Blogging Without Condition

To enable comments or to disable them? I appreciate the University Without Condition over at Adam Kosko’s weblog: this is an impressive initiative because what binds its participants together is a text. The text provides them with something like a horizon – ‘something like’ because the word horizon is itself confining. Perhaps I might put it this way: the University Without Condition brings its participants together within a horizon that breaks because of what they read.

To enable comments or to disable them? On the one hand, it is wonderful to welcome readers – to experience the gratitude that one is read, or of the joy of a shared love or a shared concern. But there is a danger, beyond an exchange of greetings, in the simple confidence that discussion is possible. It can become a matter of a regulated exchange, of a mutuality and reciprocity which endangers precisely what blogging permits: the happening of peculiar community, an affiliation which occurs through the acknowledgement of a common problem, or a set of problems. A ‘common’ problem which permits nothing mutual or reciprocal even as it is borne by all; which calls for a response essayed in an idiom which is the blogger’s own and can only be the blogger’s own. Perhaps the University Without Condition indicates another way of thinking about this …

What is that line from Blanchot? Friendship for the writing which excludes all friendship. Friendship, perhaps, which demands the protection of the idiom of a particular blog. I like the idea, say, of a blogging persona, of what Pessoa has called a heteronym, and rather wish that I have remained anonymous throughout (but then I am, writing here, the one I am in the world only in the same way that Roseanne, of the TV sitcom was Rosanne in the world).

The old dream of philosophy, from Socrates onwards: the student appropriates philosophy for him- or herself; it is matter of making arguments in one’s own name, of being responsible for what one writes or says in view of establishing the truth. Remember the scorn Theodorus shows in the Theatetus for those followers of Heraclitus the Obscure who repeat without understanding what their master wrote. But there is another dream – a writing which prevents this appropriation and deprives one of one’s name. A writing without responsibility.

Perhaps such a writing might be said to be responsible in another sense. Perhaps it is necessary to withhold discussion so that something else can begin. Perhaps to reply to a blog is to do so on your own weblog, which is to say, in that space where you might be able to construct an idiom, to respond to a shared problem in your own way. ‘Your own way’: do not think this a return to oneself, to the self, a reclusiveness or an anti-socialness. It is a question of allowing a writing to happen in which a gift occurs without mutuality or reciprocity. To happen and to proliferate across the blogosphere, leaping from one blog to another.

The Gods Themselves

Too tired to work or read anything difficult, I spend the day in my office, reading books on painting and film. From Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations, in which the great artist converses with Julian Rios, I learn of Kitaj’s friendship with Avigdor Arhika. They speak every few days on the phone, and cheer one another up when it is needed. There is a marvellous drawing of Kitaj by Arhika, and then one of Arhika by Kitaj. And drawings of Anne Atik and Gabriel Josipovici. Sadly, the reproductions in this book are in black and white.

Then I read Kitaj in the Aura of Cezanne and Other Masters, a slim volume full of splendid colour reproductions, where the artist talks with Colin Wiggins. Open the cover, and there is a photograph with the title Sandra (and underneath that: ‘seven’). This is, I presume, Kitaj’s wife, who died, according to the foreword, a few years before. There is a picture of the older Kitaj with his sons and grandsons, too. This book has reproductions of paintings which inspired Kitaj, including several of the bathers sequence from Cezanne.

Then I read Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway, which is an attractive and interesting volume with a long interview with the man himself. And again, a Kitaj connection – he is, apparently, a particular inspiration for Greenaway. I particularly liked the author’s description of Greenaway’s screenplays as a libretto for images.

Reading these books, enjoying them, you wonder what it would be like to be an established artist with a few works behind me, with a reputation. Truly then you would become one of the gods, painted by some and painting others, linked in friendship with the other gods, knowing the same circle of people. Where Arhika is, for example, Beckett is not far away. Then you remember the picture of Arhika and Giacometti (where did you see it?) from the 1950s. Always a community, always a group: nothing is possible alone.

A New Universalism (2)

More notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s book Religion and Capitalism:

What matters most? This book presents us with four insights which have not, according to Goodchild, been thought in their interrelation. Firstly, there is the truth of suffering: human life is not sustainable, but the ecological catastrophe is preventable; secondly, the awareness that money has become the self-positing measure of all values; thought and values themselves must be understood in terms of their monetary value; thirdly, the awareness of what Goodchild calls the “experience” of God and fourthly, the awareness of the “murder of God” as this reveals the nihilism of the European tradition – the values which devalue themselves.

Traditional accounts of this murder will not suffice. It is not the development of nominalism, or the displacement of religious authority from ecclesiastical institutions to individual conscience in the Reformation, or the rise of the experimental method in the sciences which transformed the concretion of knowledge and prepared the way for secularism and atheism; none of these accounts for their condition, which is, Goodchild argues, a shift in pieties – a shift from God to Mammon, which is to say, the murder of God happens because of the emergence of the self-regulating market as the basis for the organization of the social order.

What is to be done? How might one alter the currency? Might one hold out for a redirection of attention – for a new piety, a new religion, a new conception of God and with it, a new understanding of truth and goodness? For Goodchild, to alter the currency is to redirect attention. It is to understand economics and economism as a kind of piety – as a way of directing attention away from what matters. But it is also to counterpose a religious piety to economic piety as it is founded upon excess and not conservation. One might object that this talk of piety nostalgic. Doesn’t scientific progress already testify to the anachronism of the appeal to piety? But, for Goodchild, the currency of truth must be altered, since the apparent stability purchased through abstraction wagers the real. When truth is understood as immutable, incorporeal and identical over time, it threatens to pass over what is changeable, material and discontinuous. The objects of astronomy or mechanics are indeed regular and ordered in their behavior – but this is not the case with the ostensible object of economics.

Pierre Bourdieu writes of the mason who forewent the ritual meal that was supposed to be eaten in the mason’s honor after he had constructed a house. He asked for 200 francs in exchange for the meal in addition to the 1,000 francs for the construction itself. What is wrong with that? The event of the meal – the taste of the food, the animals killed to supply that food, the friendships which are formed and reaffirmed over that meal, conversation and conviviality – is not substitutable. Trust is everything in the system Bourdieu describes; therefore, the temptation is to cheat by feigning trustworthiness.

One might understand the transition of ritual to historical piety to occur at this point, although Goodchild warns us against any simple understanding of this transition. The God of historical piety is understood as being able to bestow reparations for suffering in the present: He will punish deceit and wickedness; the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish. Piety, here, is no longer directed towards the ritual repetition of a past event but to the future. Abraham, trusting the promise of God, leaves Ur because of a promise; he ventures his life on this uncertainty. Ritual piety is put to death when he is called to sacrifice his son; meaning and value spring out of this gesture. Hebrew monotheism depends upon a rejection of idolatry: one worships one God; the past, and the ritual piety in which one returns ceaseless to the past, is sacrificed in view of a universalism. Piety is now oriented towards the future – to the coming of the Messiah, or, with Christianity, to the return of Christ which will bring about the Kingdom of God.

But here, already, the divine economy allows God to resemble Mammon. The event of the murder of God has already been prepared; historical piety is perilously close to the economism that will allow commodification and reification. But religion does not collapse into capitalism. Broadly speaking, for Goodchild, religious piety is still able to embrace the singular and exceptional: it can attend to suffering because it is pluralistic in a way capital is not. Doesn’t Marx show this when he allows that money “is the god among commodities” – that it is “the incarnation of exchange value”? The monism of capitalism allows it to as it were worship itself; piety synthesizes time such that the future becomes, for the financier, the object of speculation even as, for the householder, the future harbors catastrophe: the threat that he or she will be unable to subsist.

It is perhaps because only the philosopher of religion can understand the stakes of what Goodchild calls apocalyptic piety – an experience which directs itself towards the singularity of suffering in a way outside the consensus. Apocalyptic piety opens what Goodchild calls the “chaotic interval” which other forms of piety conceal (indeed, other forms of piety, whether economic or religious, are precisely an attempt to shield themselves from chaos). One cannot bring oneself into such piety through an act of will. Rather, it reveals itself only in an experience of excess which overwhelms the consensual determination of what is real. Philosophy of religion, understanding apocalyptic piety in its philosophical and political stakes, which is to say, as a way of revealing a future no longer bound by chains of necessity to the present, rises to its vocation to alter the currency. Such a philosophy must be a critical theory of religion because otherwise the experience of God which gives itself in apocalyptic piety will be misunderstood. Only thus might the thinker plunge into the reality of change and discontinuity – to the becoming and affect of the world as it exceeds economic determination and is bound, in that opening, to what Goodchild calls absolute faith.

Reading these pages, I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. We first meet Domenico as he is prevented from his attempt to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonist of the film, the Russian poet Gorchakov is staying. Domenico, we learn, locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world. Gorchakov is taken by this stranger. When he is told Domenico is mad, he replies: “We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way. Their behavior, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules. And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are.” Later, Domenico immolates himself after preaching to the army of solitaries he has gathered about him for three days and nights. Before he sets himself on fire, he cries: “What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ While there’s still time!” Tarkovsky shows us Domenico’s death is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. In the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight. His is the mad attempt draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. But it is, perhaps, the act of madness which reveals the madness of the world and thus the chaotic interval between one future and another. Meanwhile, far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico’s death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. This is not an act of ritual piety (the repetition of an eternal past) nor even an act of historical piety (it is not performed in the service of righteousness). Dazzled by the chaotic interval, it honors an apocalyptic piety.

I wonder whether Goodchild’s philosopher of religion must embody both Domenico and Gorchakov, answering to the opening of the chaotic interval and then, afterwards, patiently transmitting that experience, along with the singularity of suffering to which it is linked. The first apocalyptic experience, the experience of the interval, leads to death, or at least a kind of dying (Domenico’s self-sacrifice; the shattering of self-consciousness which Goodchild himself describes). It gives way to a second – the affirmation of difference as a potency of which nothing can be known. Such difference is wondrous – to think, henceforward, is to answer what is unthinkable; it is to direct attention to an experience whose source one cannot render explicit. But Goodchild maintains a third apocalyptic experience is necessary through which one comes to understand the experience in question, the affirmation of difference, as an experience of God. I will close with a quotation from the last chapter of Religion and Capitalism, which, if I do not yet understand, is a sign, for me of the necessity of rereading this book:

Apocalyptic piety has no name for the God it experiences, no identity on which to cling. It is merely an experience after the death of God, the subject and the world. It follows the dissolution of reality and the dissolution of the will. If it awakens to God as Truth, Goodness and Awareness, this is not a God it can condition, possess or will. It is merely an experience. Apocalyptic piety stands outside itself: it is a capacity to laugh at, relinquish and forgive oneself; it is a capacity to attend to suffering; it is a capacity to bear within oneself little fragments of heaven and hell. It is compassion.

A New Universalism (1)

Some notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s impressive book Religion and Capitalism:

The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value. Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates already set in motion.

What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.

One may object that we live in the most humane of human societies; that we enjoy prosperity as never before. But we are blinded by the self-evidence of economics as it serves to uphold the apparently benevolent despotism of liberal humanism. Economics cannot take account of the suffering which results when the social and material condition of the present is wagered on the basis of an ideal future. Abstractions like Gross Domestic Product, which purport to provide us with the value of an economy, cannot calculate the repercussions to the environment; a cost-benefit analysis does not permit sufficient attention to be paid to the threat of financial catastrophe.

For a happy minority, credit is plentiful and goods are cheap. But for the majority, the future – the immediate future – is grim; the main question is one of survival. All of us stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not. Why don’t the terrifying claims of the report on the results of climate change commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, grip us before any other problem? Our attention is misdirected. Is this the effect of our governments, which no longer answer to international law or to the wishes of their people?

Politics is possible only for as long as our attention is uncoupled from the magic of image, spectacle and glamour as they circulate in the mass media. It is possible only when we extend the scope of that which lays claim to our attention. Vaster than the number of countable voters is the polity of those who will have to live in a world which becomes progressively less inhabitable as well as those outside our country with whom we are bound in networks of interdependency.

Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable. But the catastrophe may still be preventable which means nothing is more pressing that developing this awareness.

Our attention has been captured. How to bind apathy in the face of politics into a universal politics which works on a local and a worldwide level that can struggle for the world? But there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared. There is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being.

The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe.

Bad Faith (2)

Silentio retells the story of Abraham not from a philosophical perspective, but a poetic one. Why? Because philosophy is allied to the System, to abstraction, and Silentio is worried his book will be assimilated to the unfolding of the great impersonal Encyclopaedia. He writes of faith, but he does not do so from the perspective of one who is faithful; he is not yet Anti-Climacus. He writes in a kind of awe for what he does not have.

Might one claim Silentio places his faith in poetry? I find Edward F. Mooney’s suggestion very interesting:

Abraham’s faith will be resigning Isaac and having the expectation, strangely fulfilled, of getting him back. The artist’s faith will be resigning the immediate sense of the world, struggling with the loss this entails, yet maintaining the expectation, uncannily fulfilled, of getting it back – partly through poetic labour, through recreating experience, but partly through muse, as gift. This is what Johannes might call the faith of the poet, realised in “his faithful service”. (FT, 15)

How should one understand this service? On the same page of Fear and Trembling, he writes:

If underlying everything there was only a wild fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insighficant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond to knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation succeeded another like singing birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking, unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrench that away from it – how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! (15)

Two things are preserved from oblivion: the hero’s deeds and the poem who celebrates the hero in song. But here the poet is only the admirer of the hero. Is Silentio simply an admirer of Abraham? But remember he claims at one point he tries to practice what he discovers in his ‘hero’ – to this extent, one might suppose him to be honest and sincere. But he remains a poet, which is to say, one whose faith is insufficiently profound, who is content to write and only to write, and whose ‘practices’, such as he invokes them, occur within the general endeavour to save the hero from obscurity. The danger is that, like the poet, we readers linger in the detour of this writing. Is the fact that is written by a pseudonym supposed to prompt us into our own imitation of Abraham? Or, moved by this text, will we only have been able to have imitated Silentio?

Notice that writing is, for Silentio, a bulwark against despair, against a never appeased emptiness which lies hidden beneath everything which eats away at the sacred bond that might draw us into a true universality. Writing is a way of breaking with the unthinking, unproductive force of oblivion which awaits each of us. But then what one wins by writing, one loses at the same stroke. Write of this blooming, radiating tree and you risk losing this same tree in its living immediacy. Perhaps this is why the poet Silentio reminds us of the silence of Abraham – and why the pseudonym’s name is itself bound to a silence that can only be indicated through writing. Like the oracle at Delphi, Silentio’s writing does not speak but gives a sign.

But hasn’t Silentio’s Fear and Trembling, by this token, already acceded to a kind of despair? Doesn’t he sigh after a world which does not yet exist? Isn’t it to seek, through writing, of a consolation that cannot be found in the world? The poet seeks what is lost in language – the real tree, not the one which has disappeared into the word ‘tree’. According to Blanchot, there is a movement in certain poets (Mallarmé, Ponge) to make language into a thing, to write with words which come together to form something absolutely idiomatic, absolutely untranslatable. But this is not quite what one finds in Silentio. He wants to celebrate Abraham, to attend to the Abraham in his singularity – or does he? Doesn’t he want, in some sense, to give himself the gift of writing – to receive, from writing’s gift, the faith that will allow him to escape despair?

What is it Silentio wants? Silence, perhaps. To indicate, by means of writing, the silence which escapes writing. But to do so by means of writing. To have faith in writing for as long as writing lasts. But then to long for what one can only defer through writing. Ah, it is bad faith itself, which is why I do not believe Silentio wants to escape what he cannot find through writing.

Bad Faith (1)

Few things are more pleasant than finding another volume of the International Kierkegaard Commentary has appeared on the new books shelf in the library. Each focuses on a particular text; the one I am reading at the moment is on Fear and Trembling, and corrects some misreadings. It is worth drawing out a couple of points here.

Johannes de Silentio, pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, admires Abraham and celebrates his faith. Abraham left his native land out of faithful love for God. He is also capable of faithful hope – promised a great succession, he did not waver – he waited, and Sarah only bore him a son when she was ninety years old. And when God asked him to sacrifice his son on Mt. Moriah, Abraham’s knew that what was sacrificed would be returned to him; he knew he would receive anew what he was prepared to lose by his own hand.

C. Stephen Evans is right to maintain note that ‘Johannes says that the ‘irrational’ or ‘absurd’ aspect of Abraham’s faith is not his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but rather Abraham’s ability to receive Isaac back joyfully after having been willing to sacrifice him’ (17). Unlike the ‘knight of resignation’, who would have simply resigned himself to obeying God, giving up the finite and the temporal for the sake of the infinite and the eternal, Abraham is a ‘knight of faith’. What does this mean? He is able to make a leap of faith beyond rational calculation – beyond what appears to be good or right. He knows he will receive Isaac back, whatever happens. He is capable of a faith which is more that simple obedience.

But Silentio, who appears to be so perceptive, is a ‘lower’ pseudonym – he is not yet a Christian like Anti-Climacus. As such, his viewpoint is partial – doesn’t another pseudonym (admittedly, he too is ‘lower), Johannes Climacus, note that Fear and Trembling only ‘used sin incidentally’ (CUP, 240)? One must read Fear and Trembling in the context of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, remembering the position of the pseudonyms in his overall strategy.

This advice also goes for those who are horrified by what they take to be the moral nihilism of Fear and Trembling. Read Works of Love, as Evans suggests and it is clear Kierkegaard does not think one’s duties to God ‘could replace or compete with duties towards one’s fellow humans’; he quotes Kierkegaard: ‘God is not a part of existence in such a way that he demands his share for himself; he demands everything, but as you bring it you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, an endorsement designating where it should be forwarded, for God demands nothing for himself, although he demands everything from you’ (159). Why, then, Johannes’s suspicion of the ethical? Because the ethical is not the ultimate modality of existence. Yes, to become religious means one must leave the ethical behind – but then, through God, the ethical is received anew as it is grounded in dogmatics, in revelation.

Fear and Trembling is, to be sure, the work of one who is in some sense removed from the ethical sphere, but he is not yet religious, which means he has not yet passed through despair. It is only from his partial perspective that it appears that Abraham chooses the absurd. However, as Kierkegaard maintains in his journals, ‘When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it …’ (JP, 1:10). Silentio’s book is a despairer’s book – for doesn’t he find in Abraham the infinite that he feels is somehow missing in himself? I a reminded, in Silentio, of the kind of despair analysed in The Sickness Unto Death which springs from a lack of attachment to the world, a lack of definition or finitude; the temptation to fantasy and imagination. Is it coincidence that Silentio sees himself as a poet? Of course not.

The Death Leap (2)

Only the Christian, according to Anti-Climacus, can understand the significance of the sickness unto death and can be led from despair to be born anew. But what of the non-Christian? Some types of aesthetic despair involve an attempt to overcome despair, to die to it, without this ever being possible. It remains sheer sickness unto death – a dying without terminus. Anti-Climacus gives us a clue to the interpretation of ‘Guilty/Not Guilty’ – Quidam’s Diary of Stages on Life’s Way: Quidam is wrong to believe his despair springs from his relationship to the young woman; it is just a symptom of a broader despair, a broader misrelation in the self. And one might make an analogous claim about the young man of Repetition (but what should one claim about Frater Taciturnus and Constantin Constantius, whose fictions they are?)

Beabout reminds us of the pseudonym Judge William’s typology of the aesthetic sphere of existence from Either/Or; it involves 1) living for physical beauty, 2) living for wealth, honor, fame, one’s beloved, 3) aiming at developing one’s talents, 4) living for hedonistic pleasure, 5) living for self-reflective enjoyment, and 6) despair. As Beabout comments, ‘At the first five of the stages, or so the judge seems to say, one is not conscious of being a self. Properly speaking, there is no misrelation in the self in these stages since there is no self’. The sixth variety of aesthetic existence is familiar from Either/Or and Repetition: there is no self yet, only the potentiality to be a self. One is not yet able to be able as a self; nothing is possible for you as a self …

It is worth recalling Anti-Climacus’s typology of despair. First of all, there is the despair which springs from a sense of infinitude and possibility – a lack of attachment to the world, a lack of definition or finitude; the temptation to fantasy and imagination. Secondly, and conversely, there is the despair of finitude and necessity – too much attachment to the world; one’s existence is defined by tasks and duties; the temptation to join the crowd or the mass; fatalism, determinism. Thirdly, there is also a despair which is as it were ignorant of itself, of its true nature. This seems to be linked, fourthly, to a general weakness, whereby one does not have the strength to become a self. The despair of youth, sighing over a future; the despair of age, sighing over lost youth. Here, one might despair over everything earthly – a despair, here, of one’s incapacity to escape despair. One senses the infinite, the eternal, in as it were its negative aspect (one is suspended between the two sides of the self). This is what Anti-Climacus calls indesluttede, which is translated, somewhat awkwardly, as inclosing reserve, in which the self is as it were shut up in itself. Inclosing reserve admits of degrees – it is possible to do so whilst retaining ordinary relations with the world, but it can also become more severe. Then, fifthly, there is the defiant, demonic despair of one who rejects God.

Presumably, Judge William has already passed through despair and chosen himself. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that he, too, despairs, since he still does not understand that his will lies in God’s gift. Am I right to think he will not allow himself to be born out of despair – to have done with the sickness unto death? As Anti-Climacus argues, death, for the Christian, is no longer simply opposed to physical life. It is possible to die into a new life: to die through despair and to be born anew. Then Judge William despairs even if this despair does not manifest itself directly (see the third type of despair in the previous paragraph). – I should reread the pages on marriage from Either/Or. Broadly, crudely, I venture that the Judge is not aware of his despair because of his relationship with his wife which in some respect shelters him from God. This, no doubt, is too quick – but Quidam’s Diary, placed after the long letter from the Judge in Stages on Life’s Way, perhaps attests to a despair of which the Judge is not yet capable.

Ah, the mysteries of Kierkegaard’s authorship. It would be pleasant to enter this labyrinth and spend a life wandering its byways. And with what result? True, a life pleasantly spent is already a great deal – and perhaps it is enough. But there is the leap beyond commentary through which one might be able to write, just to write, a ‘work of philosophy’. Is this possible? It is a false alternative; remember the great commentaries which are more than commentaries – Heidegger’s lectures, for example. But what would it be to start a book in your own name? Perhaps there is a kind of despair, a doubt (fortvivlelse), fostered by academia: one is never able to start, to resolve to start, to bring oneself into the beginning that would allow a work to be born. Having finished my book review, and with only the task of writing an abstract between me and the drafting of my second book, I wonder whether the pleasantness of writing conceals a kind of despair. Isn’t academic writing – the apparent proficiency of writing – already a ruse and an alibi?

The Death Leap (1)

Rereading Kierkegaard’s early pseudonymous texts is of course a delight – but it is frustrating, too, because one knows one is one is not in possession of the full picture. There are so many clues and intimations. Read The Sickness Unto Death and things become clearer, although this text, written by the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus, is condensed and difficult. Anti-Climacus – this name is mean to suggest the Christian Johannes Climacus (another pseudonym) was trying to be: not ‘anti-‘, then, but ‘ante’, before, in anticipation. The Sickness Unto Death is an urgent text; though dense, it aims to communicate simply and directly. (Why, then, a pseudonym necessary?)

In the text as in others by Kierkegaard, the task is to delineate what it means to become a self; it is necessary to actualise what you are as yet only in potential. To become a self is a matter of relation, of joining the two sides of the human being – the finite and the temporal with the infinite and the eternal; the physical and the necessary with the psychical and freedom. This is possible only through despair, which translates the Danish fortvivlelse. Beabout, whose study is immensely helpful, observes the etymological link of tvivl, doubt, with fortvivlelse. But if it is doubt that is at issue here, this is a doubt concerning one’s existence. Beabout: ‘Just as in English there is an etymological connection between doubt and double, and in German there is a connection between Zweifel and zwei, there is a connection between the Danish tvivl and the concept “two,” though it is not as obvious in Danish as it is in English or German’.

In the first kind of despair, there is only a negative relationship between these two poles – we might recognise, the form of existence with characterises the aesthetical sphere. To step into the ethical sphere, choice is necessary – one has to choose to choose oneself, to draw upon a power of freedom that was previously unsuspected. In this way, the two sides of the human being are dynamically joined: a self is born in their union. One should remember Judge William’s admonishment to the aesthete in Either/Or: choose yourself. But then Kierkegaard shows us that the Judge, who presents himself as one who has made a choice – who has chosen to choose himself – does not grasp the origin of this capacity. The self does not give birth to itself; is not born through an act of will. If it produces itself, this is only by actualising a latent self-relation. But the relation itself was created; it owes itself to a transcendent source. To step into the religious sphere is possible only insofar as the self relates to God. God was there before (ante) everything. The self achieves itself in this relation and thus it is free to be itself.

To remain in despair is to forgo this possibility. Despair happens when the self does not relate to itself properly as a self. Only the religious sphere is without misrelation. Misrelation, then, is irresoluteness: the inability to decide, to leap ahead. But what if one cannot become a self through an act of resolve? What if the resolve itself fails, or meets with no help from above? What if the self itself dissolves in an experience of the infinite? Then the relation which would allow one to leap out of despair is subject to an indefinite detour and it is as if God has a demonic double. This, perhaps, is the ‘doubling’ that only the doubter (the despairer) experiences: the bifurcation which makes the leap of faith, the saltus mortale (is this how you spell it?), a death leap. For the Christian, one might die to one’s old life and be reborn – dying is a passageway. But for the non-Christian?

Irresoluteness

A blog for Saturday night? But I’m too tired. I was going to write about Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life Way (I sense he is going to become as important here as Tarkovsky …) The most pleasant sight: Stages on Life’s Way on my office desk. There it is, a handsome paperback, deep blue with a line profile of Kierkegaard’s face on the front. London, 1993: that’s what I wrote on the title page. I want to write about the novella ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’ that is part of this volume …

There are various kinds of melancholy in Kierkegaard. Melancholi is the word that, perhaps, characterises Repetition – it is not yet the religiously impelled Tungsind of Stages on Life’s Way. Do not translate Tungsind as depression. Well, like Repetition, ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’, which is also known colloquially as Quidam’s Diary, after its ostensibly narrator, is framed as a psychological experiment – in this case, by Frater Taciturnus. There are various distancing effects – the diary itself is said to date from 1751, and to have been disovered in a trunk at the bottom of a lake. Furthermore, it comprises ‘morning’ entries – written one year after the events it reports, and ‘midnight’ entries, far more gloomy.

Just as with Repetition, this is a book about love, about the failure of love. But the failure, according to Quidam, arises out his religiosity. For Quidam, even if he is not religious yet, is struggling to be so – struggling, that is, with the Tungsind that, as Frater Taciturnus points out is ‘the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can become clear to himself in the religious’. Quidam, the Diarist, wonders whether or not he is guilty of torturing himself for the sake of a religious vocation from which marriage would have debarred him. But does he ever become religious? He wavers; he indulges himself; he does not struggle to reach the actuality of the religious life.

A crucial expression: Indesluttedhed, inclosing reserve. The full sentence from which I quoted above reads: ‘His inclosing reserve is eesentially a form of Tungsind, and his Tungsind in turn is the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can becomc clear to himself in the religious’ (427). This is what characterises the Diary itself – it leads nowhere; Quidam despairs, but despair does not carry him forward. It is as though he remains in the thunderstorm of Repetition – a thunderstorm which never ends even as it appears to bestow the future. Some would argue that the Diary is boring; I do not find it so. There is little drama here – or at least the drama is unresolved. But I like reading these pages in the same way as I enjoy the pages of the unexpurgated diaries of Anais Nin – a strange taste, I know, but like many of the books and films I like its turmoil, its movement in itself is such that it does not permit resolution.

Often I will lay a book like Blanchot’s The Last Man open in a room as though the room itself could read it – lay it there and come to it, read a few pages and then return later that day or the next. The same with the book translated as Waiting for Oblivion, although the small typeface makes it much less pleasurable to read. (On that subject – didn’t Kafka ask that his book be printed in a very large typeface? Think of some of the Calder editions of later Beckett – remember how marvellous those pages look, with a typeface so enormous that a piece of 1000 words is stretched over 20 pages.)

To remain in possibility: what Quidam evades is his guilt, which he cannot, according to Taciturnus, grasp through comprehension. His inclosing reserve has led him too far, but it has not yet led him far enough. He is suspended – he has not decided. Here I remember what Heidegger calls the Nothing which is encountered, if that is the right word, only in a kind of hovering or indecisiveness. You are unable to decide; you hover, exposed. Who are you? No one at all, or no one yet.

I love the books where one finds this shifting locus, this opening which has not coalesced into a self. I love the books in which an event does not happening – does not round itself off into an ending. For a long time, I kept a record of the books I read (I used to read a great deal). But then, in 1993, I found myself merely rereading; rather than read new books, I read and reread books like Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – the same with Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child. In those years, when I was unemployed, or able to find only casual labour, I was able, for the first time, to appreciate Beckett’s Trilogy, and in particular The Unnameable. I am not writing this to retrace my autobiography (how boring!), but only to note, for myself, when a new kind of reading became necessary. I remember going to Denmark that year, and taking several volumes of Kierkegaard with me. Was it to prepare to apply for postgraduate study? It must have been then that I encountered Bataille and Blanchot for the first time, authors I have been rereading ever since.

Where was I? Quidam, Frater Taciturnus writes, is a fiction – a venture in experimental psychology. With the creation of Quidam, one can study ‘the normal in the aberration’ (398). The young man of Repetition was also said to be a fiction (C. C.’s) (contrary to what I wrote yesterday, he should not be assumed to be young man of ‘In Vino Veritas’, which is to say, real). Then Quidam, like the young man, is the fiction of a fiction – an experiment conducted by a heteronym. Why did this become necessary to Kierkegaard? Behind all this, there is the story of his own broken engagement which should be explored in detail (it remains mysterious, however). I will not try to solve anything today … it is already late, and there will be time, later, to bring myself once again into the strangeness of an oeuvre which struggles against itself, swarming, as if it was the author of Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way who was unable to decide to decide, or to bring himself into a decision and not just his heteronyms and his heteronym’s fictions. Kierkegaard’s irresoluteness – that’s what fascinates me.

Last night, I ended by writing of a repetition through which nothing is given back. Now I know that this repetition is there in Kierkegaard’s great oeuvre – it is as though the text is more irresolute than Kierkegaard will allow. A reading of Kierkegaard has begun to open itself to me. Doubtless, though, it will remain sheer possibility, and I, like Quidam, will accomplish nothing. Still, isn’t this the peculiar joy of blogging – of writing without responsibility? Of writing without having to condense what I write into a paper or a book? Blogging is writing’s drift, an irresoluteness without momentum. Remain in the thunderstorm, then. Tungsind is without issue; but writing’s melancholy is also writing’s joy.

The Thunderstorm

Tonight, I went through old manuscripts, trying to restore them to life – to repeat them anew. It was thrilling at first, but then these ‘literary’ texts began to bore me. They were failures; I knew that, which is why I never tried to publish them – at least, under my own name. Then I remembered the book I was reading the other day: what could be more apt: Kierkegaard’s Repetition.

Repetition is a novella of sorts, comprising general reflections by one Constantine Constantius and the letters written to C. C. by a young man. We learn from those letters that the young man fell in love, but that no relationship was established between him and his beloved.

Who does he adore? One might think he adores adoration – loves what enables him to love. He loves her as the occasion of his love. But thereby he loses the one he loves – indeed he never loved her. As occasion, she is nothing; if he writes of her, writing out of his adoration, it is only to imprison her in a kind of ideality. She is ideal, not real; as the object of his love, as his beloved, she exists only as an archetype who belongs to an eternal past.

He is linked to her by recollection, Erindring (related to the German Erinnerung) -literally internalising. The poet has not reached her; recollecting, he plunges into himself; he is lost. His relation to the beloved is a pseudo-relation, or at least it is one which falls, with him, into his past and to the ceaseless recollection of an archetype which inhabits the past. But then the young man wonders whether this experience is a kind of ordeal – perhaps, he thinks, it is analogous to what Job underwent. And didn’t Job receive 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. Remembering the time when Job was rebuked in the form of a thunderstorm, the young man writes, ‘I am waiting for a thunderstorm – and for repetition’ – What does he want? To to receive himself anew.

What has lost? His own past, his own future. Better: he has lost possibility, the chance of transformation. And what does he seek? Gjentagelsen (repetition, literally re-taking): to take his life again – to receive it anew. He wants possibility – he wants the momentum which will carry him into the future. This is how he would break from recollection, Erindring. And break he does (or at least this is what we learn from his correspondent, C. C., who later claims that the young man was a fiction, C. C.’s own creation. Do not believe him. For they are both diners and discussants, as real as one another, at the symposium in the first part of Stages on Life’s Way.)

We know, perhaps, where this is leading: the original state precedes the original sin. Thereby, the relationship to God is received anew through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ. Yes, this would be a Christian repetition – a restoration – to which the repetition of the young man can only approximate. But we might speculate that Kierkegaard himself may have thought he could win back his former beloved – Regine Olsen – at the time he wrote this little book, but that he learnt, as he finished it that she was engaged. He ripped up the last pages of Repetition and wrote them again – the young man, the poet, also finds out his beloved is engaged and rejoices in that fact. Is it this which makes Repetition so peculiar? According to some, in one draft, Kierkegaard had meant the young man to commit suicide. Now this would have been more satisfying, I think, although the book would be less of an enigma.

Here is the enigma: the young man writes: ‘I am myself again. Here I have repetition; I understand everything, and life seems more beautiful to me than ever. It did indeed come like a thunderstorm’. Then he didn’t achieve repetition by establishing a real relationship with his beloved, who was already lost to him. What he was seeking, and what he found, was the one for whom possibility was possible. But this does not convince. I think the young man wanted his beloved before he wanted himself – that he sought, first of all, a relation that was not a self-relation. He sought, I think, the newness or novelty that comes from without – the shattering experience of the Other – and the book should have ended, perhaps, with this experience or his suicide. The Other? His beloved perhaps – but why not God? Remember C. C. writes that if the young man were religious, he would never have become a poet. But what kind of judge is C. C. – whose name suggests the inability of movement, of momentum, of transformation?

The young man, by contrast, is nameless. He has no name, it is suggested, because he has no grip upon the present not foothold on the future. He is not-yet, pure potential. But when he regains the power to repeat – when repetition allows him to seize, once again, upon possibility – he presumably regains his name, too. Well, the text doesn’t tell us, and the young man disappears from the stage. A question – I ask this not of Kierkegaard’s text, but more generally -: is there a repetition which reaches beyond both recollection and the pristine innocence which is recovered in the relationship to God? A repetition, then, that restores not a name, but a namelessness, not possibility, but impossibility. A thunderstorm without cease, from which no deliverance comes.

Between the Clock and the Bed

Too tired and dazed to read or write (I have a book review to complete, lectures to prepare, but …), there’s nothing else but to find my way to writing here, if it is possible.

To find my way to writing: the great advantage of writing here is that I can write as it were with the surprise of being able to write – that surprise is the wind at my back. Only it is a feeble wind and does not blow me far. Already, five lines in, and I am becalmed.

In a sense, there are plenty of things to write – I have been reading about the Cynics, and could write a blog about Diogenes and the rest, inhabiting tubs and temple porticos and forming peculiar communities. And I’ve been reading about Heraclitus – I know I want to write about the image of the lyre in his fragments, I’ve always found it wonderful. And then, because of Heraclitus, I went back to reading Char …

Yes, I could write about all of this, but it has fallen away from me. I am like the man in one of my favourite paintings by Munch, ‘Between the Clock and the Bed’, his arms fallen by his sides, his hands limp. He gazes out of us and I am frightened by his gaze. I won’t look in the mirror tonight.

A Beautiful Soul

You move from contract to contract, with little job security and no time to root yourself in the place you live. There is a pleasantness to it: you live the life of a writer, you are unknown, yet to prove yourself, but the channels are open to you – there is a chance. And there is a pleasantness in momentum – there is no time for anxiety; you laugh at those who are anxious, just as you laugh when others tell you of difficulties with their house, their wife, their job (what time have you for these things?). Perhaps you live the life of a beautiful soul: weightless, ephemeral, you barely leave an imprint on the world; no one knows you. You find yourself living here and then there, it doesn’t matter. And you pare your living expenses down until it is as if you can survive on air. Air and books.

The everyday: to you, it was that time when, after a hardworking morning, you could take a stroll around the town. The time before a hardworking evening and a busy night. It is a time of pure potential, when you enjoy the feeling of the indeterminability of the future. Who are you? The future asks you this question. And your reply: I haven’t, yet, begun to live. – You live within that alibi.

What, then, when you have to begin? You find yourself living in one place or another (it could be anywhere) and know you will be there for some time. Until then, you had rather enjoyed living like a ghost. Now you are known, and you harden under the gaze of the others, you coalesce out of the air, out of the afternoon; you are no longer lost in the drift of the everyday. Who are you: the question can be answered. I am —-; I work as —-.

Kafka’s Ape

After Kafka’s death, Max Brod sees to the publication of everything – not only the unfinished novels and stories, but also letters, including the letter Kafka wrote to his father. What indiscretion! And then there are his dramatisations of Kafka’s books, his three critical studies of Kafka, the prefaces he appends to the volumes which collect Kafka’s work, and even the novels where Kafka appears barely disguised as Garta. Brod’s admiration of his friend’s genius leads him to promote Kafka’s work but also to interpret it, to fill in the void which opens so marvellously in Kafka’s writings the better, Brod thinks, to preserve their greatness. So – don’t laugh – K. in The Trial is guilty, for Brod, because he cannot love.

This reminds me of Bruckner’s eager friends, promoting his work even as they demanded that he makes cuts and changes. We might say Brod is Kafka’s ape, a ludicrous, capering figure and, insisting that the various interpretations of The Castle are ridiculous, secure our own good conscience; we are not apes. But then if The Castle inscribes an experience bound up with the experience of writing … if the void in question is linked to the movement of writing itself, if it is something like the secret heart of the work itself such that it can only be covered over and lends itself happily to its own dissimulation, then Kafka is already his own ape, and The Castle is a buffoon’s book.

Hubris

This, via James Ward’s Heidegger’s Politics:

According to Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger would write, in a passage omitted from the published version of G53: “Perhaps the poet Hölderlin must become a Geschick of decisive confrontation for a thinker whose grandfather was born at the same time the ‘Ister Hymn’ and the poem ‘Andenken’ originated — according to the records, in the sheepfold of a dairy farm in Ovili, which lies in the upper Danube valley near the bank of the river, beneath the cliffs. The hidden history of Saying knows no accidents. Everything is dispensation [Schickung] ( “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding”, p. 223).

The ‘I’ as Construct

Another splendid footnote from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation:

In this sense where there is an ‘I’, the identity of a self, ‘God is not dead’. This is also why Nietzsche’s decisive contestation has to do with ‘consciousness’ or the identity of the ‘I’. Consider this text drawn from Nietzsche’s unpublished writings, cited by G. Colli and M. Moniari in the Cahiers de Royamont no. 6 (Paris: Minuit, 1967), devoted to Nietzsche: ‘I rather take the I itself as a construct of thought, of the same order as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘goal’, ‘number’, thus as a regulative fiction thanks to which one introduces a sort of constancy, and therefore a sort of ‘intelligibility’ into a world of becoming. Faith in grammar, in the linguistic subject and in the object, has up to the present held metaphyics under its yoke: I teach that one must renounce this faith’.

Bureaucracy

A fascinating note from Blanchot’s essay ‘The Wooden Bridge’ of Kafka’s The Castle (you can find it in The Infinite Conversation):

Incidentally, I would note that for Kafka bureaucracy is not simply a later development (as though the gods, the first forces, were pitifully ending their reign by becoming functionaries) nor simply a negative phenomenon, any more than is exegesis in relation to speech. To his friend Oskar Baum he writes the following, which demands reflection: ‘Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution’. (This is in a letter of June 1922, the period of The Castle.)

The Condition of Music

Recall Schopenhauer’s account of the encounter with the artwork, which allows one to break from the world of representation to seize upon underlying Ideas (conceived Platonically). Art presents us with objects in terms of what manifests itself in them without the mediation of concepts. Ideas present themselves sensuously; they reach us when we encounter the object in a disinterested manner. But they reach us such that, in disinterested contemplation, we no longer exist as individuals with individual wills. Instead, each of us mirrors the object we encounter; we exist, in Schopenhauer’s terms, as a pure subject who is as it were merged with the contemplation of the object. This purity is such that it is without will, pain or, indeed, time. Yet it is this supra-personal subject who is capable of knowing the Ideas; the relation to the work is cognitive; there is an aesthetic knowing.

What, then, when the encounter with the work is to be understood non-cognitively – when it is not contemplation through which one would merge with the work, but when, nevertheless, there is a certain purification of the subject. Purification? A despecification, when you encounter the work not, once again, as a detached ‘I with a personal will, but as the impersonal ‘it’ – the ‘il’ without attributes whom the work reaches because it bypasses every attribute. The ‘il’? Could I write here, less obscurely, of the body? Yes, so long as this suggests the non-cognitive locus of an affect, the open space into which the song is received (I am thinking of the music of (Smog), Will Oldham, Cat Power). And as long as the affect is no longer bound to Ideas nor to knowledge, but their inverse: the matter that is without form, the unruly element which escapes Idea and representation. And then, finally, there is no mirroring here, unless there is a mirror that allows you to see not you but the darkness of your body as it joins the body of a reserve without form, without Idea.

But then remember the condition of music for Schopenhauer: it does not represent an Idea but presents the transpersonal cosmic Will itself, in all its gradations. Thus, the material part of the Will is analogous to the ground bass, organic nature in harmony and subjectivity, spirit and feeling in melody. Now think of the affect of a song like, say, ‘Little Girl Shoes’ by (Smog): it would be towards the ground bass that the work tends, the throbbing or pulsing that is the undoing of the ‘higher’ forms (harmony, melody) – or perhaps the background against which the ‘higher’ forms unfold. Better still, perhaps: the song emerges in the struggle of the ‘higher’ forms against the lower – such that, with some music, matter, unruly matter is as it there, rumbling even as the voice, the guitar seems to have left it behind. Then the ground bass is the rumbling within music: the barely musical drone in which harmony, melody threaten to disappear.

The Will: is this the right word? But it presses nowhere and it cannot be unified. Think of it instead as the outside, scattered in uncountable multiplicity, of the arrhythmia which has not yet gathered itself into a pattern. And the ground bass? It is the rumbling of that place in which the world tears itself apart.

Obsession

Are you obsessive, obsessed? But what would this mean? To write of the same and always the same, to be possessed by the same thought all day and all night. Or is it that one finds a way to struggle to a certain thought and that thought is given in struggle: it is the gift of that struggle and struggles in turn?

In the end, if, here, everything is the same – if it seems the same is said over and again – this is only because it is the same struggle that is necessary to clear a space in order to begin. To begin what? To write, which is to say, to mark in writing, through writing, the capacity to begin. And after it is marked? You stop, surprised by the surplus of strength which made it possible and to begin to slip back towards murk and weakness. Stop, and you know, tomorrow, you will write the same thing and also fall away from strength.

60 Pages

A book … hardly a book. The magic words: 60 pages. Yes, 60. Then the book can find a reader in the bookshop, inexpensive – in large type, perhaps, but small enough for your pocket. Which calls for an intimate reading – for the intimacy of a reading which would be the correlate of an intimate act of writing. I have the pleasant dream of writing a book in a single creative gesture – in a sweep of a week, a fortnight….

The Surplus of Strength

Happy people have no stories. And happy bloggers? Do not hope for melancholy, if that’s what you think would allow you to write. Hope for the space of non-melancholy to open within melancholy, the surplus of strength from which writing is born. But that is not enough, for of what would you write? If you wrote the sentence, I am melancholic, no one would believe you, for how could the melancholic summon enough strength to write? Try: I was melancholic. But this isn’t interesting – and now it is besides the point. You are left with very little: a writing which is surprised at its own existence, which attempts to mark that surprise in the act of writing. You write: I write. Or: I have the strength to write. But what have you said?

Perhaps at the heart of writing (blogging) there is only the contentless affirmation of writing itself. But then it is an affirmation which breaks through the writing of reports, administration, bureaucracy. Remember that fragmentary writing begins, for Blanchot, when the whole is completed, when it appears everything has come to term. Perhaps fragmentary writing is only open to the servant of the whole, who believes in its inevitability and its justice. Thus Henri Sorge, protagonist of Blanchot’s The Most High: servant of the system from whose pen a writing is born which escapes the whole as the whole moves to completion (total bureaucracy).

Do you believe in the whole? In the order of which administration and bureaucracy would be part? The order to which melancholy is directed? Only to the extent that you are surprised by writing which is always the interruption of order.

The Last Man

The passages on the last man from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra frighten us: who would want to be this creature, product of a terrible entropy, end result of a movement that appears to move through everything in this age of administration and bureaucracy. Read Blanchot’s The Last Man: now we learn that the last man is the one whose place all of us will take. Only this man is, as it were, the Other stripped of specificity, subject to no predicate, bearer of no attribute. Who is he? To call him the ‘last’ man – is this to indicate what remains in each of us when we become, for another, the Other [Autrui]? Recall that he is said to be dying (the tale is set in a sanatorium). But isn’t there a sense that the others in the tale will come to assume the place of the last man, and, in so doing, open themselves to the other patients? The last man: the one whose place we occupy in turn. The one we become when we are drawn close, too close to a dying without limit, without term.

Is there a sense that the reader, before a book like this one – a work of literature – will likewise occupy the place of the last man?

This is difficult, very difficult, but I also sense that this goes to the heart of this difficult book. A few notes: to read, one might think, is to determine, to delimit – in Hegel’s terms, to see through the work of death. Then, through reading, no longer to be bound to oneself – to have had introduced, at the heart of the relation through which you are bound to yourself, the opening which unbinds. Who are you? Not yet anyone. Not yet because self-relation is, for a moment, impossible. Dying is a word for this. Dying, not death; the illimitable, not the limit; worklessness, not the work.

Dying – this is the word that Blanchot allows to indicate the way in which we are unbound to ourselves in the opening to the Other (a story that should be told by way of Levinas). Dying, then: the name for an interruption of relationality through which, reading, exposed, you become no one in particular. No one? The self despecified, the ‘I’ given over to the ‘il‘. The last man? Each of us takes part in the roundplay where we take the place of no one, of the last man, in turn.

Busyness

Rereading my last post, I wonder why I am content to write so vaguely and impressionistically about music? In my defence, I might say I don’t have the time – I am too busy to make space enough to listen to the albums of which I write. Too busy – which is to say, I don’t have the leisure: I can’t let myself be drawn into the space they open. But then, writing that, I wonder whether I would ever ‘have time’: isn’t the idea of busyness the attempt to avoid the encounter with the work? Then I know I am deluding myself: to write, here, is to sketch an experience I am frightened to have. Empty time, open time: I don’t want to be drawn into a space that resembles the space of unemployment.

Why write about it, then? Why write? I think of that child of whom Freud writes who, in the wake of his mother’s death, plays the game by which he expels something and then draws it back to himself, thereby controlling the experience of loss, of losing. The ‘busyness’ of Spurious: I write about dispersal, but nothing, here, is dispersed. Blogs are not fragments, if fragmentation would safeguard a ‘minor’ speech – a way of writing that resists the grand synthesising gesture. But how, then, to write in a way that would risk risk, answering to the risk in the work of which I would write?

Rather than answer that question – which cannot, perhaps, be answered (it is a matter of allowing the question to resound, to give it issue rather than answering it once and for all), I would prefer to wonder why commentary would be necessary for the critic. Remembering Freud’s story again, one might think it goes back to a trauma of some kind – a death, a bereavement. But who died?

Remember the story of the child who witnesses a night behind the day in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. Do not think that it is a ‘confession’ of some sort, as if this would give one insight into the origin of Blanchot’s strange vocation. It is not a question of an original trauma that is then repeated, but rather of a trauma that occurs as repetition – the fact that there was no origin, and there is only the return of an experience without meaning and without determination.

Busyness – the busyness of the employed, of the critic, of the philosopher: is it possible it is a defence against the recurrence of a kind of nothingness, of an experience which cannot be situated with respect to the present moment? In which the past and the future evacuate themselves of any specific content? A defence, yes, but one which manifests itself in the attempt to control the experience in question – to subordinate it to the general busyness of the day, throwing it out and drawing it back in like Freud’s child.

The critic survives where the artist does not. The artist who disappears into madness was unable to return. And the critic, who writes on Nietzsche, on Holderlin, on Nerval? Somewhere, far away, these writers laugh from out of the night into which the critic is too frightened to enter.

Drone

I often daydream about writing a 60 page book on Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), and then one on Bill Callahan (Smog) and another on Chan Marshall (Cat Power). 60 pages, a little book which offers itself in a kind of discretion to its readers. As though it drew its reader into the space of a secret.

But then I ask myself: what would you write? What could you construct on the basis of an experience of the streaming into which, say, the songs of Cat Power hold themselves? I listen to The Covers Album – take the first song, ‘Satisfaction’: what do I hear? Repeated, reaching me over and again: the pulsing of a moment which falls outside what I can hold or grasp. Pulsing? – It is not a heartbeat, with its regular rhythm, but the scattering of rhythm.

And then if I listen to The Doctor Came at Dawn … well, who listens (who listens within me)? One might think because of the slowness of the album, the way it takes time, the way, sometimes, a drone can be heard behind the songs, that I am soothed or lulled. But it does not send me to sleep so much as awaken me from my wakefulness, drawing me into a strange kind of insomnia. The night opens in the day; the sun is put out and then, in the darkness, there is a scattering or dispersal: instead of points of light, stars, there are points of deeper darkness within darkness, swarming.

And Will Oldham? Days in the Wake is the album in which this singer turns himself into a beast, a creature so small that he can crawl through the interstices of the world. Following him from song to song, it is as though from these interstices, another kind of music resounds. I remember Pythagoras’s claim that the spheres of the planets turn in such a way that they generate a great, roaring music. This is what I fancy I hear from Days in the Wake, an album of mice and God and children: not the sublime order of the planets turning, but the darkness in which nothing turns, a music without form, without melody. Listen to his voice strain and break. He is bringing something to us from faraway. From before and after time. From the void of the future, the void of the past.

Secret Name

How can I write of Low’s Secret Name? I have tried many times, if only to have done with the claim it has upon me (ridiculous dream!) For are there not those works which frighten because they cannot be determined – more, because, listening to them, they begin to dissolve the bond through which you are bound to yourself? Who listens? Not me – but something in me, far from me. Secret Name summons the one who is without name within me. Within me but also outside me. Who listens? But there is no name for the nameless. Which is why I always fail to begin to write about Low.

The Idiot

The night, the sea, the earth: you like to write with these expansive words – words which substitute themselves for a reserve which can only appear ‘beneath’ other words (under erasure). In the end it is as if every word you wrote took the place of an indeterminable word which could not have been written but writes nonetheless, writing as writing writes, writing within writing.

Within you, taking your place, writing with your own words: the idiot who writes not to communicate, to transmit a message, but to get lost in writing – to lose writing itself in writing, before it can find the other shore.

You write; you congratulate yourself because you were strong enough to receive writing, to write with it and not to obliterate it, to allow the idiot to write within you. Strength? But it is also weakness – a fatal susceptibility. But strength is necessary to endure weakness, to bear the theft of words. Let the idiot write – if you can bear it (do you have the strength?) Give him the words he can unwrite as you write them, erasing everything you write in advance.

Who?

Loss. Think of a melancholy so profound you forget your name. Who am I?, you ask. ‘Who?’, the answer comes: your question returned. In your place, echoing, the empty space of the question: ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’ … the question mocks itself and laughs at the one who asks it.

Tired

You say you are tired, but there are tirednesses which are propitious, exhaustions from which it is possible to assemble a few words. But then isn’t that to say you never reached the limit of tiredness or exhaustion? Or that tiredness bears you in the direction of a particular kind of writing, which begins when you declare tiredness is too much and, in that declaration, attests to the fact that tiredness is too little?

The Writer

A few passages from Ann Smock’s translation of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster:

The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.

The mortal leap of the writer without which he would not write is necessarily an illusion to the extent that, in order really to be accomplished, it must not take place.

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.

‘Optimists write badly’ (Valéry). But pessimists do not write.

The writer, daytime insomniac.

Granted, to write is to renounce being in command of oneself, or having any proper name, and at the same time it is not to renounce, but to announce, welcoming without recognition the absent. Or it is to be in relation, through words in their absence, with what one cannot remember – a witness to the unencountered, answerable not only for the void in the subject, but for the subject as a void, its disappearance in the imminence of a death which has already taken place, out of place, any place at all.

To keep still, preserving silence: that is what, all unknowing, we all want to do, writing.

To live without a lifetime – likewise, to die forsaken by death…. To write elicits such enigmatic propositions.

How absurd it would be to address this question to the writer: are you a writer through and through? In everything you are, have yourself become writing – vital and activating? This would be to condemn the writer to death or foolishly to deliver his funeral eulogy.

What happens through writing is not of the order of things that happen. But in that case, who permits you to claim that anything like writing ever does happen? Or is it that writing is not such that it need ever happen?

A Bad Machine

I am a bad machine, I say to myself. Whom have I failed? My temp controller, my coworkers at the companies at which I temp and above all, myself. Yes, I’ve failed myself. Conversation with temp controller: ‘I know I was wrong, I know I did badly’ – ‘What you did was extremely immature’. As I speak, I feel deep shame. My soul is ashamed and wants to extinguish itself. She’ll not use me again. I am at fault, I’m infinitely guilty.

I will be cast into the outer darkness, into the ring of broken temps who float, occasionally colliding with one another, like the asteroid belt. Now I will have to win her confidence again, my temp controller, I say to myself. I’ll have to begin with the most mundane jobs and work my way back up. One day in the warehouse in Farnborough? No problem. A half day in Basingstoke? Yes, of course. Anything, everything, for I’ve been a bad machine and deserve punishment.

Cycling into town (I do not drive; I have never driven even now, more than ten years later) it comes to be it is because I want to punish myself first of all. What is the reason for my little fit of madness? Why that small insanity of sending a soup stained spoon instead of a leaflet to the company client, and changing the name on the envelope from a he (Steven X) to a she (Stephanie X)? The answer comes to me: I did it because I want to be punished. I did it because my soul is too large and too hollow. I did it to expurgate my interiority, to destroy that echoing place inside me in which laughs (but it is not my laughter) at the madness of my job, all jobs and at the madness of capital.

I want to be punished. But the punishment will not be complete until interiority is turned inside out. Until what is hidden inside me emerges into the day and shrivels up in the sun. The Samurai take the sword and open their innards to the sun. Thus is shame extinguished. I imagine my temp controller reaching a hand into my chest and drawing my innards outside. My secret exposed, the even light of the day pouring through my insides, I know I will be fit for employment again.

The Blazing World

The melancholic looks at everything with 100 year old eyes. I have seen it before, he says to himself, it is all the same. But the melancholic is drawn to the same because he wants to confirm in himself the dread that always prevented him from seeing the world as anything other than the correlate of his dread. The ultimate horror of the melancholic would be a world in which there is nothing to justify his melancholy. Fortunately this is not the case and never can be because this is the melancholic’s chance and his joy, since it is the state of the world which prevents his dread from devouring everything.

It is accurate to write of the black sun of depression, but it is a sun which reveals itself piecemeal, and not all at once. This is because melacholia is a form of attention and it is always possible to pick out something in the world to identify as a cause of that same melancholy. And even if one knows that to so choose risks falling under the category of Nietzsche’s ‘imaginary causes’ (a cause we invent for our own sake), it is still worthwhile, still righteous insofar as it is linked to the world’s plight, to the madness of the world. In these days, I have dreamt of an army of solitaries linked by their madness to the world’s madness, of the ones in whose blazing death might be discovered not the black sun of melancholia but a blazing world within this one, a utopia that can only be hatched from fire. Ah, but this is a melancholic’s dream.