A Trust in Trust

Remembering posts at Charlotte Street and The Weblog... Some of us are autodidacts ... stumblers, idlers ... But perhaps it is the strange chance which allowed many of us to fall outside a consensual determination of philosophy that will transform philosophy itself. No longer, then, reasoned discussions about brains in vats and cricket matches ...

Autodidactism: yes, I think it marks many of us who found their way into the enchanted kingdom of continental philosophy. Initially, on my first encounter with this book and that (Josipovici's edition of Blanchot's essays, Nick Land's book on Bataille, Shaviro on Blanchot, Bataille (where I first read of Deleuze, Guattari and an 'intensity without form or limit ...', Cixous's writing on Rilke and Tsvetayeva) I said to myself: how can anyone be allowed to write books like those? The question resounded in two registers at once - firstly, shock: I was, after all, an analytic-trained philosophy graduate, but secondly, thrilled, enraptured as the lover of a European literature I also was (bunking off logic to read Musil ...)

Then the sobriety of the Ph.D. when I learnt these books are based on something enormously complicated. Lengthy detour through Heidegger then Husserl then Hegel then Kant. A detour which would take a lifetime. Then the difficult task of writing articles for journals (another detour). Then the strange world of academic press, where if you are in a good university, you can get something published with little effort. (Publishers only put out hardback library-only research monographs as a sop to the academic community, to earn their respect so that they can get on with the real business of making money from textbooks. (My experience: after submission, the manuscript was copy edited by someone faraway, my publisher was outsourcing. When I saw the typescript, I found dozens of errors had been missed by the editor and several inserted into the typescript, no one cared really, part of the blurb read: 'May 1969' instead of 'May 1968', the book was publicised under the wrong title etc. etc. ...: the lesson: it doesn't really matter what you write, so long as you are at a 'respectable' university.))

The danger: remaining at the level of infatuation (this is my tendency). In awe that an oeuvre like Cixous’s is possible (The Book of Promethea!) Awe that Bataille could publish Inner Experience, Guilty or at the majesty of Madness and Civilisation ... Suspicion that Derrida was rather a churl when, in Writing and Difference, he found himself able to criticise them, his predecessors. To criticise them – but how could he? But then I realise this critical sense is lacking in me, that my engagement with these writers remains a simple fanaticism ...

Discussion with a philosopher (this word is an honorific, I don't use it lightly). I ask him how he works. He tells me he continually rereads his own work. How much does he read, I ask him. He fears he reads too little. And what is it that allows him to proceed from philosopher to philosopher in his book, finding one wanting and then another? He has an overall argument, a mission, he is proceeding fiercely in one direction. And how did he arrive at this mission, I ask him. Perhaps this is unanswerable. One phrase he used: a trust in trust ... This is what he meant by faith, he said.

Discussion with a friend: is philosophical discussion possible? Was Deleuze write to abhor discussion? It would be unfair to speak for my friend here, so I will say simply that there was no discussion, only an encounter which happened when I felt the intensity of his philosophical mission. ‘Mission’ is this the word? I prefer the expression: ‘enabling phantasm’. That strange problem (for example, struggling with religious belief, struggling with a difficult childhood, struggling with a sense of the horror of our world, of the decline of culture) which falls to the level of philosophising (and it is rare, philosophising – or at least I am barely capable of it). I write ‘fall’ because it is a matter of these problems detaching themselves from, say, an ‘issue’ which could be treated by counselling or psychoanalysis ...

Discussions with R.M. on the eccentricities of those we regard as serious thinkers. It’s part of the whole deal, I think to myself. Of a life – of living not a developed philosophy but a problem – of allowing the problem to bear itself out of an existence. Isn’t this what you encounter when you meet a real thinker? Isn’t this the thrill, regardless, in fact, of what is said between you? The encounter: strange joy when you meet someone who is not swollen from that ‘ontological tumefaction’ of which Levinas speaks: careerism, self-regard, scholarship (academia is largely comprised of these people). When you meet a philosopher (very rare ...) Bliss in which you are brought close to the pure draft of a life ... a life which lives within this person you encounter such that philosophising is possible not between you as discussants or disputants but in what I can only call, feebly enough, intimacy. When you sense, in the other, the force of a life. That draft which catches up books and arguments as it passes like a moving hurricane ...

So I think to myself: develop your legitimate strangeness. Fall back and discover it. Fall back so far into yourself that you are no longer there. Disappear into that immanent force which transforms reading into a potency which envelops you and your writing into that movement of pure joy and exteriority ...