The Whole

Goethe murmurs of Romanticism: unfinished books, unaccomplished works. Blanchot responds:

Certainly it is often without works, but this is because it is the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the purity of the poetic act, an affirmation without duration, a freedom without realisation, a force that exalts in disappearing and that is in no way discredited if it leaves no trace, for this was its goal: to make poetry shine, neither as nature nor even as work, but as pure consciousness of the moment.

Without works? But then it never tried to produce a work, but only to mark in the work, to the extent that it broke its ancient forms, what refuses its measure. Wrecked lives, broken works better to affirm a movement of research, a search for a poetic knowledge. Poetic consciousness: a thinking, a not-yet-thinking in which the meaning of poetry and art is itself transformed. Schlegel, Novalis, Holderlin know themselves, as they write, to be true philosophers, truer to philosophical research than the philosophers around whom later Romantics will gather (Fichte, Schelling). It is as though for these three names such research had to take on another name: the Work, writing, in order not to realise itself but to experience and attest to what cannot be realised in the Work.

Novalis: ‘The poetic philosopher is "in a state of being an absolute creator."’

Schlegel: ‘The history of modern poetry is a perpetual commentary on this philosophical axiom: all art must become science, all science, art; poetry and philosophy must unite.’

The Athenäum is a manifesto, not the first, perhaps, although it is absolute new in affirming, as its content, something like an awareness literature would have gained of itself. Blanchot:

The poet becomes the future of humankind at the moment when, no longer being anything – anything but one who knows himself to be a poet – he designates in this knowledge for which he is intimately responsible the site wherein poetry will no longer be content to produce beautiful, determinate works, but rather will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination. To put this differently, literature encounters its most dangerous meaning – that of interrogating itself in a declarative mode – at times triumphantly, and in so doing discovering that everything belongs to it, at other times, in distress, discovering it is lacking everything since it only affirms itself by default.

Literature lacking itself, in lieu of itself, makes itself responsible in the figure of the poet for keeping open an absence in the work. An absence? A kind of presence, too: presence which only literature can affirm. But what does this mean? If the Romantics are inspired by the French Revolution, it is not by the classical oratory of the revolutionaries, but by the Terror itself. Heads tumbled from the scaffold, death was everywhere.

True, the Athenäum warns us ‘You will not waste your faith or your love on political things, but reserve yourself for the divine domain of science and art.’ Science, art: it is a question of a responsibility which will not be limited by anything but the great Work itself. The Work which indicates an absolute freedom unknown to even to revolutionary politics. And yet it still bears a revolutionary inspiration – it is still a matter of a manifesto, a manifestation:

Art and literature, on the one hand, seem to have nothing other to do than manifest, that is to say, indicate themselves in accordance with the obscure mode that is proper to them: manifest, announce, in a word, communicate themselves. This is the inexhaustible act that institutes and constitutes the being of literature. But, on the other hand – and herein lies the complexity of the event – this becoming self-conscious that renders literature manifest, and reduces it to being nothing but its manifestation, leads literature to lay claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics and philosophy – this would be little – but to everything, to the whole that acts in every instant and every phenomenon (Novalis).

The whole: how should one understand this? There is, in the Romantics a kind of power that revels in itself – the work of furious negation, the denial of everything, the denial of God, the denial of nature. This is the Terror: write, negate the given, lift the world from its hinges, celebrate the power to name which grants the world to you as a writer, allowing it to be reborn in your words. Speak the whole, say the world and you no longer depend upon it; speak and the world might be destroyed but you retain the power to speak.

But know that words are never yours, that by writing you only play with the words that were there before you. To write: sham power, power over nothing. Ah but the temptation is there nonetheless: the whole is that space which spreads itself before the writer: the world become page, the page become the blankness before the creation, the writer as the revolutionary who will call everything into being anew. Lay claim, then, to the sky, to the earth, to the past and the future, lay claim to science and art – and lay claim to more than this: the world is yours, the world is reborn on those pages upon which you write. Write furiously, do not pause because then you will remember that this revolutionary movement is empty, that those words were there before you, that language itself is an impersonal structure whose power is lent to you and will soon withdraw. Live in the madness of the revolution, blood pouring from your pen …

Isn’t this to accede to humanism, to the supposition that each of us, any of us, can occupy the place once taken by God? Or is it to depose humanism itself, to restore power to the power of the language which streams through us and allows us to speak? By whose power do you speak? Your own? – Or is it a borrowed power – one which you will punished like Prometheus for stealing the divine fire?

The Romantic poet embodies Prometheus in his daring and in his punishment. For the dullness of the daily round, when words, dull words, steal you from yourself over and again, is the eagle which swoops upon the Titan, devouring anew the lobes of his liver. But there are moments in which the whole glitters before you like fire in heaven and you dream of the Work which would bring heaven to earth.

In the end, the writer has no power over the power of language; the poem must fail; literature falls short of the Work. What matters is only the trace of the Work in such failures, the break in the poem which indicates the whole.

Romanticism inaugurates an epoch; even more, it is the epoch in which every epoch reveals itself for, through it, the absolute subject of all revelation comes into play: the "I" that in its freedom adheres to no condition, recognises itself in nothing in particualr, and is only in its element – its ether – in the whole where it is free.

Romanticism understands the whole as all that is, all that was and all that shall be. And thereby the Romantics confer that great act of recognition which reveals the significance of those titanic creators of the past (Shakespeare, Dante, da Vinci …) and of the innocent splendour of classical art. But if this is its achievement, it also deprives it of consolation: romantic art is adrift from itself, from its classical certainties; its task is not to realise but to indicate, not to complete but to fragment. It is no longer constitutes a world or inhabits one, belonging instead to the whole which retreats from any possible world.

This is what Hegel understood when he proclaimed that art could no longer answer the highest form of Absolute Spirit: Romantic art is deprived of itself, in lieu of itself. But this is the point: by that stroke, a change of epoch has occurred: art becomes merely an object of aesthetic, literary critical contemplation. Art, literature become what they are, attaining themselves at the moment what is called art no longer belongs to a particular world but to the whole ‘behind’ every world. Art has died, but art lives from its death; it is dead, but its dying will become its sole content, understood as what resists, in art, every attempt to secure its meaning and its future.

Lightness

Read a weblog every day and you’ll see blogs that disappear as well as those which are transformed into new forms. I enjoyed seeing a blog disappear from Red Thread(s); another has appeared in its place, but I remember the first, and I can see it beneath the new one like a psalimpsest. And there was another appearance/disappearance at Poetics of Decay. In both cases, it was a matter of referring beyond the blog to a work of some kind – a grander project, a story …

Was the trouble that a weblog is in some sense closed upon itself, that it is troubling to point to a writing beyond the writing of the weblog? To me, this weblog records the traces of a work much larger and ambitious than anything I do here. Larger, ambitious, but this is also to say riskier – there is the great risk of botching the work in progress. Writing here, by contrast, is lightness itself, a kind of alibi, a trace left to prove to myself that it was worth spending another day in the office.

Meanwhile R. M. lies on what she calls the ‘floor of dread’ contemplating her impending deadline. ‘It’s the weather’, I tell her, when we note that we’ve spent 72 hours in the office over the past 6 days and produced, for all that, very little. The weather … well it’s clearing up, I think, though clouds are amassing once again. R. M. and I have taken up tennis and play in the rain until the balls get soggy. Sharapova is our heroine.

Writing, Events

Bad faith: you say yourself: I write to try and catch up with yourself, to render accounts with respect to events, to say: here I am, I survived, I learned, I mastered my experiences, I brought it all back home. But you know that what happens refuses this mastery. That each event eludes you now, today, tomorrow, echoing what eludes you in every other event, in everything that happens.

Zero Summer

Why keep a weblog at all? In order to feel that, at the end of the day, something was accomplished. A little flourish, some not-yet-thinking, some verbal pyrotechnics … something at least to show for another day in the office or a day in the flat. And when even that is impossible, when days turn upon themselves and nothing asks to be written? You can at least leave a record of failure, a blog to say: nothing was possible today. And in this summer where nothing is possible? This zero-summer where every rainy, humid day was exactly like the previous one? In Spurious, this weblog, summer watches itself spinning in the void …

The World Unwoven

Not-yet-thinking: a thought not formed, a thinking which is not determining or identifying. It is not the ‘thing itself’ long sought by philosophy unless this designates what ‘in’ the thing which does not let be claimed or identified as the thing. It is a claim, an appropriation which cannot be appropriated in turn – cannot be grasped, that is, by a determinative thinking. Not-yet-thinking: a thinking which has yet to find its term, yet to allow itself to be enfolded by the concept. But what is it which allows this unfolding to unfold? What enfolds such a thinking so that it unfolds itself and the claim of the concept?

Not-yet-thinking attends to the coming-into-presence of the thing. But it is also that which sets itself back before what can be identified in the thing: it is a kind of residue, a stubbornness which belongs to the singularity of the thing, its unique occurrence. If it is not, here, a question of mediation, it is not one of immediacy either. The suspension of mediation, its incompletion. Think of it in terms of the coming-into-presence of things before they are identified or grasped as things. Of the way what gives gives itself and lays claim to experience.

Not-yet-thinking is non-wilful; it is a thinking that is implicated, unfolded by what there is to think. Unfolded, magnetised, drawn out of the power which is proper to it. Called out of itself, displaced with respect to itself and hence deferred with respect to its goal. Not an abdication of thought, giving up before the unthinkable and standing guard over the ineffable, but thought’s suspension – a detour of a thinking-on-the-way-itself – a non-developed thought or thought as interruption which is taken in by what, in things, turns away from their identification, their determination.

Not-yet-thinking is a name for life lived, for that opening to the world in which everything touches me before I assemble them into identities. Everything: it is a matter of the world, of that contexture of things and persons, of everything that is woven by me into a contexture. Is it this to which the opening passages of Woolf’s The Waves attends? When the child-narrators have not gathered what they experience into a world? When it is only this patch of blazing colour, this tremulous sound, this atom of sensation which awakens them?

"Birds are singing up and down and in and out of all around us," said Susan.

True, Woolf’s infants speak what they cannot speak – they indicate with words what words cannot find. But as they speak they also give voice to a speech which resounds in the pages of that literary writing which is claimed by a reserve that is not yet thought and not yet woven. They speak what literature speaks as it unweaves our world – as it tends towards that living fire which reaches us only in our most distant youth. Only children read, only children write.

Intimacy

Some moving lines from a manuscript I am reading:

Our private lives have become so invaded by economic necessity that we no longer any idea what love might or could be. Our intimacies might be nothing more than a flight from reality, a flight whose condition is the very world it flees.

Tomorrow’s Page

The day disappears into a long meeting; there is little point, now, in beginning anything. What to do with these hours? I would like to write something, true, to pretend to myself that something happened – that writing would have allowed me to think. But when you are too tired or washed out to write, when you are too tired to begin to write anything except ‘there is little point in beginning anything’, nothing is possible and it is as though this nothing were a blank, immovable wall, the blank page you would like to incise with words of truth and fire.

But you know that marks you leave on the page will be absorbed by the page you will see tomorrow. For it is the same page as today’s and yesterday’s: the same page which calls for writing and refuses to disappear beneath it. You can write towards it, tomorrow’s page, only when you cannot write, when beginning is impossible and the writing you write is no longer written by your own hand. Writing of the origin, writing writing writing, repeating only the event to which it belongs and which it cannot bring to completion.

Assurance

I love those moments when an artist, sure of his or her genius, feels able to speak and to speak on all matters, like a master. Imagine the million conversations Tarkovsky had in private before, at a relatively early age, he made the masterpiece Andrei Rublev and gave this interview. What I love here is not necessarily what he says, although he is always interesting, but his assurance. How dazzled he must have been at the work which made itself from his hands!

The Passion of Reading

Conversation with W., who’s read the preface to my book. ‘You make too many references to yourself.’ – ‘Where?’ – ‘In the preface.’ – ‘Oh you mean the articulation of my thesis.’ – ‘It’s unnecessary. Let someone else do it for you. Levinas didn’t write one for Totality and Infinity.’ I protest: ‘But I spoke to X. and he said: “where is your thesis?”’ – ‘You shouldn’t listen to X. No one should write prefaces for their books. Are you depressed now?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘Good. Well I’ll ring you tomorrow and depress you about the first chapter.’

Then to write a preface is to try and supplant the place of the reader, of the act of reading which would decide what it was that had been argued. To write a preface would be ungenerous: it attempts to stand against the proliferation of readings of the book, to safeguard the univocity of a message when that message is more equivocal and more complex than might appear. It is as though the book itself had something like an unconscious – not the unconscious of its author who wrote the book, but a darkness or a reserve in the book itself. As though the book were alive and dreamed and the reading, my encounter with the work, were only the unfolding of a dream latent in the book. Of what does a book dream? Of itself, which is not to say of its pages, of its white pages and black ink, but of that source from which it never ceases to well each time it is encountered by a reader.

Perhaps W. is right about prefaces, though I still remember what X. said, and recall my impatience when I read theoretical books whose argument is too elusive to grasp. ‘How much time do you think I have?’, I find myself asking these books. But this is also an attempt to avoid the act of reading. An act? No, something like a passion. A passion linked to a kind of passivity and a kind of patience which I always fail.

Oh All to End

What you would like in the present sadness: a life lived, life already behind you, and you near the end of life. The future opens in the faces of your sons and daughters. What you would like, today: life to have happened already and you to have already known every grief and joy.

Little Manifesto

Meaning of communism I would like to articulate. Not only would private property be abolished, but the propriety of the self with respect to itself, its powers, its autonomy, its ‘ontological tumescence’ (Levinas). Profound insight of Levinas’s philosophy: that place where I am, the place from which I speak and take to be mine, is already an usurpation. Pascal was right: mine is the place in the sun – the great evil of the world begins in that assertion. Doesn’t Bataille indicate the same when he writes about laughter? Or Deleuze about immanence?

I won’t present an argument here. Still, when Marx and Engels insist that communism is not an ideal but real, when they claim it is something which begins through strategic negotiation here and now, today, it is to those experiences which break from the molar form of the worker to which they point. Work, identification: the labour which permits you to carve out a place in a world, to make a home for yourself, to set yourself back from the elements, to pull a roof over your head – this same labour has as its price a terrible usurpation.

What is to be done? There is no room for good conscience, that first of all. And no room for that great elevation which would allow you to become the judge of all, surveyor of the field, like Zeus above the battlefield. Yes, it is necessary to judge, to act, but this is local, provisional – it begins in the middle as Deleuze likes to say. It begins as soon as you are there, which is to say, straightaway. Politics is there first of all – yes, everything is political however bland and indefensible this sounds. Your self-relation is political. Relation itself is political. What matters is to bind relations to the great struggle, to understand its implication in the great struggle for the world. For the world – yes, to call forth the virtuality of this world – the great potencies which work against the molar form of work.

Meaning of communism: affirmation of the being-together which answers to the usurpation that has always occurred. This recalls the communism to which Marx will sometimes allude: non-fetishised relation to nature, non-fixity of social roles: all of this is announced in the laughter which bursts contagiously across you and others. Announced there, though it has hardly begun. Laughter reaches you from the day after the revolution – that impossible day in which we will live without a place to occupy. That impossible day from which we live today: place without place, u-topia.

Errancy

I dislike, in conversation, that demand to have an opinion, to express doubts, reservations, to assess, to weigh up: this invents the vile judge, measure of everything, the bore who finds the world wanting.

Deleuze was right: there is too much communication, too much opinion-making. My favourite thing about this country: polite talk, discussion of the weather, pleasantries: nor conventional formulae, but a lightness in which language is seized by an impersonal movement. No one appropriates it; there are no ‘order words’. No ‘ontological tumescence’ to use Levinas’s expression. I like to agree with others. I like living in a city where you often hear the sentence ‘I am a socialist’. I am a socialist: pleasant phrase, said with simplicity, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Unsurprising to find, when I go out for walks with a group, everyone avoids the one who pronounces on everything – true, I objected when he said ‘all these blacks, taking our jobs …’: what tedium. More than that, though, it was the desire to spread his opinions that bored us all. Someone said: don’t walk with him. So I drop back, walk with other people. Once again a conversation, joyous interchange, give and take of language where nothing is said – there is no specific content – but difference is affirmed by the very fact that each of us talks without taking a position.

Errant conversation, moving nowhere in particular – there are conventional formulae, yes, apparent blandishments – there is repetition but what is repeated is the difference that marks itself by the fact that what is said is said by another. You speak and then I speak. I speak then it’s your turn. But there is a sense of another speaking, that through both of us there is a great impersonal streaming of language. A happiness comparable to a certain writing. What do you discover? Joy of a speech which drifts without responsibility …

Bliss: no longer to make a case, to defend an argument or to contest one, but to allow there to open, like the psychoanalysist’s drifting attention, a movement of language and gesture in which the ‘I’ is no longer the castle which would have to defend itself. A dispersed movement, nomadic, across the plane without cities.

Daydream

To have the attitude of a great author, who guards his privacy, quarrels with friends who don’t understand him, disappears into the life of a recluse, drinks himself to death in a house with closed shutters – yes, to have that life, critical favour then critical neglect, visits from admiring young authors, lengthy decline … but without having written a line.

Uncreative Writing

You want to be seen, you don’t want to be seen. Anonymous writing, writing of no one, which is nevertheless present. You can’t escape writing by writing. Or if you escape, the path of that escape is legible, and any reader can follow you.

Writing sacrifices writing by way of writing. Places itself at the stake and does not cease doing so. Futile action: something always remains. Futility: writing cannot unwrite itself.

Written Behind Clouds

I’ve been rereading Kierkegaard alongside Geoffrey A. Hale’s excellent book Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language.

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s later texts, Kafka writes to Brod:

They are not unequivocal, and even when he late develops a kind of unequivocality, even this is only part of his chaos of spirit, melancholy and faith…. Besides, his compromising books are pseudonymous and pseudonymous nearly to the core. They can, in their totality and in spite of their contents, just as well be understood as the misleading letters of the seducer, written behind clouds.

Written behind clouds. How to take the heteronyms seriously? One might dissolve their identity into Kierkegaard’s, following Kierkegaard’s own remarks in Postscript. For doesn’t he provide the key to his works when he writes:

The contents of this little book affirm, then, what I truly am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort.

But one should also remember what A. writes in Either/Or: that it is ‘characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary extravagance …’. A. versus Kierkegaard? A. is a heteronym; we know who should win. But this is to resolve the problem in advance. The problem: it is not merely A.’s texts which are fragmentary, but all texts. No text can guarantee its meaning once and for all.

Whence the temptation to resort to the psychobiographical, whereby it is the unity of a life behind the writer that matters most (there are dozens of commentaries of this kind). Kierkegaard would be the exemplar, whose work and life are bound under the heading of an existence – whose existence is his testimony and which the reader must learn to imitate in turn. Thus is his existence bound into a living coherency. A. anticipates this: ‘because of the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers, one feels a need to poeticise the personality along with them’.

The poeticisation of the author will not resolve the problems of authority. Rereading the passage from Point of View of My Work as an Author, it is clear that here it is not a question of a poeticisation, but a testament, and a fragmentary one. As Hale argues, it is not a question of thereby grasping the truth of Kierkegaard’s work, ‘it offers no revelation of a hitherto unacknowledged secret; it does not attempt in this way to correct an otherwise misled readership. In it the author never explains or supplies the meaning for texts previously written’.

This gives us a way of reading Kierkegaard’s remark: ‘What I write here is for orientation. It is a public attestation; not a defence or apology. In this respect, truly, if in no other, I believe that I have something in common with Socrates’. To attest, here, is not give the keys to the work to the reader. There is an orientation, true, but the texts remain. This is why Kierkegaard writes in ‘My Activity as a Writer’:

Without authority to call attestation to religion, to Christianity, is the category for my whole activity as an author, integrally regarded. That I was “without authority” I have from the first moment asserted clearly and repeated as a stereotyped phrase. I regard myself preferably as a reader of the books, not as the author.

A reader, then, who can only provide an orientation. Should one, then, take indirect communication as the key to his work? This is to lead to another temptation: Kierkegaard is praised by some commentators as a great poet before he is a great philosopher or a great theologian. But this is to confine him to prevent the possibility of a thinking-writing, of a writing which thinks in the author even as it renders authority ever incomplete. True, the poet is one for whom language does not have to be universal, conceptual. Nevertheless, the poet is condemned to language, and hence to meaning.

How, then, to think this indirection? What Kierkegaard stages is a relationship between text and reader such that meaning depends upon their relationship. This is not to make meaning entirely dependent upon the reader, relativising it to a particular perspective. Language is more than that perspective, even if, as this more, it can only be figured as difference or alterity even if it becomes necessary to invoke an outside which resists inclusion in any particular reading even as, in its exteriority, it only exists for itself as refusal to offer itself once and for all. Infinite interpretability: it is to this the finitude of language condemns us. It is the fact that the work happens in a contract between book and reader and that the work breaks that contract.

Then who is the author?

An author is often merely an x, even when his named is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual….

A mere x – a pseudonym. Read the journals and you’ll find Kierkegaard knows this:

The difficulty with publishing anything about the authorship is and remains that, without my knowing or knowing it positively, I really have been used, and now for the first time I understand and comprehend the whole – but then I cannot, after all, say I…. But this is my limitation – I am a pseudonym.

As Hale comments, splendidly:

Language and subjectivity remain irreconcilable, and this irreconcilability itself exceeds the delimitations of cognition. It cannot itself be known within language, because it is already the effect of language. Language produces the subject as its own excluded outside. (28)

Then irony cannot cover this notion as long as it refers to an underlying subject who would know, all along, what he or she was doing. Irony is dependent on the finitude of language, upon language as excess or outside and upon the communication in which the reader is exposed to the work as it gives and withholds itself.

The author is merely an x – but then, in encountering the text, isn’t the reader likewise an x? Doesn’t the communication which reaches between writer and reader do so as between one x and another? Behind the clouds – there where the texts meets and breaks from the reader, where the contract is shattered. Where writer becomes reader and the reader becomes x.

Drunk on Pure Water

Whenever I think of Will Oldham’s music, I remember talking about it with my friends. We are enthusiastic, wistful, moved, we remember favourite interviews and profiles, we swap anecdotes about seeing him live, but in truth, we say very little.

What form of community, of being-together, claims those who are moved by the same work of art even as they exist far apart from one another and unaware of one another’s existence?

With some works of art, it is as if there was something predestined about the encounter, as if the work knew each of us in advance. We are each separately, singularly, brushed by its wings. But in what sense, then, can the encounter with the work be called a shared experience? Does the encounter withdraw into the absolute and the idiomatic to the extent that nothing can be said or shared of the experience of the work? Is it not, always, a question of the impossibility of the encounter, insofar as the work shatters the horizon of expectation, as it is absolutely new? If this is the case, then the community the work gathers is always disunited; it is born in disarray.

The commentator belongs to the community that is gathered and dispersed by the work. But he or she cannot be true to the encounter so long as the work refuses to gives itself in truth. The encounter is always a rupture or hiatus; the work that grips me is never close to me. Or rather, its presence is bound to an absence, because it never rests in its place. But before the work, I, too, give up my place. Who am I? On the way, on the road, caught between poverty and plenitude, like Plato’s eros. In the end, perhaps, I am no one at all; I meet the work by vacating my place.

Is this why I can only speak of my favourite works when I am drunk? I am not like the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium, master of eros, who can drink all night with Alcibiades and the others, but remains sober enough to out to the marketplace….

This is why the scene Bataille remembers is so important to me. Bataille and ‘X’ are not brought together in order to learn something from the book they read together or bound a shared project. My favourite conversations take place in the pub perhaps it is because it is there one can allow oneself to be remember the claim of the work. ‘That was inspired!’ the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues often exclaims. What he means is: you are drunk and you speak like a drunkard. But it is necessary, sometimes, to allow oneself to babble, to enthuse.

Plato distrusts a writing that would bear no personal guarantee – in particular, a certain sacred speech, in which the singer, inspired, is turned over to impersonal forces over which he can exert little control. Although Plato had great respect for Heraclitus, he puts the following words in the mouth of Theodorus concerning the pupils of this great Ephesian, perhaps indicating his own worry about a teacher who transmits his thought teaching in such enigmatic aphorisms:

one can no more have a rational conversation with those very Ephesians who claim to be the pundits than one can with lunatics […] people like that don’t become pupils of one another. They spring up automatically here, there and wherever inspiration strikes them; and they don’t recognise one another’s claims to knowledge. . .you’ll never get an explanation from them, even if they’re intending to give you one!

Now that is a perfect description of the babblers and enthusiasts who can explain nothing of the work, who are inspired, who cannot teach anyone anything at all. The more difficult task, the task of the commentator, is to get drunk on pure water which is to say, through that peculiar mixture of work and worklessness that will allow an essay to be written. The difficulty lies in preventing the essay itself from tumbling into that vanishing point, until there is nothing left of it at all.

This is, of course, also the difficulty faced by the work. Before the great works for which he is famous, Giacometti found his sculptures got smaller and smaller until he carried all his works in a matchbox. Perhaps there is something of the songs on the early albums Will Oldham recorded with others under the names of Palace, Palace Music and Palace Brothers that is similarly small or minor. And yet it is not that Will Oldham had yet to find his style. There is a fragility that is part of these works. His voice is frail not because it is weak or because he can’t sing, but because the guitars are tuned so that he can’t reach and hold the note.

It is Will Oldham’s great strength to endure this weakness, to sing and play at the edge of the murmuring vortex which threatens to enfold him, to allow his voice to be marked by a trembling or wavering at the edge of music. It is not the measurable frequency of sound that is at issue in his songs, but its nuances and timbres as they escape the possibility of a musical notation. It can never be a question of his musical competence, so long as competence is measured by the technical ability to reach and hold a note. But nor, finally, is Will Oldham a member of an avant-garde, who, after all, write and paint and create music only for one another.

It is always a question of working from a familiar space – the singer-songwriter, the country musician, the folk singer – and allowing that space to undergo a transmutation. This is what ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ music has always meant: a minor practice at the edges of other genres, rooted in punk, which is to say, one of the last real avant-gardes, which brought art to everyone (similar claims can be made for the explosion of hip hop in the 1980s and, no doubt, other moments since).

I hope Will Oldham augurs the time of non-singers and non-painters, of writers without talent and artists without training. And I hope these untrained artists give birth to a new kind of commentator, who is drunk on pure water, no longer celebrating the human condition or the cultural prestige of the work.

Rousseau’s Catastrophe

Another day passes. Another day – I always wondered whether you didn’t grow wise during the day as one might in a lifetime. A day as a life, and so as evening draws towards night you become wise because of the adventures of the day. And today? Broken paths, dead ends. What was I supposed to do? Bridge the gaps in the chapters of the book on Rousseau’s Confessions, on Kierkegaard’s practice of writing, the early Levinas’s criticisms of Husserl. And what happened? I wandered from home to work and back again, then through town, from shop to shop, repeating in my own way Rousseau’s wandering life.

Movement outwards to the world, desiring company, and then the retreat to write – yes, this is close to the movement of the Confessions. And I had a little vision this morning – my own version of the ‘heavenly fire’ Rousseau witnessed at Vincennes: I knew what I was to write, the path lay open before me, everything was simple, I was young. And now, older, I know I will still try to write, dreaming like Rousseau as he finishes Part Two of writing Part Three where everything will be laid bare (he wrote the Dialogues and then the Reveries …). As though it were possible to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’ which Rousseau asks himself at the outset! As though one could write, just write my way towards an answer. Rousseau’s faith: he will be able to speak, he will find his way to the truth.

Rousseau’s fear: writing will carry him away. What happens? He writes, he writes in faith but he also writes in fear. Whence the necessity to write more and more. Whence the strange outbidding in the Confessions whereby every catastrophe is greater than the last and Rousseau, again, is shipwrecked anew. It is as though he knows that to approach the true, the immediate, is to miss that truth, to pass by way of a lengthy detour. First the primal light to which Rousseau will return over and again: the natural, truth, all that thereafter becomes distorted. But then the great corruption whereby the natural is lost, when a great deviation is necessary in order to return to the primordial. And then the real catastrophe: there is no end to his wandering; he must return to himself by way of writing which is to say he is lost, he was lost straightaway, as soon as he picked up his pen …

Saying Everything

Liberty: saying everything. This is what Sade would have enjoyed. Joy of being able to say anything at all. Writing opened before him. The chance to write whatever he wanted, however obscene. He took this chance; he wrote and wrote voluminously. But why the desire to fill book after book? Why not rest, stop? Because the movement of writing is infinite. Because the desire to say everything will carry you to the point where you know you haven’t begun, and that every beginning was an imposture, an usurpation with respect to the writing of a writing which withdrew itself in advance. Did Sade know of this frustration? Or did he bury this knowledge in a sheer movement of writing – in the desire to write everything to avoid the terrible awareness that to write is to write nothing?

‘Begin.’ – ‘But I cannot begin.’ – ‘Begin and accomplish a real act in the world.’ – ‘But the beginning eludes me. I begin and the beginning slips away. I write and writing escapes me. Empty eloquence. Empty prolixity.’ – ‘Then give up writing. Turn away.’ – ‘But it is as if, in turning away, it is only then that writing turns and turns towards me. As if, at the point where everything is lost, everything is gained.’ – ‘But what is gained? You have produced nothing. You waste time.’

Job received everything anew after the ordeal. He kept faith – and thus if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Abraham received Isaac anew after he raised the knife to sacrifice him. Think of Kafka: what does he regain when he breaks his engagement, estranging himself from other around him? And Kierkegaard, whom Kafka admired? And Sade? Empty consolation: consolation without consolation: the restlessness of a movement in which nothing is regained and nothing is your reward. Is this the content of one who knows nothing will come to anything, that all is vanity and nothing is new under the sun? The pleasure of one who knows he or she has gone beyond every human work and laughs at them all. I am not sure. Or at least, I am not sure that the one who takes pleasure is the same as the writer who writes. Then there is one inside the writer who laughs at writing. Who is laughter laughing at the imposture of writing and the usurpation that authorship is.

‘Who laughs? Who laughs within these sentences? Whose laughter tears these sentences apart?’- ‘The one you become when you measure writing against other acts in the world. The one who knows it is all for nothing.’ – ‘”For nothing”: but I have written a book.’ – ‘You have written only what permits you the illusion of having done with writing.’ –

Kafka’s Carpentry

If writing is your vocation, get another vocation. If it is to write that you desire, then desire another desire. Get a job, work, lest you disappear into the worklessness to which writing is bound. I do not like empty, open days. To be alone with writing. What, then, do I do? Write? No: I write of the impossibility of writing, like a wheel which spins in the air. What you need is friction: the contact with the world which would allow you to think you move forward. This is why I am happy to have a ‘real’ job, and that that job is mundane (administration, meetings, form-filling).

Mundane work: it belongs to the world, to the security and solidity of the world. Kafka in the Worker’s Insurance Company: he had a short working day, home for lunch by two o’clock. Janouch reports Kafka took up carpentry. Good, honest labour which filled his afternoon. It was only insomnia which allowed him to write. Permitted him at the same stroke that it severed him from everyone around him. Gave him the dream of writing even as it woke him from those nights of sleep which would have been him rest sufficient to work. Blanchot: ‘Writer: daytime insomniac’: yes, because to write is to be awoken from that daytime slumber which is work. (This, by the way, is the real meaning of the ‘primal scene’ of The Writing of the Disaster: it is a story of the writer who without words (infans) turns from work to the sky in which only being and nothingness turn and unfurl.)

That’s all for now

Well, that’s it for Spurious for the time being. This weblog has been up for almost exactly 6 months. I’ve got a book to finish by December 15th, so I’ll post only very intermittently until then.

‘Nietzsche has broken me’

Interesting tidbit on Heidegger. Gadamer reports in a Century of Philosophy Heidegger said over and over again in his later years: ‘Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht’ – ‘Nietzsche has broken me’.

Here’s another one. Gadamer is speaking.

… I asked him once, ‘Why did you leave your posthumous papers to that national archive in Marbach? After all, one can’t work properly with your things there at all – they don’t have a philosophical library’. ‘Yes, yes’, he said, ‘I know that, of course. I could have left it all to the Freiburg library where I was a professor. But ultimately I found out from my son that they have very deep treasure troves in Marbach where many treasures are buried’. Did there have to be?’ I asked. ‘No’, he replied, ‘but my writings aren’t all that important now’. ‘Apparently not’ I said. ‘No’, he answered, ‘what’s important to me is that we now arrive at a new direction – that humanity achieve a new kind of solidarity’.

The Holy be my Word

Holderlin, from ‘Wie Wenn am Feiertage …’/ ‘As when on a Holiday’

Jetz aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,
Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come.
And what I saw, the holy be my word.

Blanchot complains of the French translation: ‘Et ce que j’ai vis, le Sacré soit ma parole‘, ‘And what I saw, the holy, may it be my word’. Rather: ‘le Sacré soit ma parole‘. One does not speak the holy, the holy is speech – the poet’s speech. The holy: here it is a name for the immediate. But why is this? Consider Hart’s remarks on Blanchot on God:

For Blanchot, who is writing on behalf of literature, "God" stands for any immediate singularity, since that which transcends all concepts and that which falls beneath them are both ineffable. Literature wants precisely what it cannot have, the absolutely singular, and it cannot have it because this singularity is destroyed by the very conceptuality that makes literature possible.

Elegantly put. Desire: lierature’s desire to invoke what refuses to call under the generality of the concept. What, then, did the poet see? Perhaps, Blanchot comments, ‘nothing more than the present of this wish, this provoking resolution that gathers in an intimacy of belonging and through an already sacriligeous contact the holy and speech in the space of the extremity of desire’. The poem desires. But what does it desire? That the holy and speech might come together; that one might speak of the absolutely singular. But this is impossible to the extent that the language which the poet is obliged to use remains passes over the singular in favour of the universal. Then the desire of the poem must be without issue. Char: ‘Le poème est l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir‘.

Can you say what it is impossible to say? It is a question, here, not of rendering the impossible possible (naming it -), but responding to what withdraws from the possibility of signification. And yet the impossible does not lie beyond the possible in the manner of a frontier. Above all, the impossible is not a term. It is not ‘in’ the poem nor anywhere else. It is neither the one nor the other – it is nothing but the relation itself, desire reaching out to what it cannot possess.

Outside

‘Outside language’: outside the language we take to be at our disposal. Words substitute themselves for singular experiences. No: the experiences themselves are already mediated, according to their significance in a system of discourse. But this significance, the sign they are made to bear, the values they are made to reflect, does not exhaust the being of language.

The language of the immediate – this is only a very crude way of invoking the excessiveness of language above signs and values. Language as indication – language which points beyond its letter in the manner of Apollo at Delphi; language as the speech of Pythia which calls for an interpretation which can never have the last word: this is an unsubstitutable experience. Singularity marks itself on the body of language. It is inscribed there.

Exhausted language, frayed language: perhaps it is not a question of the being of language but that experience which prevents language from suggesting any kind of permanence or stability. Language which does not posit. Irresponsible language? Certainly it is spurious (of dubious birth) – its illegitimacy arouses the philosopher’s suspicions: here is a language which will not settle itself into a thesis. A sceptical language (although scepticism is also philosophy). It is never a question of leaving philosophy behind, but of opening in philosophy, as philosophy, the experience which scepticism names.

Maintain this opening in the name of philosophy. In the name, perhaps, of what Kant called critique, or Husserl phenomenology: an awakening or vigilance, an insomnia which awakens us from a world which cannot help but totalise itself, lending itself to a movement of identification. Philosophy, scepticism: these names events in language. Events which find a locus in a certain kind of writing. In literature? – Yes, in a certain experience of literature. In what is called ‘ethics’? This word is too imposing. Write, simply, of the opening to the Other. An opening which is neither good or bad. Which marks itself into the play of language.

Etymologism

Heidegger links the phy– of physis to the pha– of phainesthai (a coming to light) in order to think the ‘first’ beginning of philosophy, to open up aletheia, the element that allowed the Greeks to think without revealing itself to them as the origin of their thinking. Is this not to yield to the temptation of an etymology, a kind of philology which would somehow supplant the demands of philosophy? A demand which is maintained, in Heidegger, when philosophy itself is supposed to safeguard the null ground, das Nichtige grund?


Authority of etymology: the privilege of words and roots of words, a journey upstream to the secret roots to which words are filiated. A dream of a ‘natural’ element of thinking – a secret law which binds our thinking. The sense that in the ‘root’ of a word would lie its proper meaning, and that language itself is the play of such dried up roots which have forgotten their original enrootedness in a natural language. The sense of an ancient day which would have bequeathed to us everything we can or should think: the ‘first’ beginning in accordance with which we, ‘Europe’, the ‘West’ were destined. Of the day from which was first sent those great words according to whose presence the vitality of language can be measured. Of a becoming of language bound to an origin but also to a certain notion of history, of destiny, and to the inner homogeneity of an eschatology.


Beginning and end are linked. History as a kind of regress. The first beginning – the pre-Socratics is bound to our condition at the end of this history. Language is a straying that strays along one parth. Remember, too, Heidegger dreams also of the ‘other’ beginning – of what he calls the Ereignis.


Objection: how else can one construct a genealogy of those concepts which are closest and most commanding (think of Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the words good and bad)? How else might we understand what we are given to think? Besides, etymology, philology, is only one weapon in the philosopher’s armoury.


Counter-objection: the sanctification of language is a great risk – too great as long as one does not retain a kind of scepticism towards language. Scepticism towards the idea of origin as original presence. Scepticism as it would maintain, instead, the immemorial that is at play within language. What does this mean? Renounce the power of words, of a saying whose trace can only be discovered through etymology. Powerless words: no longer confirming the unity of a synthetic language. Strange diachrony that would allow the word to happen in two times – on the one hand, the word of history, whose origin one might trace, which lends itself to philology, to etymology, and on the other, the word which falls outside history, whose origin cannot be traced to an originary presence (even an originary relation between presence and absence, detectable only after the fact, as in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks). To what, then, can one trace it? Scepticism: a distrust in the language which one is nevertheless obliged to trust: limitless suspicion of those who would build the house of being on the shifting sands of language.

Shades

When you speak a kind of substitution occurs. Speak and the words you speak, if they are to be intelligible, are not your words; others have said them and others still will say them; there are always others to say the same, as if, over an infinite expanse of time, it is the same that would be repeated, the same sentences in the same order (however dubious this cosmological hypthesis might be). No escape: then language itself is infinite, everywhere, it is the condition of our experience over which we assert only a borrowed mastery. No exit! It is as if language were a fine, glistening web that had spread over everything, covering our faces and our mouths: impersonal horror. But this is still to evince nostalgia for a true speech, for an uncovered mouth, for an edenic language which would name everything again.

Proceed in another direction. It is a question of what is outside the movement of sense and was outside from the start. But outside with respect to what? With respect to the language that places itself at my disposal. For the most part, language functions. And when it does not? When I lose my power over language? When the capacity to speak, to find a word, fails me? When I fall from my capacity to express myself? Then I am lost in the frozen ocean where words emerge from the obscurity like ice-bergs, drifting, vast and in their stillness, they no longer offer themselves as the means by which I might communicate with others. My words? No one’s words, for the ship of meaning has shattered against them and gone under.

Stranded words. Now they are detached even from the possibility of exchange, like coins from an abandoned currency. Yet, like those coins, obscure markers, they become nonsubstitutable, valuable to no one. Who would dare linger in their presence? Only those who have to linger there, for whom speaking, writing, for one reason or another, is no longer possible. But for these powerless speakers, another substitution has occured. Who are they, as they speak, as they fail to speak? Who are they, the ones stranded amid words (and not only words, but sentences, too – tendrils which lead nowhere)? Those who fall beneath the power to appropriate language and thereby outside the world which, through communication, is held in common.

Sisyphus

I admit it: I am completely lost before the massive task of writing the new book. I am too busy at work, for one thing: there are constant administrative tasks and a huge flood of essays to mark. Then there is a low level illness which prevents me from ever assembling any thoughts, or following from one idea to another. Still, these are good days: summer is here, my loud neighbour has moved out, I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour…. But the frustration of falling below the level of work!

The Sisyphean task, every day, to take out my notebook and try and write from what I have written there – it is absurd, work without work, a wheel idly spinning and nothing is done. A list of posts I shall have to write to fill in gaps in the book on my whiteboard: Levinas on illeity, the fragment, Hegel on Heraclitus, and, most bafflingly: exteriority – being (how pretentious!) Then there is W.’s book manuscript on a similar topics to my published book and the one I am writing with which I torment myself with – am I right? Is he right? We can’t both be right! What does it matter who is right? Isn’t it philosophy that is at issue – the attempt to do philosophy (whatever that means)?

Doing philosophy? What a luxury! And one you can’t afford! You are a writer, a humble writer, I say to myself, knowing straightaway this is sheer affectation. Still there is the chance of redeeming the first book in the second – this is the ruse: write another book, always another, to erase the mistakes of the last one. But to write another book is to make new mistakes, so the path to yet another book is cleared.

Sisyphean task! Laughter at the great comedy of the academic writer. Who will read the book? What does it matter? It’s exhausting – it exhausts me! Where did I learn that ponderous style? Here I am, at the office. On a Saturday at the beginning of summer. Tomorrow, the Lake District – that is a consolation. Today – is too long; I know nothing will begin, that what failed to begin yesterday and all the other days will fail again today.

The Day of Judgement

Herodotus is said to have called an end to the time of myth and opened the period of history, at least here in the West. This is still an age of myths, as if we belonged to the era Herodotus had already left behind – the time of the epic, of great causes and triumphal victories. The mythical age is not over – it lingers yet in the war without end which opened more than two years ago – itself the continuance of what perhaps the word ‘war’ cannot reach: an unsettled and impersonal struggle that has long spread across all the nations on the globe. Yes, it is still mythic, this war, for as long as Bush pretends to be the conscience of the world.

And Blair? Who is Blair pretending to be? ‘Do you pray together?’ Jeremy Paxman asked him of his relationship to Bush in a studio not far from here? ‘No we don’t pray together, Jeremy’, said Blair. Then I remember Alistair Campbell’s comment of the PR machinery that surrounds the Prime Minister: ‘we don’t do God.’ What do they do instead? Appeal to the great end which would justify the means: democracy for the Middle East, an end to a destructive regime etc.: a humanitarian cause. Impressive if it were true – but we are too sceptical to believe that and to believe anything from our politicians. There is a strange severing of the populace from their leaders. A dream: the public becomes unpredictable, wayward; apathy gives way to militancy; there is a general refusal of myth.

And the Enlightenment dream that myth will disappear? This is perhaps our hope, and it may be a vain one: the great evil against which we are enlisted to struggle will be exposed as the last shadows of an ancient myth. And the great good? The great humanitarian cause? Wake up, sober up: the broken, humilated body of the Iraqi prisoner refuses to be reappropriated by a mythical humanitarianism. Do not try and justify torture as royal road to happiness for all. This would be to accede to oldest theodicean and cosmodicean myth which survived right up to the concentration camps: everything will be justified, everything will come right in the end.

Is it the absence of myth that we see in the photographs of the tortured bodies of Iraqi prisoners? Will others see it, too? This is the time of the digital camera and the internet. Of technology and the atom bomb. Horrible and wonderful, it could be the new technology which allows us to witness evidence of the tortured and the dead which will finally drive myth from the world. This is naive, hopelessly so – who would counterpose myth and technology in any simple minded way when it was technicians who designed the great places of extermination? And why should one expect the public to believe incidents of torture are anything but exceptional?

Dream of the end of the myth, of a new age in which a utopian future does not justify terror in the present. When every day is as the last day, the day of judgement and no theodicy or cosmodicy could justify a present injustice.

Fat Singers

Conversation with W., who likes it when I whine here at Spurious. I haven’t written for the past few days, I tell him, because I feel a little ill. Write about being ill, he says, I like it when you whine. He reminds me I ripped him off in comparing Cat Power to Josephine the Mouse Singer a few posts ago (he is right of course). Then he reminds me how much we admired the singers at All Tomorrow’s Parties who 1) were fat (or at least plump), 2) swigged wine out of bottles, 3) had tattooes – i.e., the guy from Modest Mouse and the guy from Arab Strap. Both were slightly menacing, too – the guy from Modest Mouse reprimanded people in the crowd for throwing flyers at the band and both were self-deprecating.

Yes, we liked these singers, we felt (as I said at the time) in the presence of greatness as much as we disliked Vincent Gallo. I had already agreed with W. to let myself get obese, but he reminds me that my new hobby of hillwalking is an obstacle to this plan. I tell him I walked 33 miles last weekend and he says, you’re always like that – you throw yourself into something, and then you know how it ends up? In tears, I say. W. and I speak of our vehement dislike of administration and bureaucracy. I speak wistfully about writing a book on ethics next year. I’m tired of commentary, I tell him. But what are you going to say?, he asks me. I don’t know.

Icebergs

Once, it was verse that was the highest mark of literature; prose was humdrum, servile, but poetry was so lofty it had to be protected by rules and codes which made of it a monument. The novel, modest beast, was a device to render worlds, to reflect the world back to itself: no longer, like the poem, was it a mantic work, a work of divine inspiration, but a genre which answered the measure of the human being. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I wanted to express my experience of…’ Sober, industrious, the labour to produce a novel is analogous to that of producing things in the world: novelist as craftsworker – and if the novel has been compared to a loose, baggy monster, it is a domesticated beast, which works alongside us in making a world.

To make a world – to confirm an order – to raise great edifices on the earth: without doubt, the novel is a virtuoso’s genre: there are so many ways to celebrate our civilisation and the principles that underlie it. But the world opens itself as against a resisting force: call it earth, this movement of self-occlusion, this withdrawal within the things of which you would write and within writing itself.

Rilke: ‘Earth, is this not what you want, to be reborn invisible in us?’; Char: ‘shifting earth, horrible, exquisite’; Van Gogh: ‘I am attached to the earth’. A difficult thought: a writing which is no longer born of power, be it the power to express oneself, or to articulate a world. A weak writing if the word ‘weak’ didn’t suggest that one measure its non-power according to the measure of power. It is as though the words were made of the clay of the field or the surf on the water – of obdurate rock and the broad sky. But these are only ways of writing about a withdrawal or reserve which can in no way be understood in terms of what we call nature.

Perhaps, then, ‘earth’ is the wrong name for this reserve, suggesting an easy paganism: the sacred groves and wood-nymphs which belong to a seductive archaism. Still, it provides a useful analogy in suggesting what happens when language no longer offers itself as a medium through which the world might be represented: for it is possible to write that language becomes heavy and resistant, that words themselves become like the great blocks of granite which were assembled to make ancient monuments. But the power to utter these great, block-like words fails our writer, and even the power to write.

The power to write? Yes – the freedom to say anything and to say it in any way at all; to say everything and to say it in every way. But what is this anything and everything when compared to the experience I am trying to sketch here? Anything, everything: it is as though the author was the master of the infinite, the demiurge who can make a world. But then, by the same stroke which opens the world to him as what can be rendered on the page, the author is deposed and made to wander the same world as a stranger.

Master of the infinite? The author, now, is a wanderer in an infinite space without abode. But is it the earth in which the author is exiled – the natural realm in which he can still draw joy from the beauty of the foliage, from the birds, beasts and flowers and the great vault of the sky? But our author isn’t even the mad, blind King Lear on the moor. Space without place, time without initiative: what is left to the one who is delivered over to what we cannot call the earth?

I have already written about the fascination which can lay claim to the literary author. Today I imagine it as a half-frozen sea across which great icebergs drift. Only those icebergs are great, frozen words, as simple as ‘and’ or ‘but’, but which are hardened into a grand immensity. Simple words frozen in the distance between the writer and the work and against which the ship of meaning is wrecked and dragged under.

But even this image is too comforting. Think instead of the husks of an exploded star – of the dark, infinitely dense mass which collapses into the black hole into which all sense disappears: the secret centre of the work that unravels from within. Then the sentences of the novel are infinitely stretched as they disappear across the event horizon as one by one they fall into the darkness wherein all light disappears. And the novelist? He is strewn with his sentences like darkness across darkness, a galaxy of dark points upon darkness.

Fascination

How is it, as a post at Dan Green’s The Reading Experience points out, that the literary industry (the publicity industry) almost always abuses and marginalises the best literary authors? Perhaps the desire of such authors to publish has nothing to do with money or reputation. Write! says the story to Kafka. Paint! says the painting to Cezanne. ‘My entire work is only an exercise’ wrote Kafka; an exercise: but to what end? There was no end – only endless work, the endless desire to work which unravels all works. Begin again, and again, and again, but you will get nowhere.

Fascination is perhaps one name for the movement towards the curious space the work opens. But fascination – which leads to what the world can only call failure – is difficult to bear. Who will console the Rilke before he was able to write the Dunio Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Rilke who struggles for ten years to complete Malte? Who understands the terrible privation which prevents Pessoa from gathering his Book of Disquiet into publishable form? And what of Kafka, who begins stories only to leave them half-completed, not revising them, but beginning new stories each time with a fresh creative gesture? Ah, but perhaps they do not need consolation, these writers of fragments! Because they do not experience fascination as a loss – because it is reaffirmed in the different editions of the Book of Disquiet, in the profusion of Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, and in the letters through which Rilke maintains his prolific correspondence, as the joy of the work. Strange joy which is also failure! Strange persistence which entails failure! I know they are working out there, lots of them, our secret companions, burrowing like moles …

But what does it mean to celebrate the fragmentary? After all, the Sonnets to Orpheus are perfectly formed, well rounded – and isn’t Metamorphosis the most satisfying of stories? Ah, but they are fragmentary, these works, because they present themselves to us in the manner of a flashing indication, pointing to what they cannot seize, making manifest what cannot be frozen into something dead and finished. It is in this sense that they are broken and break us, their readers, from the false consolation that we are reading something edifying, something that will add to the great movement of culture. Fascination: yes, they fascinate us, too. For myself, I am afraid of Woolf’s The Waves – and I cannot read Sarraute unless I am prevented from sleep. On those insomniac nights I read Woolf, Sarraute, Duras because it is only then I overcome my fear of fascination …

But there is, as you would expect, a counterforce – a movement against fascination: the great cultural movement against the indeterminability of the work. Wander the pages of Sarraute’s Childhood and you may well be lost forever. And Beckett’s Unnameable? You will come apart as the sentences unfurl. But the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life?

It is a question, in each case, of a redundant humanism – of the desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being – a humanism which understands what it might mean that the works we take to be great are fractured from within; that the fragmentation welcomed by Rilke or Kafka leaves its mark upon the most imposing monuments of our age.

But if fascination does summon a certain kind of the artist it does not permit her to transform its vanishing ‘object’ into a completed artwork. It is a kind of a ghost of the work, or a ghost of completion, forbidding the artist from recognising herself in her accomplishments. A ghost? Perhaps something still more mysterious: a darkness without contour, a reserve which surpasses every cultural form. Is it the earth from which the ghost of Hamlet’s father arises, the old mole? But it is the same earth against which the world of publicity affirms itself. Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more (but they do not exist …)

There are no shadows and ghosts in the daylight of publicity; the self-withdrawal of the old mole’s earth, the way it presents itself by hiding itself, like the God who showed only his hindparts to the prophet, seems to leave no traces. But is this really the case? Has the era of a certain kind of literature disappeared altogether? Or are there books, paintings, works which would point beyond themselves to the reserve which plunges into darkness – which would present themselves as avatars of the unattainable ‘object’ of fascination?

Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters: the reading which greets the literary work, the novel, the poem; the viewing which welcomes the television drama or the exhibition. The horror is that the space for these encounters slowly withdraws – chance, for example, will not lead you to a film by Tarkovsky on a terrestrial television station on a weeknight.

What does that mean? That the world appears complete, perfected, finished and I believe, as a reader, a viewer, but primarily as one who is alive, that I am aberrant if I cannot disappear into a world which I imagine to be full of the public I read about in magazines, or whom I think I encounter through reality TV. There is a great misery and loneliness, but then, within that, isn’t there also a kind of refusal of the forces which determine what we want to watch or to read? A refusal beyond cynicism; a simple horror at what seems a vast conspiracy to close every channel of creativity and innovation. And isn’t this the greatest objection to a unified Europe? To the common market which raises its walls against poorer countries? To a movement which may see the old Europe transformed into something streamlined and efficient? Refusal of the denumerable and measurable; refusal of the market and of marketeers; refusal of the great engines of publicity, and the lies of our politicians. Refusal of the system of values which holds our culture together, communicating with itself as it passes through us.

The danger: that refusal fails to recognize its political potential, is ungrasped as a legitimate disgust with our world. Because isn’t it this same refusal which is treated by antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy? I think here of Todd Haynes’ film Safe, where, in the closing scene, Julianne Moore, after renouncing much of the paraphernalia of modern life which brought about a protracted illness, speaks directly into a mirror: I love you. Who does she love? Who is ‘safe’? In the mirror she sees the one who refuses, the bare life which has not vanished into the ‘public’. And here the parallel with Kafka, with Cezanne is perhaps apt: has she not glimpsed, in the mirror, what fascinates her and draws her towards it? The one who is not yet – the darkness through which the old mole burrows and ghosts wander. As if she confronted the ghost of herself who said: I am refusal. I am the one who refuses. Now she can begin the work she cannot complete in which she is held into the darkness in which she is unravelled.