Lars Iyer's Blog

The best Kierkegaard, W. says, is the last Kierkegaard, the Kierkegaard where he's gone completely curdled and has lost all moderation. As we, too, must lose all moderation in writing about and with Kierkegaard, W. says. As we, too, mustn't be afraid of the polemical heights which Kierkegaard attained and that, we, too, should try and attain.

Just as he called an opponent a glob of snot, we, too, must call our opponents globs of snot. As he called the entirety of Christendom an invention of Satan, we too must understand our enemies as the inventions of Satan. Why don't I understand the extremes to which we must go?

Kierkegaard was a great walker, of course, I tell W. The greatest of modern philosophical walkers! He loved nothing more than to wander through unknown streets, or to let himself be carried along by the crowd. Yes, that's when it was that he was at its happiest, this man who wrote 'the crowd is untruth', when he was at one with city crowd, being carried along, with his bamboo cane or an umbrella and his high-shouldered, crablike gait.

He wasn't a silent man, he wasn't lost to inwardness, not there, on the streets of his city. If he praised Socrates as a 'virtuoso of the casual encounter' – the Greek philosopher speaking 'with equal facility to hide tanners, tailors, Sophists, statesmen and poets, with young and old', so, too was Kierkegaard. Doesn't he tell us, in his journals, that he speaks every day 'with about fifty people of all ages'? Contemporary accounts have him walking arm in arm with politicians and actors, with poets and philosophers – but didn't he, too, speak to herdsmen and bakers, bar-women and fruit-sellers?

At home, he rarely opened his door to anyone. But on the streets … That's where he thought, he wrote to his sister. That's where ideas came to him, and where he left them behind, too. 'I have walked my way to my best ideas, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it'. No thought so burdensome: I'm his burden, of course, W. says. I'm the obstacle to his thinking, but how can W. walk away from me when we're walking together?

And when, as a result of the satire of a Copenhagen newspaper, Kierkegaard became known to his interlocutors? When children followed him, shouting out 'Either/Or, Either/Or'? When he felt himself to have become the object of ridicule, of laughter? He went inside, closing his doors even tighter. His inwardness went unchecked. He became paranoid, raving … Christianity festered inside him and became something else. His Christianity went sour! Was it any coincidence that he had only a short time to live? He was dying, dying of ridicule! Dying of loneliness! Poor Kierkegaard! Poor Soeren!, as they called after him in the street. Poor Soeren!

'And what do they call after you in the street?', W. says. 'What do they shout after you?' Poor Lars!, poor Lars! … But no one seems to notice me, W. is disappointed to find out, as we head towards Fenwicks to buy gin.

When Derrida visited Nice to lecture at the university, he would drive up to Eze-la-village where Blanchot once lived, looking for postcards to send to the old writer.

Of course, that cunt Bono's bought half of Eze-la-village now, I tell W. He owns the old cottages, no doubt including the one in which Blanchot lived, its tiny top room, as the writer remembered, made bigger by two views, one opening onto Corsica, the other out past Cap Ferrat. Bono's probably peeking out that window now, the cunt.

W.'s always been amused by my hatred of Bono. By my hatred of Bono and my hatred of Sting. I should be immune to such things. They shouldn't concern me. The true thinker looks away from his time, W. says. Into the past, perhaps. Into the future. Looking into the past, reading books of the past as he does, W., in order to recover a sense of the future, to prophesise. What does the present matter to him, and the consensual reality that defines the present?

Derrida looked for old postcards, and sent them to his friend. Once or twice a year, he would ring him, too - would hear Blanchot's reassurances when his younger friend asked him about his health. 'I will continue to write to him or to call him, in my heart or in my soul, as they say, as long as I live', Derrida wrote when Blanchot died. Would pick out old postcards from the collector's stall in one of the winding streets of Eze … The winding streets Bono now owns, I cry out. The collector's stall Bono's bought out!

Of course, Sting used the street on which I live in a film he directed, W. remembers. I hated that. I felt soiled, invaded. Sting – on my street. Sting, who, admittedly, is a Geordie, but had long since moved away from Newcastle, filming on my street … 

What can I see from the room in which I write?, W. says. The expanse of the ocean? The great breadth of the sky? But my tiny room only gives onto my yard, and the horror of my yard. It gives only onto the rats which scuttle across my yard, and the back wall that puts an implacable limit on its view, saying: look no further. Look no further, no, do not look. Concrete, that's all you'll see. The shore of grey, with Sting, that cunt, making a film on the other side of the wall …

There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part I believe that I would gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards …

Walter Benjamin. W. is reading my notebook and examining my collection of picture postcards. The Pilgrim's Mayflower Steps & Monument, Plymouth, he reads. A black and white photo of the old harbour, old fashioned streetlamps and cranes behind. – 'When's that from?', he asks, but the postcard is undated.

Then a picture of the Promenade from 1930, this one sepia coloured, apparently taken from the old Grand Hotel on the Hoe, and looking along the coast to the Barbican. Then a coloured drawing, picturing the Hoe from the other direction, with Smeaton Tower on the left and the war memorial farther off on the right, and Mount Edgcumbe visible beyond.

Then a fine picture of the lido on Tinside, bathers gathered on the steps, and the Citadel visible towards the top right of the picture. – 'There's writing on this one'. W. reads it out. 'Just to let you know we are having a lovely time. The rain here makes us feel tired and sleepy, am going to bed now. Look after yourselves …' 

And finally, a simple sepia view of children playing in front of Smeaton Tower: one toddler pushes another in an old-fashioned pushchair; a boy in a sailor suit sitting beside a spread picnic blanket looks into the camera. Where have all the adults gone?, we wonder. A girl in the distance, hands on hips, caught mid dance. She's strutting, we agree. W. is a tremendous strutter, and sometimes, when I beg him, he struts up and down the corridor like Mick Jagger on stage.

Benjamin was a great writer of postcards, I tell W. He always requested them back from his correspondents as a record of his travels, and even planned an essay on the aesthetics of the postcard, which he sketched, appropriately enough, on the back of a postcard to a friend:

If you pursued further the skewed bits of the petty-bourgeois stage of dreams and desires, then I think you will come across wonderful discoveries and perhaps we will meet each other at a point which I have been gauging with all my energy for a year without being able to hit it in the centre: the picture postcard.

Benjamin made his friends promise to return his letters, too, so he could use them as the basis of a diary. 'There are few more difficult tasks for a writer than a diary …'

Do I think he should keep a record of my emails to him?, W. asks. And what about our Microsoft Messenger conversations, our masterpieces? He'll write me a postcard, W. says, picking up the last one and writing Lars is a twat on its back. What will posterity make of that?

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too will it sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

That's from Benjamin, W. says. – 'Everything there will be just as it is here: Does that mean you'll still have a tiny cock? Ah, not even the world to come will make you well-endowed'.

A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything.

That's Bloch, W. says, reading from his notebook. He picks up a box of green tea and throws it at me. – 'Do you think that's enough to bring the reign of peace?'

'Everything lies in the hands of God except the fear of God': that's what it says in the Talmud, W. says. – 'But when you have no fear of God? When the word God, to you, means nothing at all, which it doesn't?' What is he going to do with me?, W. wonders. How is he going to teach me the meaning of sin? For you have to have some sense of shame in order to understand sin. And when shame is entirely lacking …

At least Moses had his Levites, his faithful! At least he had a vanguard who understood the real meaning of Canaan! The Hebrews, full of resolve at first, fell to whining about their hunger and the desert heat. They fell to building idols and to defying the covenant each had made with God. Only the faithful understood. Only they knew their aim was to become a holy nation, a kingdom of priests …

Each was to be a prophet. Each the outcome of a prophecy. For the promised land is the messianic age, where each, in his own way, has become the Messiah. The vanguard dissolve into the people; and there will be no leaders and no followers. Each will live in accordance to the Law. Each will wholeheartedly obey the Law.

And in that way, Canaan was no longer to be understood as a place, no longer as a bounded territory. We will reach the promised land only when we live fully under the law, only when we accept ourselves as sinners. And while we have not? Even the lushest countryside is a desert. Even the countryside of Devon beside us, lush and green, is but an infinite expanse of sand.

Of course, the Hebrew's commitment to God was greatest at the beginning of the march, when they'd just set out. They were leaving Egypt, leaving their captivity: that was the excitement. Who could be more willing? Who ready to sacrifice more?

Some commentators have claimed that, in coming together on the march, the once scattered tribes was already the prophesised  'kingdom of priests', long before they had arrived at the promised land. The holy nation, according to some commentators, was a people on the move, defiant and uncomplaining.

When did they begin, the murmurings of discontent? When, the frustrations about blisters and the desert heat? When the dispiritedness, when the demand for sustenance? The Pharoah at least fed his slaves! He at least gave them some modicum of shelter!

Ah, but what they didn't understand was that the desert was a test; the people had been delivered from this suffering only to undergo suffering. Thus began the pedagogy of the desert, thus the attempt to purge themselves from the humiliations of their servitude.

For not the least of those humiliations was the desire to return to Egypt. To turn back, relinquishing the dream of a promised land: that was the temptation for a people yet to free themselves from a kind of inner slavishness. Was that why they built themselves a golden calf? Was it in imitation of the idols of Egypt, before which they prostrated themselves?

The people preferred the old gods, the old certainties. But there was a new world to be won! So the meek Moses became a slayer of men. So he punished the people, as W. sometimes has to punish me. It is sometimes necessary to sit on the Chair of Judgement. It's for my own good!

But then, too, sometimes W. is guilty of backsliding. Sometimes he years after the high table, after fellowship with his former allies. The old Gods: the fellowship of professors, the esteem of his peers. Must he leave them behind? Of course he must: he sees that, W. says, in his lucid moments. That's been my lesson to me. I, in my own way, have been his liberator.

But he, in turn, must be mine. Are we there yet?, I keep asking him, pulling at his tunic. And where's that milk and honey he was telling me about? But he faces forward, marching ahead of me. He faces forward, wondering how to teach me about the Law.

How many covenants were made at Sinai?, W. wonders. Just one, you might have thought – the one which bound the association of tribes in captivity into a nation.

Rabbis have always debated this question. One said 603,550 covenants were made, one for each adult male who pledged himself in service. But another said these covenants were made 603,550 times, each man pledging himself to another. For it was not enough for each to act justly; the people as a whole must be just: one must obey the law and see it obeyed. Each man, then, is equal before God (the rabbis do not tell us about women). Each is bound freely, responsibly accepting his responsibility in the eyes of his neighbour. And more: each was responsible for his neighbour. The one bore the other. And it was only thus that God promised not only a land overflowing with milk and honey, but that his people, God's people 'shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'.

A kingdom of priests: that's what W. dreams of becoming. A holy nation. But we're not much of a nation, the two of us. Not much of a kingdom! If only we could find others to walk with us! If only there were others who would walk with us to the promised land! But our friends are scattered, and at war with one another. God knows, they have their own problems.

And us? We who walk with the sea on our left and the Devon countryside on the right? I am responsible for him, W. says. But what is much worse is that he is responsible for me, for all the sins I have committed.

Only the young can reach Canaan, by which was probably meant the innocent, the free-born. Only the young might become the holy nation, the kingdom of priests … And that means that I am the obstacle to W.'s crossing into the promised land. I am the uncrossable desert across which he has been doomed to wonder.

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That's Marx, writing in the aftermath of 1848, W. says. Have we gone under?, W. wonders. Are we going under now? We're on a walk, the sea to the left of us, our shadows on the right. We're walking, exulting in the ozone released from the foaming waters.

Only the young arrived in Canaan, we reflect. Moses himself died without entering it. And he bade the Hebrews to wander for 40 years in the desert, lest they bring Egypt, the memory of their captivity, with them into the promised land. 

For the escape from Egypt did not happen once and for all. The Pharoah's horses and chariots were drowned, it is true, but there is a Pharoah of the mind, too; and there are horses and chariots of the mind. We are all in bondage, W. says. We have no idea what freedom might mean. No idea of liberation.

Where is our leader?, he wonders. Where the Lenin to organise and discipline us? We need to be purged! Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries! Only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might we overcome our bondage.

Did the Hebrew people ever reach Canaan?, W. wonders. Oh, they reached it, alright, if that means merely crossing a line, crossing the Jordan. They arrived there after forty years of struggle.

Moses decided to remain in the desert until those born in the Egyptian captivity died. Only the young were to arrive in Canaan. Only those who no longer knew the bondage of their people at first hand.

Maimonides: 'It is not in the nature of man that, after having been brought up in slavish service he should of a sudden wash off from his hands the dirt of slavery'.

We're slaves, slaves, W. says. Look at us, my God. We'll do anything they tell us! Anything! – 'Especially you', he says. 'My God, you're the worse, dancing in your chains'. How far will we have to walk to wash slavery from our hands?  

The walker, the real walker, can have no destination, W. says. He walks is a means without end. A pure means, uncoupled from the purpose that might channel the walker. In this way, the street is as open as the desert. As open as an ocean – a pure expanse. You can wander this way, or that. Make this turn, or that. Freedom – for you are without the aim that would determine your course.

Of course, the walker must also be a great student, a great learner, W. says. There is a pedagogy of the streets. Other walkers have been there before you – you need to learn about them. Marchers, demonstrators – about them, too. And about history – the great sweep of history, even if, in the end, history is the burden from which the walker longs to escape.

We must walk, W. says, we have to walk. We have to continue to walk, and in so doing, to continue the walk of others before us. Mandelstam writing his poems on the hoof, Kierkegaard his philosophy. Benjamin's flaneur straying in Paris. Ghandi heading to make salt on the beachhead of Dandi …

To walk to leave the house of bondage behind, as Moses left Egypt. The walker is always heading towards Canaan, W. says. It's always a question of going out, away, towards the promised land. But, in truth, there is no such land – or that land is only another place to wander, another version of the desert.

I've lost my ability to wander, W. says. But did I ever have it? Did W. only imagine my ability to promenade? Of course, he is a man of the promenade, W. says. He walks slowly, his torso held erect, looking about him. He's interested in the world, not like me, who am always bent over, always looking at the space on the pavement immediately in front of my feet.

He's open to surprises. – 'But you're open to nothing!' When the chuggers approach him on the street for a donation, W. thanks them and politely declines. When marketers ask him to contribute to a survey, he looks them in the face before he says, no thanks, thank you anyway. But I look down, W. says. I glower, and when a stranger approaches me, I hold up my palm to say: stop!

'And you walk so quickly!' What am I trying to escape?, W. wonders. – 'Yourself? Well, in that case, you're doomed'. Once, he and Sal saw me from afar, a pedestrian among other pedestrians. They saw me as a stranger might see me: a derelict walking at a furious rate, head down, glowering. What was wrong with him?, they wondered. What's his problem? And then they saw it was me, and they know all about my problems.

'What does God want?', Kierkegaard writes in his journals, 'He wants souls able to praise, adore, worship, and thank him – the business of angels. And what pleases him even more than the praise of angels is a human being who, in the last lap of this life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty, nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that God does it out of love'. 

That God does it out of love: what can that mean to us? But we're not on the last lap of our lives, not yet. Then will it become clear one day? Will it all be revealed to us?

If he's cruel to me, it's out of love, W. says. It is meant as the highest kindness, when he sits on the Chair of Judgement, listing the many compromises of my life, my betrayals and half-measures. Who else would have taken notice? Who else would have thought to teach me the meaning of sin?

Ah, would that he had a similar tutor! If only someone had the same interest in him! But perhaps my ingratitude is only a version of God's cruelty. Perhaps my moaning in protest, as he sits above me on the Chair of Judgement, is a way for God to test the extremity of W.'s love.

Is there hope for us, any hope?, W. wonders. We're hungover. The light hurts our eyes. Perhaps in our own way, we have prayed, W. says, as we reach the Hoe. Perhaps that's how we'll be judged: as idiots, it is true, but as prayerful idiots. We had a sense of what was good, a sense of what was right. And a sense of God, too – perhaps we even had that.

But there is something, too, that we lacked. For did we ever suffer enough? Were we not always too blithe, too light-spirited? 'The destiny of this life is that it be brought to the extremity of life weariness', Kierkegaard wrote in his journals. The extremity of life weariness: how hungover would we have to be to feel that? How much would we have had to drink? 

It is a time to make distinctions, fine distinctions, says W. of our collaborative paper on Kierkegaard. We should write in a series of numbered points! We should incorporate equations, if we could! And diagrams! It is a time for graphs, W. says. For geometry.

Our inclination has always been towards the vague, the amorphous, W. grants. We lose ourselves in grand vistas, in the account of the huge disasters to come, for example. In our would-be prophetism. In our wholly spurious sense of the infinite.

Wasn't it Kierkegaard above all who warned of the despair of the infinite, of leaving the finite behind? Wasn't it Kierkegaard who warned of the dangers of the imagination unlimited by anything concrete? The fantastic, the unlimited: that's what Kierkegaard warned against. And we have to heed his warning!

But then, too, Kierkegaard warns us of the opposite kind of despair: of finitude's despair, which never dreams, never roves far from what it takes to be the self. But the self of finitude is a paltry, secular thing. For it is only from the infinite that the religious comes, Kierkegaard says.

Religion needs imagination! It needs the abstract even as it needs the real; it needs the concrete. Our task- the great task of the self in willing to be itself - must be to hold them in tension. It is to affirm the infinite and the finite, not one at the expense of the other.

It is the same, for Kierkegaard, with dipolar relationship between possibility and necessity. Possibility's despair is, he says, a lack of necessity – a sighing after mirages that take no account of the limits of individual existence. Necessity's despair is the loss of possibility, and with it, the meaning of faith, of freedom.

For necessity is only a kind of fatalism, a determinism, and hence a denial of God as the ground the self. There remains only the calculus of probability – of the chance of this happening, or that. Possibility, thereby, is withered, etiolated.

The self of necessity, then, is secular, bourgeois, the philistine who knows that this world is all there is. What sense does he have that 'with God everything is possible'? How can he pray, when prayer depends on that same 'with God, everything is possible'?

With God …: a beautiful sentiment, W. and I agree. Prayer: a beautiful idea. And to think we know something of it in our vagueness and grand vistas … To think that's what we've been doing all along, trying to pray …

And now W. is dreaming of prayer-graphs and Godly equations. He's dreaming of a celestial rigour, of the sharpness of fine distinctions aquiver with the divine.

'He lives the life of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely …' This could be a description of me, W. says, were it not for the word 'intellectual'. In fact, it is a report about Marx from a Prussian police spy. But then I'm not much of a bohemian either, W. says. At least there's some grandeur to the Bohemian's dissipation.

'Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do'. A great deal of work – if only we had that, W. says. If only the sense of something urgent to communicate, something on which would steer us through the days and nights!

'He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world'. W. lies on the sofa at midday, he says, but then he hasn't worked through the night with tireless endurance. Oh, what it would be to lie down, sleep as untroubledly as a child, knowing that one had done some real work!