toys? It is as though a child needs a child to care for: as if the cared-for child needed to care in turn. Why? Is it because all a child knows is being cared for, a ritual to be enacted anew as children repeat adult behaviour? Or is it because there is a loss of childhood at the heart of childhood, as though the child knows the ultimate object of parental care has plunged inside her, as if to be a child is to be one of a series of children, one within the other, until there is the pure form of childhood, something inviolable called innocence, but which in truth is adamantine, as hard as a diamond?

A loss of childhood: you remember conversations when it was clear that you were the child being talked about – you were object of conversation, this was pleasant but in the end you shrugged your shoulders: you were the child, but were you? The phrase ‘the child’ seemed to miss you as it referred to you. You thought to yourself: I am not that child or any child. Yet you took care to hide toys in a small box as if this box in its secrecy – you showed it to no one – was the bearer of that child buried inside you. This is who I am, you thought and you thought it tenderly. It reminded you of those fairy stories where the heart of the ogre was buried in a box and sunk in a lake; the hero would have to retrieve that heart and drive a stake through it in order to kill his adversary. Still, the desire for secrecy, for a childish secret – the secret of childhood – came before anything.

As you grow older, these objects were necessary to you until what was painful was the fact they were unnecessary; their time was past, they no longer held the secret. There they are still, the toys of your childhood, in binbags in the loft of your parents’ house. Alongside the suitcase full of Lego. You remember those toys uneasily, wishing you had a young relative to play with them, to bring them to life as each toy bring stands in for the heart of childhood which fascinates even the child.

I remembered those toys this week as I moved the books I had collected over the years into my office – hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction, which had moved with me from one city to another. Now I am secure (for the moment) in my job, I am aware that these books, too, have lost their importance as fetish-objects, as repositories of hope and faith.

A friend told me of the distress of his little son when he saw dozens of boxes of Buzz Lightyear in the toyshop. I feel the same kind of distress knowing my battered copy of Kafka’s Diaries, an old Penguin edition with a Paul Klee painting on the cover, is the same book as the copies of the Diaries in the library. My books are no longer singular; worse, they are inferior – my editon of Balthus’s paintings is inferior to the edition in the library; my book of Chagall cannot match the vast compeniums of his paintings on the shelves of the art collection.

Almost year ago, I started this blog with the aim of writing about the fiction which I had stopped reading years before. I thought: I will read them again. I moved all the books to do with my job to my office; here at my flat, I kept poetry and fiction.

Ah, those books! R.M. was impressed when she first saw them: a universe. A universe spread in bookshelves around my bed. But over the year, they’ve lost their aura; they’ve become books like other books. All this because I am secure, because I have a place in the world, because my office is that neutral repository into which they disappear as my early adulthood has disappeared. Who am I now? The one whose heart is buried neither in my toys nor my books, whose heart is dispersed across the libraries of the world.

Today? A disenchanted world. True, I am a reader again: I take Appelfeld to read in the gym; I read Josipovici in bed; Bernhard has become essential. But I am a safe reader, I read from a distance which has become safe.

Shame

A year after I submitted the final copy of the typescript, W. is still polishing his book. ‘It’s like Gnosticism,’ he says, ‘if your book is full of typos, mine has to be pristine’.

‘I’ve reached new levels of self-disgust.’ – ‘You’re always disgusted at yourself.’ – ‘No, but this is worse. The book is so bad.’ – ‘Why did you read it?’ – ‘I don’t have a copy. But then one appeared in the library.’ – ‘Why did you get it out?’

‘You know what I feel? Ashamed. But it’s good to feel shame. It’s appropriate.’ W. says, ‘I thought you were supposed to be finishing your new book.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘I’m ashamed.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ – ‘After this book I’ll …’ – ‘write a book about Smog.’ – ‘Exactly.’ – ‘But you don’t know anything about music.’ – ‘No, but I know a guy who plays guitar.’ – Who?’ – ‘You. But you can’t play chords, can you?’ – ‘No. You’re not going to write a book about Smog, are you?’ – ‘No.’

W. has been to a conference. ‘You’re famous’, he says I said: ‘why?’ – ‘These guys were asking me whether I was W.’ – ‘They read the blog? Haven’t they got anything better to do? Anyway, it’s going downhill. It’s terrible. I should call it “Shame.” Really, it’s drivel.’ W. says: ‘I told them you’re really fat. Too fat to come to conferences.’ – ‘Tell them I can’t make out of my bedroom. That it’s like something off Jerry Springer.’

Hubris

You are prolific, you write too much; you squander your time and your resources; you are educated, but you do nothing with your education. What is more grotesque than writing about writing, about your own inadequacies with respect to writing at the time of the new atrocity at Fallujah, the theocratic madness in the States?

You’ve turned writing into a petty narcissism. It’s worse than that, for narcissism would presume a self that could be reflected in the mirror of his prose. But there’s no one here. No one who has not turned himself inside out. Who knows he is no more than what is written, impersonal language which streams above the place where he should be. As though Narcissus saw not his reflection but a kind of black hole and tumbled into it.

It is irresponsible. Nothing is being said; no work is being done. This is indulgence, a waste of time, a waste of effort. What does this kind of writing add to the world? What does it make? What does it permit? Worst of all: you have abrogated all responsibility because you will not articulate a position. You write of the Outside, of impersonal affects, of a swarm of forces which escape what is called the Self, but this is a way of avoiding the responsibility of philosophy. You refuse to argue, to present arguments. To use your time in order to focus upon what matters most.

You’ll tell me you never asked for a place at the philosopher’s table, but this is the pathos of pretending to be outside philosophy, one of those rebel thinkers. But you are exactly what Sartre said of Bataille: “an incendiary in carpet slippers.” I know what you’ll say: I cannot find the words, I haven’t the strength to express an opinion, to hypothesise. I’m too weak to to lift myself to the place where a philosophical argument would be possible. But this is a pose; behind your relentless productivity, and your mock-disgust at the same productivity, your great whine about not being educated enough, about lacking taste and culture, I see hubris and retreat.

Everything here is an alibi. You write without responsibility. And I know what you’re going to say. In his letter to Kojève, you”ll tell me, Bataille conceded that everything was finished, history was over, except for the wrap up. One does not have to agree with this to experience what he called unemployed negativity: that residue of restless inaction, of a feverish desire to do something which mocks everything that can be made or achieved. Most often, says Bataille, unemployed negativity becomes art. You’ll remind me that this is an alibi, another lie. And you’ll claim the same could be said of philosophy. But do you think philosophy, with all its riches, its great dignity, its devotion to what matters most would have anything to do with what you call writing?

I can hear you laughing. You laugh and I despise your infinite capacity for evasion, your writerly irresponsibility.  But I will have revenge. You fall towards the Outside, you laugh but it is no one’s laughter. One day it will swallow you up and you’ll struggle to write a few lucid lines.  But you’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Immediacy

Daniel Green is disquieted by the comments on various blogs which seem to dismiss the importance of blogging about books in the wake of Bush’s victory. Isn’t the status of reading the question you face as soon as you set aside time to read? Time says: couldn’t you do something better with me? Progress says: isn’t it more important to keep up with current affairs, or with developments in science and technology?

The old humanist insists that literature is spiritually uplifting and morally improving. The cultural critic asks: But is it really a question of putting culture together again? Or was the unity of culture, that pantheon of books and works, already a lie? The critic says calmy, dispassionately:  reading is a cultural practice like any other; through reading you amass a cultural capital, you profit from your fine education; you can show off.

Come now, I reply, the books I like never had any place in culture; they were base, disgraceful, their authors untrustworthy or wierd. The cultural critic turns to me and says: you like obscure works – but why is this surprising? True, you like narratives where characters seem to evaporate, in which nothing happens, in which events cannot come to completion. Nothing entertaining happens; nothing suspenseful. And there is nothing useful, either; nothing of relevance to understanding the world. But wasn’t this, the critic continues, since Kant, always the sign of art, of high art as it belonged to what is called high culture? Isn’t this the defining feature of what is no more than a marker of cultural capital?

I sigh and remember what Josipovici said in a recent interview:

As Bacon said, what he felt when reading Eliot was the immediacy of the poetry and he wanted in his paintings to get some of that immediacy, to break down the polite distance between canvas and viewer. I want to do the same in my work, to break down the polite intimacy that is the norm in fiction of a story being told to you, of a storyteller who knows the outcome telling the reader who doesn’t know, the reader following respectfully behind[….] Of course one can’t get that immediacy simply by using raw language, for raw language is still language, one has to come to it by indirection, seduce the reader into going along one track and then suddenly surprise him or her. And that surprise is the goal of the story or novel. 

The appeal to immediacy is not a call to the development of new fangled artistic techniques so much as to the newness inherent in a particular style, in the singular timbre of this voice or that, in the heaviness of a word or the sonorousness of a sentence. I would like to say that to read literature is not simply to imbibe improving values as the cultural conservative would have it; but nor, too, is it merely to confirm the superiority of one’s taste. What matters is shock or rawness; what matters is the materiality of the artwork, its darkness, its obscurity.

‘Culture has collapsed’, say conservatives of the left and right. But it is the idea of culture that has collapsed and this is our opportunity. An immense field has opened: that rich domain of works supposedly too ‘low’ for critical attention. Claw them back, these works and remember too those charred books which were always marginalised: Bataille’s Inner Experience, Klosswski’s The Bath of Diana, Duras’s India Song. Claw them back and attend to the transformation of the media as it opens itself to those who call themselves artists and many who do not. Let reading join that unnamed practice of attending to affects, to the great stirring of the world. Rebuild aesthetics as the science of this whirl of affects, always surprising, always raw.

I hear the great lament about the death of culture from those around me. But I know that Bataille has more in common with A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology than with Beryl Bainbridge …

Destruction

Admit it, you’ve read very little fiction for years; you’ve reread favourites, it is true, but only on occasion and always tentatively, nervously, as though you were worried you would disturb something in yourself by continuing.

When was the last time you really read, when you gave day after day to reading, when you read with abandon, with no sense of what would be useful to you, with only the horizon that reading clears before you and the urgency of reading itself carrying you through the hours? When your own future was open and vague enough to form the backdrop upon which your reading could project itself; when your cares were only of the immediate kind; and it was a matter not of your life, your vocation, finding a job or keeping one, but of tomorrow, of the weekend, or the weekend after that?

And now? Is it true that you’ve become settled enough to read? That you can begin to read fiction again because you have made a place for yourself in the world you can wager because you know it is your own? The experience of tragedy depends upon the safety of the audience; you are afraid, but not for your physical well being. Isn’t something of the same true for the sublime, at least for the sublime work of art? Then the work resembles only that theatrical performance which takes place at a distance, away from you. Reading must always take place at arm’s length.

But the books to which you are drawn, those you’ve read over the last few days (Roubaud, Josipovici, Bernhard) do not permit this distance. Then there is a kind of reading that will not allow you to escape: a response, a responsiveness to what reaches and refuses you in the work. For this refusal cannot be held at a distance; the book fascinates, which is to say, it brings you nearer to its unfolding than you can endure.

In one sense, reading is nothing; it leaves everything intact; the world, as you look up from the page, is still the world. A cloud passed over the sun; that was all. But it was as though it took forever to pass. As though, reading, you passed forever through the darkness the work inhabits. As though the sun itself that had gone dark.

This is still too vague. Approach it from another angle. Once you were an avid reader, you wanted the wondrous, the exciting, and you found books to satisfy that demand. You were drawn to genre books and then to the classics; you read until you found yourself enclosed by a small circle of books and it was though you would never leave that circle. Gone, now, was the attraction of the great names of literature; excitement and wonder were not enough; now you could only reread the books which fascinated you because of the way in which they seemed to resist reading. The circle of reading drew tighter; there were fewer works, each with a special obduracy, a stone like resistance. They stood all around you, obscure monoliths. And then it was as though the circle of reading were tightening around your neck.

What happened? What freed you? You found authors who wrote on the authors important to you. The circle widened. Then you found the authors who influenced those authors in turn: philosophers, fearsome creatures. You found yourself on the open plain: philosophy spread everywhere, in all directions. Now there was too much too read; you felt a kind of agoraphobia before this new expanse. You wanted to be enclosed, to find yourself among the great stonelike books and draw the circle of reading around you. Only now it was protection you sought; you were afraid of the infinite expanse of the philosophical library.

Now you sought protection from those mutilated books written at the edges of literature. Books whose characters have lost their way, whose plots run astray in the infinite. Books which seem to write of themselves, of the strange gratuitousness of their own existence. Books which took a detour and took the whole world on that detour. What are their names? Whisper them: Klossowski’s The Baphomet, Bataille’s Le Petit, Blanchot’s Waiting, Forgetting, Duras’s The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein, Artaud’s Collected Works.

What do you find in their pages? A fictional world which frays before you, a worldly expanse which has worn thin and through whose thin fabric you can see the whole night as though shining behind it. A world in whose mundane objects you discover the pull of that night and in whose characters you meet the force of the infinite wearing away. ‘No one here wants to be linked to any story’.

The Baphomet, Le Petit, Waiting, Forgetting: books that do not unfold events as on a stage before you. That do not conjure an imaginary world out of the air. Books in which nothing happens, books with half-characters and suspended suspense. Books in which the nothing-is-happening is happening. For nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen; all you hear is a kind of roaring, a conflagration of language. The black fire which sets fire to itself and all literature. Books that are like anti-arks, books which preserve nothing and destroy everything.

Bliss: you are scattered by these books. You read and you are scattered and so too is literature scattered. There is no longer that ray of intentionality which animates black shapes and the whiteness between them; no longer that magic through which a living world may be born from dead pages. In each of these books, literature comes to an end; a tradition is not so much completed or perfected as destroyed, over and again.

A new fear: you betray these books by returning to them. You should have left them behind as soon as you found yourself in the library of philosophy. For now you return to them armed by what you think you have learnt. Commentator, exegete, everything you write is irrelevant, words added to a movement of writing that was already complete and perfectly closed on itself.

Scum

Tonight George W. Bush will regain his presidency. At first I thought to write of something else, something completely different. But what I wrote in my stupid way became a lament for hope, for the end of hope.

My boss speaks of the chasm between the ‘generation of hope’ to which he says he belongs, and the ‘generation of shit’ to which he says I belong (and he means this not unkindly – he knows from what I have said what the absence of political hope must mean). Another friend, a man who died too young, used to tell me of the monks who taught him, of their brilliance and their inspiring example. I said: didn’t they try and grope you? weren’t they sadistic? remembering of my own encounters with mediocre, bullying teachers, with figures of authority from one could expect nothing but massive stupidity. This was unthinkable for him: they were his teachers, his guides, they demanded a great deal, but they gave a great deal to their pupils.

He told me stories of his enchanted childhood, of the full student grant, sufficient in those days to eat out every night, to develop a taste for fine wine and port, to assemble collections of the complete works of this or that author, to buy a gramophone and records, to entertain. He remembered the 60s when he grew his hair long and wore rings on each of his fingers. He spoke of seminars which lasted all afternoon and then all evening; he would take his students home and talk with them into the night and then, next morning, would take back to university. The 60s: you can’t imagine it, everything was possible, he said. It got silly, he said. He spoke of houses of friends where everyone would have sex according to a strict rota. You can’t imagine it, he said.

As he spoke, I thought to myself: you are secure in a town you never had to leave. You rose to prominence here, restauranters greet you with delight when you walked through their doors, taxi drivers vie for your custom, streams of visitors come to your door. You live on the outskirts of the city in what you call the earthly paradise. You are a man of hope, hope was always there for you. You always had a future because you had a past, a chance to begin.

And compared to you? We are the generation of shit; we are pallid, transparent; you can see through us. You can see our guts and our heart; we barely exist. Our past? Nothing happened. Our present? We are dispersed across the world. Our future? We will be dispersed across the sky. We are the ones without substance, one of the transparent creatures through whom shines the light of the long afternoon of the 1980s and 90s – those terrible decades in which political hope evaporated.

You remember (but it didn’t touch you): new housing estates spread everywhere. House prices rose; every home became a fortress closed against the world and the suburbs a wall closed against the poor (and you were never poor). Jobs were casualised; temporary workers serviced the great corporate machines. Incomes rose for a few; for the rest, they withered. The utilities were sold off. Workers closed their eyes in the workplace and opened them when they got home. A thin film formed over our eyes and our ears. You know this, but you were protected from it; it never touched you.

The 80s, the 90s, and now the 00s. You survived, entertaining everyone in your great house. You were alive, still alive, hope was alive in you. You could retire; you lived on the sidelines. And for the rest of us? We’ll spend a life on the dole and on the sick. We’ll live on the sick till the end of our lives. A life to lie sick from the new ennui, the great consensus, the crushing awareness that nothing is possible, that there is no foothold from which we could begin. Sick and alone, each of us, fallen to nothing. With only a dim hatred for those who had risen above us like scum. For the scum that had floated to the top and seethes there.

In my boss, in you, the world says: you came too late, you missed the party, now the final adjustment has been made and we’ll march in lockstep to the end. It says: you haven’t a chance. You are braced against the future because of you past. But this means, too, you cannot understand what will happen. You said you had never experienced boredom; I thought: you will understand nothing. You had the past, the richness of the past. Was that why I was drawn into the orbit of your house? Why, in the end I had to admit that all I wanted was security, continuity: a corner in which to curl up, a room with a table and a chair, some hours in which to read and write.

You gave me a room; I was grateful. I was indebted, but you never reminded me of my debts. We disagreed on everything, but we spoke for hours every day. And every night I ate with others at your table; I was in from the cold. You said grace and I closed my eyes. You took in those I thought were beyond hope; I warned you against them; you were right. The house was full, day and night.

In your attic room, I read, I wrote; it was dark, always dark; in a pool of light, I finished my dissertation; I began my first articles; I received my first rejection letters. Eventually, I left; I took a job, I moved further north; I went to another city and you, who phoned no one, who despised the phone, rang only once. And then you died, not long ago. You died a few days after I had tried, for the last time, to phone you.

Tonight, Kerry admitted defeat; George W. Bush has retaken the presidency. Tonight, I remembered the days we stuck Socialist Alliance stickers on the door and the window. That was 2001. When I left in 2002, the stickers were still there. And when I visited in 2003, they were there still. You hated Bush; you hated Blair. You spoke of other leaders, of different times. You spoke of the past, which gave you strength to endure the future. I thought: but they are politicians like the others, all the scum who have ruled us. You spoke from your hope; I answered from a resignation beneath resignation. I said: they are scum.

The Beach

Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine is so-called because it was to present only a sketch of a film, only a beginner’s lesson in filmmaking. Kitano thought of himself as an apprentice, but it is as though, in his film, he had seen everything and knew everything and what he saw through his camera was only a segment of everything he had seen.

Sonatine‘s style: wide, long shots of motionless, emotionless characters and then short, quick ones in confined spaces: gun battles, sudden and horrifying. Characters filmed flatly: faces seen from the front or in sharp profile or from the back. No clues as to what they are thinking. Few close ups. Neutral music. No facial expressions. His characters have seen it before: victims and perpetrators are weary. Dying, killing, it is all the same; the roundplay will continue.

Kitano plays Sonatine’s yakuza boss Murakawa. He is a man who has not died once but a thousand times. He is a man who missed his appointment with death; what remains is the beach, the sand, that place where the waiting game can be played out. He is waiting for death to keep its appointment.

The beach is a hide out, a place where Murakawa and his henchmen come after taking bloody revenge. Some, battle-scarred, are waiting for the showdown. Others, younger, are only playing at being yakuza. An interval: a fun and carefree time. The gangsters become pranksters. A young woman joins them when Murakawa kills her rapist.

Days pass. Idle hours of conversation and horse-play. Sumo games, Frisbee, target practice … this is the interval before death. Before the real business of life, which is to say, death. Death dealt out or death received. Soon, the other gang will come. Meanwhile: the beach, the flat expanse of land and sea.

The gangsters come. Gun battle. Murakawa survives; death has not come. Then he must give death to himself. Earlier he said: ‘When you are afraid all the time, you almost wish you were dead’, but it is not fear that makes him take his own life. It is sense that death is everywhere. That everything is a pause between now and death, but that death is everywhere, waiting. That death is there in the sand, the sea, the sky.

The yakuza are numberless. More will come, Murakawa will have to kill them, or they will kill him. If he survives, still more will come. Then more still, from now until the end of time. This is why he laughs as he brings the gun to his head. Has he defeated death, the multiplication of death?

A smiling Murakawa brings the gun to his head. Pulls the trigger. Now an empty shot. View of the beach. Which joins the other empty, trailing shots of the film. The silence before and after action. And now we know: the beach is what remains before and after death. It is that expanse upon life and death are played. It is what saw itself when Murakawa saw it. The beach knew itself in him. The beach opened its eyes in his eyes. The beach raised the gun to his temple.

And Takeshi Kitano? his suicidal despair in this period is well recorded. His deliberate attempt to wreck his career. His motocycle crash. His drinking. He dies in his characters. But he survives as the beach survives, witness to all. He survives in the film as it watches itself being watched. The film is what knows itself in us as we watch it.

A Child

Falling everywhere and unnoticed, falling in every part of the world, yet falling invisibly: it is ideology that falls and covers our mouths and our ears and our eyes.

Do you remember the man who taught his asshole to talk?, Burroughs asks. The asshole talked, but this man’s mouth was covered by a fine film. From now on, the asshole spoke and not the man. But what does he say? What do you hear when you hear the voice of ideology in your own voice? You’ll hear a voice that is pleased with itself. That speaks out of a man for whom the world as it is is the only world there can be; it is natural, eternal, this is it, now and forever.

Capitalism is your milieu; it gave you your chance, you took it; you’re a success. And your success is natural, you say to yourself; you deserve what is yours. A success that would have rewarded others, had they worked hard enough, had they worked on themselves and let capital work through them.

What interrupts this voice? What stops it from speaking? Not boredom: you haven’t the time to get bored. Not melancholy: you have everything you want; the future is yours: a great wagon of a car, a detached house in the countryside, private health care and your children at public schools.

Then what? What remains? The past? Remember the happy moment when capital turned its benign face to you and said: you; I want you. And, being called, you were as though called into being: you were put on the road to where you are; you were able to find yourself. You said: here I am, to the call when it called. You knew you were indebted to this voice, to the voice of your boss, of your workmates.

You found yourself, but what did you find? And what did you lost by finding it? Yourself? No, not that. But the one you were before you were called: you lost him. The non-capitalist, the one who had not been hailed and gathered together. You lost the one you can only regard as lost: the child: youth? Is this is what is unbearable about your own children? That demands you turn them into little capitalists as quickly as possible?

Youth: not your youth – not the youth of anyone. A child: the one who is not yet caught, whom capital has not yet seen. The one has not been hailed. A child: still there in you, capitalist, still alive in you: a child who is not anything at all. A child who returns from the depths of your past. Remember it: but what can you remember? A child: a kind of hole in memory. The forgotten one. The one who is forgotten in you. And the one who forgets, who draws you close when you forget to remember to forget. When ideology, for a moment, does not claim you. And you live from a future you bear in the past: in a future that is not the future of capital.

John Peel 1939-2004

I could write of John Peel, of his lugubrious wit, his modesty, his enthusiasm, of the records he played before anyone else and the artists who owe him almost everything, but I’m not sure my memories would differ from those of others in any but the most unimportant of details. And I would have missed in recording the public details of his life what was most intimate in my relationship to a man I never knew and never met but who was nevertheless a kind of friend.

I listened to him for twenty years; to mark his death is to mark an era in my life – one which, if he had not died at just 65, would have remained open, indefinite, for as long as he continued to play the music that he did.

When did I first hear him? 1984. Twenty years, then – sometimes, it is true, I did not listen for a few weeks or months, but I always came back. And even as I’d turned from listening to his show to something else, I knew he was there, that John Peel maintained himself in the opening to what was new in music. That he was there for me and for all of us, listening for us, playing records for us.

And now? His early death – twenty years too early – closes a door on the future of music. And upon that future which drew me back to those times when as an adolescent I first discovered that world of independent record labels and artists who did not deserve obscurity.

I discovered it through him and with him, John Peel – through him first of all and not through the music papers of the time, which were to susceptible to changing fashions. Now, who will play the music John Peel played? No one. There are other shows, it is true and other DJs, but none whose continuity was part of the continuity of my life and the lives of so many.

To mourn is also to mourn for yourself, for the adolescent and young adult that you were and now the man that you are. To the adolescent who is also alive in you as he was in John Peel: to the inexhaustible teenager for whom music is the opening of the new itself.

John Peel. All of us who listened to him, who listened with him, owe it to him now to listen out for our youth as it comes towards us from the future.

Company Foyer

The area around the foyer on the ground floor of the company is open; you can sit wherever you like. This is not a space for work, but for meetings (names of the meeting rooms: Locke, Spinoza, Hegel …). You come here to read. You sit on the leather couches near the receptionist and say to yourself: I look like a client. You pour yourself the coffee which is intended for waiting clients. You read the business pages in the Financial Times and then read Management Today. It’s delightful.

Then you go to the training suite and borrow self-motivating tapes. Who produces these tapes? They coalesce out of the air. They are born in the middle of the air. No one makes them, the motivational speakers do not exist. They arise, these tapes, in the same way as the ancients thought insects arose: from dirt and mud. Only the tapes arise from the pristine air-conditioned corridors of the company. From the dead space of the company foyer.