Spurious

Our Idiocy

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, I ask W. Isn't that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, I tell W., we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.

I say tragedy, I tell W., but I mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we've run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we're about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.

The idiot, I tell W., does not want to be an idiot. But isn't that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.

In our case, I tell W., although we know we're idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause ... but then we would no longer be idiots.

The essence of idiocy is activity; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.

It is rather like the film Memento, I tell W., except that the protagonist, instead of forgetting everything that happens each day, remembers it, but still does nothing to dissuade him of undertaking the most idiotic course of action given his circumstances - he kills those who would help him, and falls willingly into the hands of what, for him, will entail the very worst.

Farce , I tell W., and not tragedy, for we can never be said to run up magnificently against our limits. We have no dignity; it is not the limits of fate that we test - the great confrontation with our finitude, but only the limitlessness of idle chatter, that great spinning of puns and innuendo that anyone at all could accomplish.

Heidegger was right, I tell W., the philosopher must avoid the fall into such chatter: what is worse than gossip and idle curiosity? But nor is the idiot ever entirely ignorant: isn't it precisely the way he is caught between knowledge and ignorance that makes his life farcical?

But there are different ways of living this 'between': like Plato's Eros, the idiot is a wanderer, the son of Poverty and Plentiude. Unlike, Eros, however, he has drunk himself into a stupor with Aristophanes and the others over whom Socrates steps in order to make his way back into the marketplace.

And isn't he unlike, above all, Marx's proletariat who alone can repeat and retake the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century into order to become the true subject of history? The idiot is lumpen, I tell W., no question of that. But still, I get the impression the lumpenproletariat enjoy themselves in the moment, there and then - the idiot must always defer gratification. Isn't he too busy dressing up as a philosopher in order to know he is only trying on ideas that will never fit him?

At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, I tell W., idiots come in pairs because only their double will be left, eventually, to amuse. An amusement that depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.   

You tell me I am happiest when I'm making plans, I tell W., but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening each morning into our idiocy.

Doesn't Homer Simpson always have a madcap scheme? Aren't Bouvard and Pecuchet perpetually beginning yet again to explore another branch of knowledge? It is always dawn for the idiot, who is too busy to notice the radiance of the morning, I tell W. Perhaps this is what tempted Dostoevsky to create a holy idiot, I continue, but Prince Mishkin is a solitary, and hence not a genuine idiot.

Brad Pitt's character asks the serial killer at the end of Seven whether he knows he's insane. I think it's immaterial whether the idiot knows what he is or not; knowledge, for the idiot, has been dissevered from action: he knows what he is, but does it anyway, not with the resignation of a hero towards his fate, but in the eternal hope of one for whom the future remains open.

Out of Our Idiocy

We were never witty, W. and I agree. We are not raconteurs; we do not have conversation, as we imagine others have conversation. Of course W. can do an impression of a wit, of a conversationalist, he can sit with others at the high table, but he is at home, much more at home with crudeness and simplicity.

Strange chance both of us were admitted. Strange that we found our way in; we wouldn't have a chance now, we know that. They do not even hate us - who, after all, are we? Would they hate us? We wouldn't be acknowledged. Us least of all (and our friends) - we were admitted by accident; it was a mistake; it will not happen again. Still, we have learned a great deal about stupidity, and about our own idiocy. We've studied as we've wandered this strange, stupid land.

A simple distinction: stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. Outside ourselves - we are inside this stupid land, but we are also outside. W. does a good impression of an insider (I do not), but it is still an impression; they'll sniff him out. Is he one of them? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, then, which begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet and idiocy speaks, if only by burning up words. Idiocy speaks. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. To address, to be addressed: this is idiocy's relief; it lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that's how idiocy discovers itself. That's how it lets itself be discovered.

Two of us, and the table between. A bottle of gin, and ice from the freezer. Slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. Open jewel cases and dirty CDs. 'Listen to this!' - 'You've got to hear this.' Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that - but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn't idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

Idiocy laughs. Everything said is a decoy, it is all indirection. Idiocy laughs: it is the laughing path of words crossed between us. Then idiocy laughs too hard and the words fall. But what does it matter what was said? 'What were we saying?' - 'Where were we?'

Gin and the ice, sliced cheese and dusty, thumb-marked CDs: this red-walled room is a wicker man built to be set aflame. Laughter: what stupidity, and all around us. Stupidity of politics, stupidity of work, stupidity of honours, titles, and professional competence (of what Levinas calls 'ontological tumefaction').

Idiocy: a block, a break. How can we speak in that land, so strange and stupid? By what right can we speak? No wit; no 'conversation'. Then idiocy is interruption, just as our lives, inside, are interruptions. We are tolerated - for the moment. But then they haven't noticed us, not really. Tolerated - so long as we remain out of sight, in peripheral vision. We'll disappear soon, they know that. And meanwhile? The idiots are in the room with red walls. Idiocy is laughing across the table.

Ah but to think from idiocy - to think stupidity out of our idiocy, our gift of idiocy: will that be our revenge?

Pure Idiocy

'Pull out another chair', I say to W., 'not for Elijah, but for idiocy'. But idiocy does not come to sit down; he's already here. Between us. Idiocy is between us.

Plymouth Gin is the path; it opens the way. Plymouth Gin, the table, W.'s front room: now it opens: the route to idiocy. Now will we run up against what everyone is capable but us. Claustrophobia of idiocy, the sense of being pressed up against it. There is no escape. We are idiots, we are becoming idiots.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Gin over ice, no tonic, no mixer. Gin: absolute alcohol. Alcohol that has burned everything away but itself. What burns? Alcohol burns; it has become a star. Alcohol, igniting itself, is sheer ardency. Drink, and speak of what you have not done. Speak of your failure; share it. Share your failure, and your sense of being outside. You are both apes, imitators. You are idiots, and your idiocy is growing pure, as pure as alcohol.

Burnt engine oil: that's what opened the way to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But now it is Plymouth Gin, and it opens nothing but our own idiocy. Let it complete itself, that idiocy. Let us experience its completeness, its fatality. From the first, our idiocy. From the beginning, and before the beginning.

How could it be otherwise? Idiocy set itself back in us. It was our fate, our fatedness. It set itself back, it fell into our past, and into the past before the past: the a priori. Idiocy was our a priori, our condition, our uncondition. It is what sets us apart, and apart from ourselves.

How could it be otherwise? But it was also our gift. A gift from idiocy to itself, and by way of our idiocy. Two idiots, drinking. Two idiots, invited by idiocy to drink in a room with red walls, a table between us, and ice, and two glasses, and a bottle of gin, of Plymouth Gin.

Blanchot recalls that passage in Bataille where he speaks of reading and drinking with X. We know who is, says Blanchot, but that does not matter: X. stands for friendship as much as the friend. And to drink with X.? To read? A kind of community happens, says Blanchot. Drinking, reading, are its condition.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Drunkenness is the path, and this is what distinguishes us from Socrates, who knew he knew nothing. For we do not even know that (and isn't it the same for Bataille's' Socratic College'?). We speak of our failure. 'When did you know that you'd failed?'

We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y.? and Z.? Ah, that conversation I had with Z.! And with Y., that summer's day? And X., when we had him to ourselves for a whole evening? And more distantly, we speak of the thinkers we read. 'How is it possible for a human being to write like that ...'

Later, we will go up to W.'s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. 'How is it possible ...?' Above all, it's not possible for us; that first of all.

It is enough that Rosenzweig and Spinoza existed. Enough that they were alive once and wrote these books. The books are like facts, great looming facts, like mountains, like the flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it is for us, and especially for us. And the curse of that impossibility, its very impossibility.

So does idiocy presses us up against itself. Idiocy calls, and by way of the Plymouth Gin, the red walls of W's room, and the open copies of Rosenzweig and Spinoza. We are idiots. Do we know we are idiots? Not even that. We are not even Socrates, who knows he knows nothing. It takes gin to get us to that point - gin, and the open books in W.'s study. And by that time it's already too late. Know? What do either of us know?

Between us: what does it mean to share idiocy, to wander out in the mountains and the flashing stars, where books loom and thinkers are gods? To share it: now I wonder whether it can only be shared. For who can attain idiocy, pure idiocy on their own?

Blocks and Breaks

First sign of a thinker: the insistence there is a gap between them and their thought. Who are they after all? 'I'm not very interesting', said X. to W. and I two years ago, 'but the book's interesting'. He insisted on that. But W. and I scared him when we asked him to become our leader.

Another sign: the thinker experiences blocks and breaks when it comes to writing. Sometimes they write, and it is like the flash of lightning: everything is written, and all at once. But that 'sometimes' follows the darkness of many years. For a long time, there was no writing; and then - there it is, all at once. To write as by a single stroke - what does that mean? To write after thinking - but thinking is not the word, unless thinking happens in those blocks, those breaks. Unless thinking begins by facing its impossibility and then enduring it, riding it, that same impossibility, folding it into something that might be lived.

Not like us, I said to W., everything is possible for us. But for them, thinking is a risk, it is exposure. A kind of aloneness, that separates them from others, even if it allows them to return - even if it is all about return. I tell W. for the hundredth time about my two great conversations with Y., when he spoke of the category of repetition in Kierkegaard. The first time, with great urgency, on an afternoon when the sun blazed down. It changed everything for me, I told W. And then the second time, the following year, when he spoke to me of his relationship with his son. Pure repetition, he said, with incalculable joy. Did I understand him? I'm not sure. But he set fire to the word repetition; henceforward it would blaze, and Kierkegaard's book became the urbook, the first book, from which others had cooled and fallen.

And the third time we could have spoken? W. and I remember it well. W. was speaking to Y, and I was not. Someone else - who was it? - insisted on talking to me. I was aghast; I moved my chair closer to W. and Y., I tried to overhear, to participate, but I had no chance. It was a great conversation, said W., unhelpfully. A great conversation! But I was being monopolised; someone thought I had something to offer. Couldn't she see I had nothing to offer? Me, of all people! When all I wanted was to be drawn again into the circle of conversation. To listen as new words were set on fire; as books of philosophy became those scorched paths through which the thinker - thought in person - had blazed.

And a third sign, which is always marvellous to W. and I: the thinker has an absolute pellucidity with respect to  their ordinary life. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, I said to W. after speaking to X. And it was true: how frankly and absolutely X. spoke of himself, and to everyone who asked. Frankly, absolutely: as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, at that of blocks, of breaks - a level of which we had no idea.

Complete seriousness, said W., not like us. He was right: we are the apes of thought. Complete seriousness! But isn't there a sense for them, the thinkers, that there is a lightness in seriousness; that thinking is a kind of beatitude. What will W. and I know of the infinite pleasure of thought, thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker? They know more about joy than us, I said to W. There's no doubt about that. The play of thought, the game of thought: Blanchot's phrase of which W. and I always remind ourselves.

Remember what he wrote about Bataille, says W. for the hundredth time. We remember: absolute seriousness, absolute play, both at once. And I remember Blanchot's letters to Bataille (those that Bataille did not burn): almost contentless, expressing solicitude, expressing friendship, as friendship became a name for the play of thought between them.

Blocks and breaks: but now thought was a kind of turning, that orientation where speech, too heavy with itself, was turned to the other. A kind of shuttling (though Bataille's letters do not survive) where speech lightens itself as it slips from the one to the other. Speech? Is that the word? Rather, the 'there is' of speech as it returns from the impossibility endured by thought. As it returns after the longest absence, having traversed the greatest distance, but still young, younger than either thinker, announcing only itself, and the possibility of the impossible.

And now we remember Z., around whom the room becomes quiet. She speaks, and everyone is quiet. Here is a thinker; here is thought, in person. She lives differently to us, we know that. She lives a different life, and silence is a sign of that difference. What does it mean, that she does not speak? What does it mean, when her speech is light, quiet? Everyone in the room knows: what is spoken so lightly burns with the greatest urgency. The room is blazing, but these flames are like those of the aurora borealis. Thought is here; thinking is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it is impossible to think.

Touched: and it seems for a moment that we have faces with which to face the impossible; that we can be brought there, to the edge of cold and fire. The dross is burnt away; the whole of our lives become clear and still, like pools of water in Northern forests. The play of light across us, across the whole of our lives: we live; we are alive. Everyone in the room knows it. The room - but this is scarcely a room. An expanse - we lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than her speech. To be that quiet! To listen, with the whole of our being!

Thought is here, we know that. Thought that needs nothing to think, that thinks itself, like a star that has burned its substance away. Philosophy is burning. All thought is burning. And don't we each burn from that same burning? Hasn't it set something of ourselves alight? Wow, I said to W. when we came out. We sat in the courtyard, completely quiet. No more chattering. No apishness. Wow: I said nothing, I said everything. To share what had happened was only to repeat that non-word.