Spurious

Fraying

I have borrowed an edition of Kafka's Wedding Preparations in the Country which includes other posthumous prose writings including the Octavo notebooks which I remember photocopying one lunch hour when I used to work for Hewlett-Packard. Sad memory: the hopelessness of my position at that time: young but also futureless, reading and dreaming but also bound by a series of trivial jobs. I remember them still: covering for a man who had had a stroke, being there to help him, all the while reading Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for the second time. Then a period in administration when there was little to do. I read Hollier's Against Architecture in that period. Then there was a time on the assembly line when nothing was being sent down the line to us. I read plays instead: Strindberg, Tennesee Williams....

It was hard to make one's way in those days just as my friends who work in such places tell me it is today. You can expect, they tell me, upon getting your job, seven years of difficulty, of idiot co-workers and tyannical bosses, seven years of pettiness and short-term contracts, until you find a decent position. Meanwhile, for me, then, there was reading which existed at a strange angle to my present. How was it possible that Mishima's tetralogy and Hewlett-Packard could co-exist? In a corner of the office, there was even a picture of Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, shaking hands. And elsewhere, in the coffee rooms, there were motivational posters. Read Runaway Horses in such an office and of what else could you dream of the great conflagration which would destroy everything? Read the Octavo notebooks and dream of the rebellion of office equipment and temporary workers - the faculty photocopier, the glitched computer, the crashed network (I would like one day to write of the strange allies I made in the office, those who belonged to the Outside even as they were inside, strange beings who were stronger than the office and yet consented to remain inside it) ...

What purpose do these reflections serve? I am alone in the office, R.M. having become Dr. R.M. and returned to the South (she does not like to be written about and I will say nothing here, not even to offer my congratulations). In the space where she was, silence, emptiness, and it is as though nothing begins in my lonely office. As though the world were unspinning itself, fraying, coming apart, and I were stretched across those same unpleasant afternoons when, as a temp worker, I would watch the clock and wait for five-thirty.

Voluptuaries

Fie upon breakfast meetings, especially those without breakfast. Up too early, the rest of the morning was a haze. I went, straight after the meeting, for compensatory snacks. I filled my office table: falafels, salsa dip, pretzel sticks, prawn crackers, sandwiches.

In my lunch break, I make a trip to the library to find books on Kafka. And then, between the aisles, feel an immense tiredness. I want to lie down, to sleep. I sink down; I am close to the books. And then I spot a couple of books I never seen before whose spines were too faded to read their titles from a standing position. Two books, one with a marvellous essay by Martin Walser on The Castle and The Trial.

As I walk back to my office, I notice the wind has changed; it has become mild, the ice on the pavement has melted. R.M. is in the office; tomorrow, she has her viva. I tell her I’m so tired we will have to listen to our ‘going home music’ now. We have a strict rota: in the morning, The Killers and Secret Machines, in the afternoon, when R.M. gets panicky and lies down on what she calls 'the floor of dread', the Brahms violin sonatas. Then, in the evening, quite late on (9 or 10), it is time for a ‘going home song’: at the moment, the last track from the sixth Lilac Time album, which sounds as it were made for a carnival. It’s on again now.

Afternoon. Time to work. I still have a discounted salmon pate beside me and a few pretzels. I'll save them for four o' clock. As I work, I can still taste the meal R.M. and I ate last night at the Spanish restaurant. 'What was the name of the black pudding dish?' I ask her. And the peach spirit we drank after dessert? But she has left her receipt in her handbag at home. Then: 'Do you know what we are, R.M.? Voluptuaries'.

A Merciful Surplus of Strength

I am quivering with excitement: Stanley Corngold's new book on Kafka is here on my desk (I found it for half price online). Heavy, hard-backed, a brown dusk jacket with the picture of a flaming rolled up ball of paper printed beneath the title: Lambent Traces. Ah the pages are parchment coloured and the typeface is movingly clear (how unlike my own book, where there are too many words crammed onto the page)!

I begin to look through the notes and placing stars in their margins to mark books Corngold mentions that I might want to get hold of myself (David Shur's The Way of Oblivion: how interesting!) Then I begin to read the preface: yes, everything's right: Corngold seeks to defend Kafka as a writer against those for whom, he says, 'his stories, like so many stomachs, can be pumped to disgorge contents that were merely ordinary'. Then a nice sentence: 'My Kafa is an ecstatic'. And another: 'This bliss, this feeling himself "at the boundary of the human", is connected to his writing ...'

I set to work, making little pencil markings in the margins. But I fail; I'm tired, R.M. and I worked until late last night in the office; I've been busy all day. I'm not up to the task of the reading, and the pencil marks are the signs of a man losing hold of a book. Now the book is inert, beautiful, but away from me; I've failed it and I've failed reading. The afternoon is encroaching: through my office windows the vast sky, a whole grey cloud.

Dull panic (I don't like empty time ...) What should I do? I went to the gym yesterday which means I cannot go today. What shall I do? The manuscript needs work; chapter one, 'A Merciful Surplus of Strength' needs several large supplements, whole passages are to be excised and replaced, it's a mess, sixteen thousand messy words.

But I have fallen below work and below everything. There is the only the pressure of the afternoon. Happily, R.M. is here and so are the jolly daffodils I bought this morning. And happily, too, I was able to mark this dead expanse of time here, to do combat against the infinite wearing away by passing through the detour of writing.

But what kind of writing? Only a post, after all - a post because I do not have the merciful strength, Kafka's, to disappear into literature. Perhaps I only feel the 'joy of the notebook' (the joy of this blog) as Steve describes it ('Moleskin Notebooks ...').

Preparation

R.M. visits for a week to prepare for her viva. We are in my office and picnic on snacks bought in the surrounding city. Superb wensleydale cheese and caramelised carrot chutney sandwiches from Marks and Spencers (the same shop mentioned in Bernhard’s great novel Correction which I am finally finishing), prawn crackers in honour of the Chinese New Year. A pot of Tzatziki and old favourites: tubs of reduced fat tuna and sweetcorn and egg and onion. These are to be eaten with ricecakes, which I bulk order from Tescos and bring to the office in my rucksack. Every day, we buy a new gossip magazine to read; R.M. is reading Hello! as I type (yesterday Heat, the day before OK).

All this, of course, is a slight return of the Great Summer of Work last year: 14 hour sessions in the office, the whole day sprawling ahead of us, swathes of reading and writing to be done. Tonight, we have no social engagements, which makes the work day sprawl yet longer; there is time, therefore, to prepare oneself for the day: to assemble snacks, write a preparatory post (to get in the right frame of mind), tidy the desk ...

Commemorate these moments of preparation, one almost exactly like another, forgotten when, later, you reckon how many hours you spent writing on this or that day, or in that week. ‘That was a productive time’; ‘that was an unproductive time, couldn’t write, was becalmed, nothing began ...’

Style

A friend told me once of the difficulty of verifying which ascetic or holy person did what, since the ascetic in question would spawn admirers who would go so far as to take his or her name, not merely repeating the ascetic's actions, but exacerbating them, performing feats that were yet more exacting, yet more extreme. Some of the Christian saints and desert fathers are composite figures - but isn't this intruiging! To exist as a style rather than a person. Or, better still, to become a style, a certain style (imagine writing: I am a Gilles Deleuze, I am a Marguerite Duras) ...

Day Million

Some days you can work, some not. Today is a day without work; I am at my desk, ready, but nothing comes. I ask myself: who is the ‘subject’ of this inability to work? Who is the one who waits to write? It is as though the day itself, the blank grey sky, had somehow turned itself inside out, rediscovering itself in my inability to write.

I would like to commemorate this unpropitious day which did not burst into flame, in which nothing in particular was possible, this millionth dead day of empty time-space that laughs gently at the idea of work. ‘It’s too late’, said the day, ‘nothing will happen’. - ‘But I’ve been here ready since the morning’. ‘But you’ve forgotten, haven’t you, what it was you were to work on?’ – ‘I’ve forgotten everything’.

My desk is crowded: Duras’s Practicalities, from which I’ve transcribed the line, ‘A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It’s from there he looks down’, Bernhard’s Correction (I’m up to p. 200), a pile of CDs (The Low boxset, orchestral works by Strauss), chapters from W.’s book and from mine.

January 15th 2005: I wonder how I will remember this time? I know that today and all the days like it – so many – will be what I forget when I remember, even as such days make up the substance of my life. My secret history: life lived in the infinitive, a ‘to live’ without subject. What has happened today? Is it possible to write of an event that does not occur – that, as it were, reverberates through everything even as it leaves it intact?

When I come to myself I think: this is what the executives do not know – not those for whom time is scarce and a day will never stretch forever. Not the ones for whom all time is accounted for. Then I think: I belong to old Europe, to what crumbles like the buildings in one of Max Ernst’s paintings. Whatever happening, I think to myself, is not happening here. Nothing is happening, I think, and then, pretentiously: but that is a sign of the event. I’ve caught it out and here it is, happening without happening.

Nothing happens. To say this 'nothing is happening' is corrosive, that it is meaninglessness, even absurd is not to assimilate it to nihilism. It is nothing, diffuse nothing which has as though spread everywhere. What does it reveal? Now I think of a scene from a film I show sixth formers when they visit the university: a bag swirls up into the air. The voiceover: it was as if I saw God and he looked right back at me. And I think: only what I see is the blind gaze of the day, and the gaze with which I meet it has as though congealed somewhere in between the office and the sky.

Biodegradable Paper

I conceived the second book as an act of contrition for the first, disastrous book. A kind of overwriting, whose every word would erase a word for the former disaster and then leaving a whole book of blank pages. And when you find you’ve written two disasters? When you’ve filled two books with nonsense?

Youth: you have the future, you dream and the future is the space in which to dream. Age: the future is now, it is here, time to work, and you must earn your way by the sweat of your brow. So you work, with all the dreams of youth pushing you forward. You write, filling blank page after page; you write quickly and you think for this reason you write well.

And when you read the disaster? When you read back what you wrote at speed and, you thought, in inspiration? When you felt the future rushing by you and thought: I am alive in the future?

Tonight, I have a print out of a draft of the second book beside me. And I borrowed my first book from the library (I don’t have my own copy). The horror: this is my ‘oeuvre’. It isn’t even funny. Still, I laughed with W. about it on the phone. 'I've never had a single idea'. 'Nor have I'.

Steve of This Space (although he does not remember this and perhaps it wasn't Steve at all) once wrote to me our first books should be written on biodegradable paper. Let the pages rot; tear them off and throw them into the breeze. Or feed them into the river. Let the water read them.

Resolutions

Still on holiday 'midst the sun and pink sand and, when I return on the 10th January, just six weeks to finish the new book and to complete various essays. It will all end up a right mess, as usual. But at some point or another in the new year, expect:

1) A long series of posts on (Smog). And on the difficulty of writing on (Smog). And on music in general. I spent much of the past year with musicians and with those who write about music, but I've still yet to write on The For Carnation, Scott Walker's Tilt and others ...

2) Substantial posts on Duras on drinking, Cixous on loving, Lispector on living, Tsvetayeva's letters, Mandelstam's essays carrying on the tradition here of writing on my favourite authors for no reason other than my own fascination. I would like to be able to reflect philosophically on contemporary culture and politics as brilliantly as Lenin's Tomb or The Young Hegelian, or, in a very different way, K-Punk, or to tackle contemporary literature - or at least writers who are not already canonical - as Steve does at This Space. Ready Steady Book makes me feel part of a community of readers; so too, in other ways, do wood s lot and Splinters. Impatience is my sin. W. always says he has ideas first and then writes them down. I told him, when I began blogging, it was a matter, rather, of writing, writing and editing, trying everything out, rewriting and deleting, until something happened.

3) Lots more 'autobiographical' posts on working in computer companies in the South. Should the author of Spurious (this blog) become a heteronym like Fernando Pessoa's Bernardo Soares (The Book of Disquiet)? A heteronym of the one I would have become if I had stayed working as a temp in the South? Arguments for: the blog would detach itself completely from 'me' - from the one who types, anyway, in the office of a borrowed condo on a tropical island to which I travelled on my sister's airmiles. And against? Long work of editing and reshaping past posts. Pleasant to assemble these fragments into the image of someone else's face; still more tempting to disperse the face itself. Neither a pseudonym nor a heteronym but a dispersal of the one who writes by way of writing.

4) Something on complexity theory, networks and information society: the idea is to saturate myself with this material and find a way of writing about it. Vilhelm Flusser points a way; I've brought a lot of books inspired by the excellent Pinnochio Theory to read on holiday (Isabelle Stengler, McKenzie Wark and Steve Shaviro himself). I remain a man of the mid-twentieth century even as I remain convinced I live in the midst of the greatest scientific, technological and societal transformations and am duly ashamed.

Philosophy, Plotinus said, bears upon what matters most. Philosophy, wrote Bergson, is a matter of directing one's attention to an appropriate object. And when you know both what matters and what what demands your attention and continue to write about everything else? When it is a matter of self-indulgence? Everything here (at this blog) is a decoy, to recall a post at Charlotte Street.

Of course, writing the last sentence, I know that when R.M. says something similar to me, I defend myself - how pathetic - by claiming that it is not a matter, here, of anything to do with the 'self' at all, let alone indulgence. There is no one here even to be narcissistic, no one has the strength. Writing is not a mirror, or it is an enchanted mirror that absorbs its object in the same way as those in Cocteau's Orphée - only now this absorption leads nowhere, not to another world on the other side of the mirror, but to this same world, this one, as it has become viscous and sticky, as it agglomerates into one of the glutinous monsters Kierkegaard's A. describes in Either/Or.

5) The usual obsessive material on Breton, Kafka, Blanchot and so on. I started this blog to get away from these writers, but I can't escape. I wish I could, you see. I would like to exhibit the range of Waggish or (again) The Pinnochio Theory. Would you believe I spend my time not reading Breton, Kafka, Blanchot? I read broadly but write narrowly.

I wish it wasn't like this. But then as W. always tells me, I spend my time wishing I was doing something other than what it is I seem to be doing; this perpetual bad conscience is pathetic. Or is it that, as W. also knows, I've never had an original thought and feel, most strongly of all, a sense of shame? Still, I suspect even this shame is a lie and covers up something still more base and then, eventually, covers up nothing at all, just the void laughing. It's at such times I feel closest to the one who writes the impassioned pages of Inner Experience or Guilty. W. agrees with me that the figure in which I should recognise myself is that of the buffoon. Remember the figure who leaps over the tightrope walker in Zarathustra? There's no one here but buffoonery and my thought is a buffoon's thought.

I should add something else. 2004 was a year of deaths, two friends in particular, but I distrust the eloquence of obituaries (or at least the ones I write - lies and masks) and will speak of neither but instead of my feeling at the funeral of the second, a remarkable woman, that the text 'Nameless' by Levinas would be what I would like to have read at my funeral.  As strongly as I feel magnetised by the figure of the buffoon, I am drawn to a kind of communism, not Levinas's, which understands that my place was usurped and what I take to be ours is ours by theft. Not Levinas's but close to him, nonetheless, in his awareness not so much of the Other but of the proximity of what is worst to the encounter which is the condition of the new. How pretentious! Well, it is my pretentiousness and not his - nor that of Blanchot's to whom I also feel, on this matter, very close.

Just as when I was a child and felt guilty to have taken one or a few toys from my toybox to bed with me without taking the rest I feel guilty now for linking to some blogs and not to others. Hyperbole: I read blogs more than anyone else, I'm sure, and especially those listed on the left (constantly, or at least once a day, as R.M. would tell you, even when I am on holiday).

Shame

A year after I submitted the final copy of the typescript, W. is still polishing his book. ‘It’s like Gnosticism,’ he says, ‘if your book is full of typos, mine has to be pristine’.

‘I’ve reached new levels of self-disgust.’ – ‘You’re always disgusted at yourself.’ – ‘No, but this is worse. The book is so bad.’ – ‘Why did you read it?’ – ‘I don’t have a copy. But then one appeared in the library.’ – ‘Why did you get it out?’

‘You know what I feel? Ashamed. But it’s good to feel shame. It’s appropriate.’ W. says, ‘I thought you were supposed to be finishing your new book.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘I’m ashamed.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ – ‘After this book I’ll ...’ – ‘write a book about Smog.’ – ‘Exactly.’ – ‘But you don’t know anything about music.’ – ‘No, but I know a guy who plays guitar.’ – Who?’ – ‘You. But you can’t play chords, can you?’ – ‘No. You're not going to write a book about Smog, are you?' - 'No.'

W. has been to a conference. ‘You’re famous’, he says I said: ‘why?’ – ‘These guys were asking me whether I was W.’ – ‘They read the blog? Haven’t they got anything better to do? Anyway, it’s going downhill. It’s terrible. I should call it “Shame.” Really, it's drivel.’ W. says: ‘I told them you're really fat. Too fat to come to conferences.’ - 'Tell them I can't make out of my bedroom. That it's like something off Jerry Springer.’

Scum

Tonight George W. Bush will regain his presidency. At first I thought to write of something else, something completely different. But what I wrote in my stupid way became a lament for hope, for the end of hope.

My boss speaks of the chasm between the ‘generation of hope’ to which he says he belongs, and the ‘generation of shit’ to which he says I belong (and he means this not unkindly – he knows from what I have said what the absence of political hope must mean). Another friend, a man who died too young, used to tell me of the monks who taught him, of their brilliance and their inspiring example. I said: didn’t they try and grope you? weren’t they sadistic? remembering of my own encounters with mediocre, bullying teachers, with figures of authority from one could expect nothing but massive stupidity. This was unthinkable for him: they were his teachers, his guides, they demanded a great deal, but they gave a great deal to their pupils.

He told me stories of his enchanted childhood, of the full student grant, sufficient in those days to eat out every night, to develop a taste for fine wine and port, to assemble collections of the complete works of this or that author, to buy a gramophone and records, to entertain. He remembered the 60s when he grew his hair long and wore rings on each of his fingers. He spoke of seminars which lasted all afternoon and then all evening; he would take his students home and talk with them into the night and then, next morning, would take back to university. The 60s: you can't imagine it, everything was possible, he said. It got silly, he said. He spoke of houses of friends where everyone would have sex according to a strict rota. You can’t imagine it, he said.

As he spoke, I thought to myself: you are secure in a town you never had to leave. You rose to prominence here, restauranters greet you with delight when you walked through their doors, taxi drivers vie for your custom, streams of visitors come to your door. You live on the outskirts of the city in what you call the earthly paradise. You are a man of hope, hope was always there for you. You always had a future because you had a past, a chance to begin.

And compared to you? We are the generation of shit; we are pallid, transparent; you can see through us. You can see our guts and our heart; we barely exist. Our past? Nothing happened. Our present? We are dispersed across the world. Our future? We will be dispersed across the sky. We are the ones without substance, one of the transparent creatures through whom shines the light of the long afternoon of the 1980s and 90s – those terrible decades in which political hope evaporated.

You remember (but it didn't touch you): new housing estates spread everywhere. House prices rose; every home became a fortress closed against the world and the suburbs a wall closed against the poor (and you were never poor). Jobs were casualised; temporary workers serviced the great corporate machines. Incomes rose for a few; for the rest, they withered. The utilities were sold off. Workers closed their eyes in the workplace and opened them when they got home. A thin film formed over our eyes and our ears. You know this, but you were protected from it; it never touched you.

The 80s, the 90s, and now the 00s. You survived, entertaining everyone in your great house. You were alive, still alive, hope was alive in you. You could retire; you lived on the sidelines. And for the rest of us? We'll spend a life on the dole and on the sick. We'll live on the sick till the end of our lives. A life to lie sick from the new ennui, the great consensus, the crushing awareness that nothing is possible, that there is no foothold from which we could begin. Sick and alone, each of us, fallen to nothing. With only a dim hatred for those who had risen above us like scum. For the scum that had floated to the top and seethes there.

In my boss, in you, the world says: you came too late, you missed the party, now the final adjustment has been made and we'll march in lockstep to the end. It says: you haven't a chance. You are braced against the future because of you past. But this means, too, you cannot understand what will happen. You said you had never experienced boredom; I thought: you will understand nothing. You had the past, the richness of the past. Was that why I was drawn into the orbit of your house? Why, in the end I had to admit that all I wanted was security, continuity: a corner in which to curl up, a room with a table and a chair, some hours in which to read and write.

You gave me a room; I was grateful. I was indebted, but you never reminded me of my debts. We disagreed on everything, but we spoke for hours every day. And every night I ate with others at your table; I was in from the cold. You said grace and I closed my eyes. You took in those I thought were beyond hope; I warned you against them; you were right. The house was full, day and night.

In your attic room, I read, I wrote; it was dark, always dark; in a pool of light, I finished my dissertation; I began my first articles; I received my first rejection letters. Eventually, I left; I took a job, I moved further north; I went to another city and you, who phoned no one, who despised the phone, rang only once. And then you died, not long ago. You died a few days after I had tried, for the last time, to phone you.

Tonight, Kerry admitted defeat; George W. Bush has retaken the presidency. Tonight, I remembered the days we stuck Socialist Alliance stickers on the door and the window. That was 2001. When I left in 2002, the stickers were still there. And when I visited in 2003, they were there still. You hated Bush; you hated Blair. You spoke of other leaders, of different times. You spoke of the past, which gave you strength to endure the future. I thought: but they are politicians like the others, all the scum who have ruled us. You spoke from your hope; I answered from a resignation beneath resignation. I said: they are scum.

Company Foyer

The area around the foyer on the ground floor of the company is open; you can sit wherever you like. This is not a space for work, but for meetings (names of the meeting rooms: Locke, Spinoza, Hegel ...). You come here to read. You sit on the leather couches near the receptionist and say to yourself: I look like a client. You pour yourself the coffee which is intended for waiting clients. You read the business pages in the Financial Times and then read Management Today. It’s delightful.

Then you go to the training suite and borrow self-motivating tapes. Who produces these tapes? They coalesce out of the air. They are born in the middle of the air. No one makes them, the motivational speakers do not exist. They arise, these tapes, in the same way as the ancients thought insects arose: from dirt and mud. Only the tapes arise from the pristine air-conditioned corridors of the company. From the dead space of the company foyer.

Management Trainee

Who is the one who works beside me? I am watching you, management trainee. Watching you who work beside me, you for whom I am nothing. But I am barely anything for myself, I can assure you. Soon I will disappear, but you will still be there.

You have entered the Castle, management trainee; you are a functionary. Others want your place, but it is your place. Looking at the new graduate trainees you think to yourself: they have a lot to learn. You’ve already forgotten you were one of them. One of them: how could it be? You fear them, you turn your gaze towards the boardroom. Yes, that is the source of your essence, what you are. You exist insofar as you aspire. Only you will not struggle openly to find a place in the upper echelons. You know a great training is required.

You know that your boss is like Plato’s Sun who radiates through everything in the company. That those close to him glow with a light that burns through him. But you also know that this Sun is your boss’s only because he has passed through a great movement of training. You can learn from him, you say to yourself. He is not a god. He is like me, and one day, I will be like him. Because you know that once upon a time he too was a management trainee like you. And just as you cannot bear to look at the new graduate trainees, because you fear to confront your own dissolution (the fact that you did not always occupy the lofty place that is yours’) he cannot bear to look at you. Only sometimes may he allow himself to think: this management trainee is like the young man I once was. A lion cub, but a lion nonetheless …

Meanwhile, work on yourself. Develop your skills. Develop your portfolio of skills, management trainee. Perhaps you will have to move from this company to another one. Perhaps you will have to insist on a pay rise. Perhaps you will have to move into another team. Work on yourself. Only the work has already begun. Before you knew it. Before you took yourself to the training suite. You are a part of the great machinery, and it works through you. At the level of the habits and rituals of the company life: breakfast (a sausage in a roll) in the canteen, the cigarette break, the trip up to Birmingham, the night out in Reading at Mulligans on whose barfront is written: drinking, dancing, cavorting ...

I am watching you, management trainee. I am watching you and wondering what it might be to be a management trainee. I watch and I think to myself: I would like to see him malfunction, this company robot. Would that he drank like Jed the robot on Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. Would that one day he laughed so hard at his own imposture he is that he fell into his laughing mouth and disappeared.

Hegemony

You are thinking again of the M.D. Of his softness. The great apparatus around him – the suite of rooms, personal assistants – and then: his softness. Rather like that of the Martians in The War of the Worlds who are soft inside the metal carapaces in which they stalk the Earth. Only the M.D.'s softness is benign; in place of the mask, there is only a kind of feebleness (the soft face of the creature from the Predator; the puffy Darth Vader beneath his mask). You say to yourself: but he is just like me. Only he is not like you. And as he looks at you does he think, too: he is just like me. Or: he is just like my son. Or: we are all like one another.

I am reading Gramsci in my lunch hour. And I note to myself the miraculous smoothness. World that functions without the strictures of external authority. The great functioning of the industrial estate, of the interactions of this or that company, and then the relationships which spread over out brave new world, in which company trainees come to us from Delhi or from Prague. In which a foreign name arouses no curiosity. In which everyone speaks perfect English.

Smoothness: it moves of itself; its mechanisms do not simply traverse us, we are those mechanisms – its robot arms, its mechanical pseudopodia. But what happens when we are denied a firm place in the industrial estate? When you only have the position of a temp? Your light step: you are barely there. Only you are there – you are not yet a proper worker – but you are hardly there. You have always usurped someone else’s place – replacing a worker on maternity leave, for example, or providing phone cover when staff are on holiday. You role is to disappear into the role of others. To do so with a minimum of fuss and training. To be unobtrusive.

'Is Helen there?' - 'She's away on maternity leave.' - 'Can I speak to Mark instead?' - 'He's on a company trip to Blackpool. Can I help you at all?' - 'Who are you?' - 'I'm temping here. Can I pass on a message?' - 'No, it's okay.'

You are an usurper. But what you are is also usurped; your existence is borrowed; you are a temporary fix, an item from a repair kit. You are not to obtrude; you are there but you are not there, a ghost. But this is what reveals itself in the temporary worker: identity itself is phantasmic; the working of the great benign system depends upon an identification of worker and role. This is how hegemony works: you become your job; you pass through a training scheme, and there you are. You say to yourself: I am a management trainee. And you say: this is just what I deserve. The world has opened to you and let you in.

Dialogue with an Old Cynic

'I've read your pathetic sequence of posts. You write of the everyday but of what do you write? What is this category except the repository of old alienations, old ideologies?'

'I said the everyday was the diffuse, the boring, that this was the time which arrived when everything seemed completed. Finished time: a solution for all; universe recognition which falls from the sky like light. When everything was complete but all that had completed itself was the perfection of capital whose smooth movement has swallowed everything. That the everyday, seemingly innocent, ordinary, reveals its truth in the temporary worker and the unemployed. That it is in an immense, impersonal boredom that the everyday reveals itself.'

'You write of a world that although boring is safe; a world that might be stifling but in which you will always find food and shelter. The everyday: isn’t this a name, little bourgeois, for that awareness that the world will not care for you as you were cared for in your family home? A name from what turns away from you in the world? A name for the fact that you will never be what you were: "His-majesty-the-baby", in Freud’s phrase?'

'The everyday is not my delusion; it is not my experience alone. There are others, many others, and if other temps fill these companies in the South, might it not be that I have articulated a common experience, a common dispersal?'

'It is only an experience of a bourgeoisie which has been overeducated and overindulged, of those who have passed through the halls of learning, of upper middle class culture and who expect what they will never have: an upper middle class job. For a time you were a temp, but what, little bourgeois, is so bad about being a temp?'

'Then you’d agree with Tony Blair that what we should embrace a "portfolio subjectivity" whereby each will do this job and then that, taking our transferable skills with us, all the while experiencing great insecurity and uncertainty?'

'Pathetic, little bourgeois, that your generation dream of nothing more than stability! Pathetic that what you want is the life you think the bourgeois used to enjoy: mass higher education: a house, a job for life!'

'Then you refuse to consider that there might be other ways of distributing income, that there is a vast poverty beyond the everyday of a developed nation? Our misery is the misery of a casualised world – it is the misery of capital, being directly produced by capital.'

'You use suffering to decorate what you think of as your political "theory." But the poor are like ornaments to whining little bourgeois like you; you are indulged and you indulge yourself in trying to join your own misery to the misery of those who really suffer. This erases the difference between intellectual labour (the office life you complain about too eloquently) and manual labour (the great exploitation of the developing world). You pass over all the real differences which organise what you call capitalism.'

'You leave no room for radicalism, for social change.'

'I just know to expect nothing from you, little bourgeois, you who are content merely to aestheticise his experiences, indulging in lyrical pen portraits drawn a decade after the events he describes. Everything about you reeks of a safe distance: you are far enough from manual workers to evoke their suffering without letting it touch you, and far enough from your past to transform it into something which merely looks like a critique of capitalism. I know you and I know your type: you are the bourgeois who has to catastrophise the world in order to take revenge for what you see as your present misery. Whence your attraction for apocalyptic theories, your desire for environmental collapse. In the end, you want what every bourgeois wants: safety, security, a life lived at a distance, and your call for the great collapse is mere resentment that you have not received what you think is your due.'

'And you, old cynic? Where is your hope?'

'That you and your whining kind, little bourgeois, do not obliterate the real conditions of oppression in the world and conceal the truth which reveals itself in those manual workers whose suffering you cannot imagine and whose demands you cannot know.'

'Do you know them, old cynic? Or is this another way of defusing the beginnings of a great movement which might gather force in our suburbs? Which might bring us towards another May 1968?'

'Nothing gathers force, bourgeois. Not here. The struggle is elsewhere. You want catastrophe, but in the end you want nothing. For if it came, it would terrible. No, for you it must remain impossible, far off.'

The Last Judgement

Imagine this: the everyday, the great expanse of life, the unlimited but also stagnant without-end whose slow corriolis force undoes everything, grew aware of itself in one of the temporary workers who serviced the companies which spread themselves across the Thames Valley. In this worker, this temp who found work here and then there, who was driven (he couldn't drive (he still can't)) to this company and then to that, working for a week or two days or a month before disappearing back into the everyday, to unemployment, there was a great awareness of the everyday itself. As though he bore in himself the secret that could blow the everyday apart. Was he the saviour of the everyday? Was he its destroyer? Or was he its agent?

He told himself: the everyday wants to destroy because I have caught it out, I know what it is up to. It doesn’t want to know that I know. Because it barely knows itself. Because I am a part of the everyday that has turned against the everyday. Like a cancerous cell, the tumour which will spread the great disease by multiplying itself across the everyday’s expanse. Is this salvific? Death-dealing? Am I delivering the Last Judgement?

Bataille thinks history is over ‘except for the denouement’. It is 1937. He writes to Kojeve that he is the man of unemployed negativity. That his life is an open wound, an abortion of the System. Kojeve’s reply as I imagine it: this is your problem, Bataille. History doesn’t care about you.

A recurring dream: the infinite wise child, the child who knows everything like the mysterious androgyne Ismael in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Who knows everything in advance. Isaac says: I am mad because the everyday cannot bear my sanity. Madness is the reward of the one who knows. To know is to plunge into madness. Bataille again: when Hegel completed the Phenomenology of Spirit he fell ill with depression. Madness touched him; knowledge plunged into non-knowledge, an abyss opened at his feet.

Think of Toru in Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel. He knew he was like the negative in a camera. He was the absolute opposite of the world. How old was he when Honda met him, this decaying angel? Sixteen, seventeen? Toru, the angel, decays; Mishima is merciless. In the end, Toru does not die but is blinded; he could not find his way to death and then to rebirth (the Sea of Fertility, of which this is the fourth volume, is about a series of reincarnations). Toru cannot die. Mishima took his life the day The Decay of the Angel was delivered to the publishers (the 25th of November 1970). But Toru is still alive.

Once you wrote a book called The Judgement. The judgement which came from the day itself, from the everyday, from the indifference of the world to you, from the vast servo-mechanisms of Capital, from temping agencies and telemarketing companies. The judgement which said: you are a bad machine. Then the judgement you delivered in turn: the day has gone on too long. Now it is time to call up the recruitment agencies and middle managers. To judge each and visit upon them an impersonal wrath. You are the good machine. Of course this is ludicrous: the same sleight of hand in those children’s books where the most ordinary child becomes the most extraordinary one (Cat in Charmed Life who appears to be without magic is really an Enchanter, Gair the giftless in The Power of Three has the greatest gift of all …)

Genet writes: ‘I wandered through that part of myself I called Spain’. I wandered through the everyday. Was it a part of me or I a part of it? Zhuang Zi: am I a butterfly who dreams of being Zhuang Zi? Now Zizek: ‘In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network'. Are you a 'real' person dreaming of becoming a capitalist? Or a capitalist dreaming of becoming a real person?

Unable to Locate

Capitalism is dreaming in me. But of what does it dream?

You've found yourself in a warehouse job. They gave you free ‘toetectors’, there they are on your feet: black trainers with a hard tip. Sometimes at the weekend you come in for order picker training. You are learning to drive a forklift. Before the practical, the theory. A man pulls over the sheet of his flip chart. He's done this before, trained countless employees. The forklift, it says, with a diagram of the forklift truck. Your best friend – picture of a forklift truck unloading pallets – or your worst enemy – picture of a man beneath the forklift. You laugh, but you shouldn’t laugh. Everyone is looking serious. You stop laughing.

I was young then and introduced as ‘the lad’. I was an assistant to an older man, who liked to take things easy. I am replacing another ‘lad’ who has graduated from the warehouse to the office. I’ve inherited his workstation, his cartoons sellotaped to the cubicle wall. I think to myself: I’ll never live up to the example of my predecessor. I’m supposed to find packages lost in the warehouse: unable-to-locates, they’re called. UTLS. I get a list of them every morning, and off I go. Only I go nowhere; it is easier not to look. I wander from coffee machine to coffee machine. I take breaks sitting on the stairwell which goes up to the roof, where I can read in peace. What I am reading? Something trashy. Really, it’s a waste of time.

Meanwhile, there are forms to fill in. Time to wander through the warehouse again. Today it’s my birthday, my boss lets me off early. When he is away, I go up to the offices and sit in his cubicle. He has books about management and getting on with your employees. Every month we have a team meeting. There’s three in my team: a guy who dresses like a cowboy we call Cowboy Pete, some other guy, very skinny, and me. Then my boss, who likes The Stranglers. This is what we talk about, if we have nothing pressing on our minds: The Stranglers. My boss deigns to talk to me about Hugh Cornwell, Rattus Norvegicus etc.

It’s high farce. We’re playing at team meetings. Nothing depends on us; nothing we do matters. We search for UTLs and fill out forms saying we can’t find them. And when we do find them, we bury them more deeply. It’s not worth the bother of finding things. So we say: we can’t find them. And my boss arranges for a report to be sent out to customers and an insurance claim to be made. Job done.

Today, though, it’s my birthday, so I’m let out an hour early. I go towards the train station past the fields where new buildings will be constructed. I think to myself: how is that you haven’t dissolved into the air? By what force are you held together – what counter-force binds you to yourself in the midst of this absurdity? Is it possible to die of absurdity? Or would you simply evaporate into the air? Or is it possible that this is already the afterlife, that the disaster has happened and this is a form of punishment? You are a banal Prometheus having his insides pecked out every day. And this industrial estate (but where is the industry? It’s all multinational computer firms …) is a benign hell. But it is also a dream.

Capitalism turns in its sleep. When it wakes up, the whole world will vanish.

The M.D.

One lunchtime you see the Managing Director, who jogs every lunchtime. He had a heart attack and has become a jogger. Round the building he goes. I think to myself: he is more real than any of us. He may be a slim, small man, but he is also a planet and we all revolve around him. If we lose our jobs we will be spun off into the outer darkness and torn apart. He’s the one who keeps us safely in our orbits. The M.D.: a small man, but he has a whole suite of rooms with a special entrance of his own from the main foyer. He has a toilet in there. Once I was able to use it, I can’t remember why. But I thought: well, this is it, here I am in the M.D.’s suite, the engine room. It all happens here.

The M.D. is the minor deity who holds our world together. We should be grateful to him. We owe our existences to him. He is like Descartes’s God who sustains each of us in our existence. He is a benign father and we should break off our work now and again to sing his praises. In the end, none of us exist, we are finite substances and he alone is infinite: infinite substance. He alone is real and here you are in his personal toilet.

Then there are the senior managers who surround him. Important women, sleek and well-groomed. Important men, less sleek, less well-groomed. Reasonable people. You can call them by their first name. You can aspire to be like them: they are models, exemplars. The thirty something graduate trainee in my department says: I went to university to make something of myself. He is in his sandwich year. He recommends I take myself to the training facilities. Work on yourself, he says. And he is right, I'm not real enough, none of us are, there's a great deal of work to be done.

We know we’re not real enough; there’s a long way to go. Our desire to identify ourselves is phantasmic. We want reality, identity, want to hold on to something so the everyday won’t blow us away. Because there is a recession on and there are never enough jobs. But who are they, the deities? If I went to the boardroom in his private suite of rooms, spoke to him, he would be calm, reasonable. He might have a son my age and recognize in me a version of his son. And what would I see? If I expected to see a god in shining armour, I would be disappointed and confused like K. in The Castle when he discovers Klamm is a banal man, that there was nothing to him. A fat man behind a desk. But what about the M.D.? A man who is just like me?

The fact he is just like me allows you to measure yourself according to the measure which accords great status. He is an ordinary man, it is true, but he is also a minor deity. He is quietly spoken, pleasant, and you can call him by his first name. He has an open door policy. You have a problem? Then go and see him. He is benign, mild; there he is, he'll talk to you. He is just like me, born from the streaming body of Capital, coalesced from the everyday by working on himself (by allowing Capital to work on him ...) Beyond him, there is Capital. Capital is The Castle. But as K. discovers, it is also a motley collection of huts. Just as this industrial estate is a collection of prefabricated buildings ...

The Last Days

The question you ask yourself one morning as you are driven to Slough to work as a telemarketer: Am I dead or am I alive? Or is that everyone is alive and I am dead? Masochism: your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. So long as you are alive these are the Last Days.

And when you disappear? History will complete itself, the horizon will fall away and this civilisation will spread across the earth and across the skies. You are a point of absolute negativity. Everyone else is present to themselves and the day, replete. They admit light into their deepest recesses, they have no secret from the day. And each of them, the telemarketers, maintains an impressive balance of the inner and outer, like those peculiar creatures that live in the sea’s depths: they appear delicate, but their strength is such that they do not collapse under the immense pressure of miles of water.

And you? You have collapsed as a star collapses upon itself. Now you are the dark point which will draw everything into itself. The singularity across whose event horizon the world must crawl. Or is this delusion itself – some compensating ideology, some imaginary revenge on a world which has turned its face from you?

God, said Simone Weil, following Isaac Luria, has departed. As he left, the universe opened in his wake. We were born because of his absence and our lives are evidence of our abandonment. You are being driven through Slough. This is the anti-town, the seventh circle of Hell (Bracknell is the eighth circle). You ask yourself: is it that death is everywhere and only I am alive? But then you know that you are hardly alive and this is not life. You know you are the exception: it was your curse to have lifted yourself from this great living. Somehow you broke from it. Somehow it abandoned itself in you.

You are like the living wound across the everyday. Your immense boredom, your death-in-life is the wound wherein the everyday comes to know and despise itself. Now the everyday will seek revenge because it did not want to be known and to know itself. Your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. But you are Gracchus, the one who cannot die which means so long as you exist the world cannot bring itself to an end.

The Last Days: today, tomorrow, and all the days to come. You are Sisyphus, grinding everything into meaninglessness. It is easy to make unmeaning of meaning, says the phenomenologist, but the task is to make meaning of meaning. Yes, but your presence in the world turns everything into unmeaning, which is why the everyday will not tolerate your presence. Now it must set out to crush you and to crush itself in you. But how can it crush the one which allowed it to become self-aware?

You ask yourself: am I dead or am I alive? The answer comes: you are the wound which prevents dying from finding death. You are Parisfal’s wound. Today, like tomorrow and every day to come, you are telemarketing. 'Hello, I'm calling on behalf of Hewlett Packard ...'

Office Time

Escape from unemployment, from the corrosive force of the everyday. You are brought into the office, a temp among other temps; there’s work to be done, no one is quite sure what – sit there, await instructions. You wait, minutes pass, then an hour, two hours. You take out your book; you read - but this is objectionable. Soon the woman from the temping agency, doing the rounds, comes to tell you off: think what an impression this makes, she says. You say: but there’s nothing to do. She says: they wouldn’t employ you if there was nothing to do.

So you play on the computer instead – there’s Solitaire, but this was before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, so in the end the screen is without depth. You change the background to Windows. You reset the defaults. You can offer to collect tea and coffee for everyone, that’s easy enough, off you go carrying the little plastic cup holder and returning with six cups. Or you can listen to conversations. Hot air, business talk. ‘Touching base’; ‘blue sky thinking’; ‘x [name of a customer] is screaming for y [name of a product or service]’. It is easy to make nonsense of sense, but how do you make sense of sense?, asks a phenomenologist. But the office is the place where sense frays, where it is undone and torn apart.

Gradually, you discover there are other temps; over the next few days, you find out they are unemployed actors, who occasionally have bit parts on The Bill. Sometimes you’ll work alongside them, it’s a laugh, work becomes a great parody. How does anything get done here?, you ask yourself, but you know you are in a backwater, you are working in admin and the sales team are downstairs.

Sales: that’s where it’s happening. Go downstairs, wonder down, drink coffee at their machine, use their kitchen. Yes, it’s happening, there’s excitement in the air. They seem more virile than the rest of us. More self-assured. For myself, as I get to know my job, I feel apologetic. It involves badgering engineers to fill out this form or that, to observe procedure. It is an interruption of work, not work. You take their time, get in the way. You’re apologetic, they’re polite, but you’re the obstacle.

Outside the office there is a little garden in the concrete. A fishpond. There are fields where buildings for hire have not yet been constructed; it’s peaceful. Then there’s the great carpark, car after car. You can’t drive. Driving is impossible. These vast company cars remain mysterious. Above all this, the sky, serene, indifferent. You are irrelevant here, there’s no reason why you should be here rather than anywhere else. In the end, they let you go because you aren’t filling in enough of the spreadsheets.

Next week, where will you be? The same company? Another one? This is Bracknell, there are infinite number of companies, all interchangeable. You are perfectly interchangeable. There are always more of you, a great army of temporary workers. And really, you have little to offer. You wander through the corridors, from coffee machine to coffee machine. The absurdity of non-work. For what do you hope? To be noticed as a non-worker among the workers? To be told off? Sacked?

They will let you go, it’s clear enough. Today or tomorrow, or next week or the week after that. Meanwhile, office time, the great expanse of minutes and office life – you receive phonecalls all day asking for ‘Sinjun’. He’s not here, you say. There’s no one of that name here. You are sitting next to St. John, but you didn’t know how his name was pronounced.

Then, for dinner, you seek to let yourself out into the air. You think to yourself: I’d like some air. You push the doors and – alarms – the whole canteen turns to look. No matter. You are invisible, interchangeable. No one says a word. To be told off would mean you would be thought worthy of developing, educating. But you are not quite in their world, any of them. There are lots of you, like ghosts. You drift around the building and sometimes come into contact.

But you are less real than the real workers. Descartes was right: there are degrees of reality, and you, as a temp, are less real than the rest. Listen to them talk, the real workers; plans for the weekend, for Friday and Saturday nights. All of them, around you, are planning a trip out. They go off to the pub on the Friday, leaving you there to man the phones. Then the big boss comes across to address the workers, announcing the rise and fall in the share-price. It comes over the intercom: a rise. Everyone around you is happy. They’ve made a little more money. A rise …

I like it when the lads from the warehouse come up to complain about something or other. They are dressed in denim, they’re out of place. They’re more real than the office workers, and they know it. They get angry – they’re not being given enough time, they say. You have to treat them with respect; the office workers are worried. Great dramas ensue. Quarrels. Then they all calm down. Quarrel over.

One day you are promised money for some piecework and go unpaid. You tell the other temps. This is social activism. They don’t like the sound of it. You tell them your wage, they tell you theirs. They’re being paid less than you. So you stage a sit in. You are not going to leave, you and a co-worker, until you’ve been paid. The middle manager talks to us in his office. We threaten to take him to court. No dice. He’s stubborn, we’re up against it, we haven’t got a chance. We give up the sit in, leave the building. A warm afternoon … you find yourself back in the everyday, it’s over, back to the dole …

Gracchus

Roquentin, from Nausea:

I am bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of.

It’s true, I miss boredom, I’m no longer bored, I have too much to do, there’s always work and never the expanse between, that fog which billows up from the middle and obscures everything. Boredom: recall many years ago the madness of reading this and that preparing for an interview in the daytime. Sunlight through the window. Dust motes. It is the afternoon, the most frightening time, the time of dispersal. Pine trees over the houses opposite. The blue sky, too vast. Options: cycle to town. Catch the train from town to another town. Or stay here and drown in the afternoon. You are reading Kierkegaard; you take extensive notes.

Meanwhile, there is the day. You are – how old – twenty-three, twenty-four, already too old to endure the afternoon. You feel guilt: you’re not working. You’ve no money, and you’re not working. You know the great opportunity is close, that if you can get funding, everything will change. Everything depends on the interview. In the meantime, there is the day, the madness of the day. And there is a kind of boredom in which the day says to you: I am all there is. I am all there can be. That morning you had a dream. A cycle ride to Bracknell, only this is an unreal town, and nothing like Bracknell. You go to a library that is nothing like the library in Bracknell. Then you realise: this unreal town is the heart of all towns. It is every town and every suburb in the world. What does it matter where you are?

The dream fades and you wake up. Where were you? Where had you been. Days pass. You cycle to the woods. You know the lake is there ... a break in the trees ... promise of a vista. The lake. Stones to skim across the water. Somehow, you’ve been left behind. Boredom has caught you; you are enmeshed. As you imagine the weeds in the water would enmesh you.

The madness of the day: really you should disappear. Have the sense to disappear. Aberrant, out of time, you are up against the future, right up against it. Before, at the age of nineteen or twenty, there was all the time in the world – the future as the sky was then: distant, a blue screen upon which you could project many futures. But now: it is too close, unbearable close (that is what Bergman said once of the Mediterranean sky. I saw that sky once and had to agree).

The sky is too close and the future is right by you. The future says: what will you do? You have no words to reply. Because you understand the future’s question is the corrosion of your present. That it is coming apart, fraying. Like the celluloid that burns in Bergman’s Persona. What alibi do you have? What excuse can you give for your life? You have been pushed up against a white light. It is the day itself which interrogates you. The whole sky interrogates you. Only there is no answer to the day. The question turns. The question turns in the instant like a whirlwind. The question is boredom, a kind of acidic boredom which rots you from inside.

Yours is the condition of Gracchus, the man who could not die. The one who was dead-alive, alive in his death. You say to yourself: I am dead. Or: I have died. Or: everything is dead and only I am alive. Or: it is AD 51 and everything else that has happened is a lie.

A Bracknell of the Mind

The fear: nothing is going to happen. Recall Philip K. Dick’s last trilogy and his idea that this is the still the age of the Roman Empire. It is still AD 51. Still the age in which Christians are persecuted. Everything that has happened since is illusion. My fear: there has only ever been the time of Bracknell, that ghastly new town close to where I grew up (Note: a new town is one of the purpose built concrete monstrosities from the 1960s).

There will only ever be the time of Bracknell, spreading to every corner of the world. And everyone will live everyone else’s life, and nothing will have happened. Bracknell: perpetually still eye of the hurricane which is spread across the globe: still centre of that great movement of suburbanisation, the takeover of countryside and village, of city and public space, the spread of the out-of-town retail park and the global firm, for they are all there: Microsoft, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, great frightening names like those of Roman Emperors whom Philip K. Dick says will rule us from now until the end of time.

Recall Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man where your surname is given to you by the corporation for which you work. But even the time of the great corporation is ending, for they are broken up into spin-off companies and subcontractors. Even these companies will be destroyed by the corrosive force of the everyday, the great call to dispersal. Who do you work for? A subsiduary of X, a subcontractor of Y. Who do you work for? I don't know. Who are you? I don't know.

It is not the time of The Roman Empire, but a kind of Dark Ages – a time of the breakup, the dispersal. Only this is the age of Light – a half-bright, evenly dispersed light, which shines upon the workers driving to work and the trains carrying children to school. An invisible light, a light which dissimulates itself so that everything else can appear.

Who is aware of it, this light? Only the part-time worker, the contractor who goes home early at three o’clock or, who, because she has no friends among her colleagues, looks out of the vast windows across to the field out of which a new retail village has begun to appear. Or to the unemployed, only a few of them now, catching the infrequent buses to town. Or to that great army of 50- and 60 year olds laid off too young. But I dream, too, of the crises of company men and women, of those nervous breakdowns and depressions which snatch from the working world. Now they are exposed to the same even light, to the menace of an everyday anonymity which reduces everything to itself. What will they do all day? They take their medication and then ... a vast expanse of hours. It comforts me, the idea that the everyday, like fate, awaits us all. That we will all be reduced to uniformity below the bland white sky.

Picture me at 19, denizen of Bracknell, still hopeful, still capable of hope. Bracknell was spreading. I bought a map of the town and its surroundings, and cycled to every green patch I could find on the map. I passed through golf-courses and school playfields, through obscure parks and plantations of pine trees. I came to the edge of a firing range. What did I discover? There was only Bracknell, and Bracknell was everywhere.

But I was still capable of meeting the indeterminateness of the day with the indeterminateness of my future. I had the bravery of youth, I cycled through the open fields, empty spaces held no fear for me because I did not know yet what I was. The everyday said: you are as strong as I am. And then it said: but I am waiting for you.

More than ten years later, at the end of my contract at one university or another, I found myself in the same spaces, on the same bicycle. I fought the everyday as it rained great blows upon me. I gave myself a task: write the book, and a habit: follow a strict working day. But the everyday was waiting for me when I dropped below the level of my work. When tired, bored or melancholy I felt its laughter inside me. Until its laughter was the form of my pain.

It was then I knew for certain that there is only Bracknell, and Bracknell is the whole world. In the end, Bracknell is everywhere, it makes everywhere nowhere. Utopia: place without place; not this or that place but everyplace. And Bracknell, too, is everywhen. Who now can have a sense of what it was like to live in another age? Think of Guy Debord’s Baroque, which he invokes here and there in his most famous books. By what strength was he capable of punching a hole through our consensus reality? How did he leap out of our time? Futile effort. Besides, what can it mean to us who read him? The Baroque? It is as far away as the moon. Only the moon will become another suburb and so too will the Baroque. Everyplace and everytime: Bracknell is all there is and first of all there was Bracknell.

The Infinite Wearing Away

Stagnant lives, bored, caught in the great non-event of the everyday, that place where no one speaks and no one listens. The everyday! Politicians are scared by it. That’s why they have focus groups and phone surveys. But you will never plumb the depths of the everyday, I say to myself. Because it has no depths. It is superficiality, nullity, the eternal nullity politics cannot penetrate.

The politician shaking hands with ordinary folks, the Prince who starts foundations for the unemployed and hopeless: it is a mockery. You will never understand, you busy politicians, how the everyday revolves like a great hurricane, slowly absorbing into itself all meaningful action. You are too busy to be engulfed, to understand that great ennui so beautifully captured by Shane Meadows in 247 which stops you from trying anymore. I won’t fill in that application form, or that claim for benefit. I won’t come in to sign on. And soon, I will never leave the house at all. I will stay in, now and forever.

It happened to a schoolfriend … we visited our friends to see what had become of them, they were inside, living with their parents, watching Eastenders. A life inside. There was nothing of them left. Did they recognise us, their old friends? We weren’t sure. It was disturbing. Something had devoured them from the inside, our old friends. It took years to understand that it was the everyday that had eroded them. That infinite wearing away.

Some, it is true, found jobs and lived together. They passed the time (there was always too much time) with the help of marijuana. It helped them endure the evenings and weekends. That and consumer durables – the video recorder and the television, and later, when they’d made some money, the DVD player and the widescreen TV.

All this in a town where there was work – plentiful work, and some of it well paid for what it was. But a town infested with the everyday, in which only the money-makers existed in their big houses. Whose sons and daughters, we knew, would exist as they did.

Imagine our delight when those sons and daughters tumbled to our level! When they had crashed through drug abuse or depression to the level of the everyday! When they were cast out of their homes because they were touched by madness! We loved that madness – we marvelled to hear when one rich individual or another had joined the travellers.

We, however, we protected from it. We were steeled to the everyday. We understood it at its own level. Yes, it was nullity itself, it was the great whirlwind which turned inside us. It was the madness of the day which lasted forever, of one day after another in weeks which were mini-eternities. Belle and Sebastian sing about it: ‘A Summer Wasting’. And there are the Smiths too, of course: ‘Still Ill’.

But we paced ourselves. We were like the characters in 247: there were slow pursuits to undertake, analogous to fishing, which were counterforces to the infinite wearing away. We knew nothing happened in the everyday; that there was no ‘subject’ to its experience. But we knew, too, that there were ways of passing the time without allowing ourselves to be spun in all directions, spun apart and scattered across the world.

Always, though, that dispersal. Friendships ended for no particular reason. One person moved away, then another. Until only you were left, reading the papers in the town library, cycling to Tescos in the afternoon for bargain sushi. True, you saw others like you, other ghosts. But they worried you: did you want to spend time with those who mirrored you own dissolution? Did you want to see what you might become? Because there are casualties of the everyday: the mad, the depressed. What is Prozac but a cure for the infinite wearing away? No: you had to be careful.

One solution was television, which was always at a safe distance from the everyday. You became a spectator, especially with daytime television. Watch Oprah or Trisha, The Wright Stuff or This Morning: these are programmes for those who want to brace themselves against the centripedal force of the great whirlwind.

For myself, television has always been a great bulwark against formless time. Especially News 24, when I had it: there on the screen the time was always displayed. One minute, another, and then a news update after fifteen minutes. Beautiful! Calibrated time!

Heidegger, by the way, is wrong to claim that everydayness is characterised by the time of now-points. He didn’t know unemployment, for then he would know that it is infinite time, the instant which doesn’t pass which is the temporality of the everyday. The nonsense of the distinction between authentic and inauthentic life!

The great achievement is not to seize one’s project as one’s own, but to live time in a series of now-points. To hold onto time. To escape the infinite wearing away which turns the instant into an eternity. For nothing happens in the everyday – no event completes itself, which means there are no events.

For Lefebvre, it is still possible to speak of the everyday as a utopia, as an idea. He still has faith in the people of the streets, of those who gather in the places between other places, who find common cause in the demonstration. Ah, but did he know the poison of television? Did he know the extent to which it would withdraw us from the streets? No one speaks and no one listens.

As I type, Saturday morning television plays in my flat. It is true, I have switched sides, I have a job, this is a miracle, and barely experience the great scattering and dispersal, the infinite wearing away. When the revolution erupts from the street, I saw to myself, put me up against the world. For I am on the enemy’s side.

Proof: I visited, a few years ago, some friends who never found a foothold in the world of work. Who was adrift. We went out, there was trouble at the nightclub, a hospital visit. I should have phoned, visited, but I never did. Much later, an accusatory phonecall: he had been beaten up, he said, he was still scarred, and where had I been? Why hadn’t I phoned? It was my idea to go to the club where the squaddies went! We spoke until I thought: I need to escape him. He said: I’ll come and visit; I thought: no way. So it was that I never again sought the open spaces of the everyday from which, I dream idly, pathetically, derisorily, the revolution will come.

Stagnant Lives

The everyday … between jobs, and sometimes with no hope of ever getting a job at all, unemployed, perhaps unemployable, or finding employment only in those marginal jobs with no security and which seem to accomplish very little at all (data entry, telemarketing …) I have felt the great force of what Lefebvre calls the everyday.

1992-4: the recession hits the South, where I used to live. No jobs, no temporary jobs, just aimless drift, signing on fortnightly, applying for this training scheme or that. Cycling from home to town, no one around, friends long since moved away, here I was back in the home town I left, knowing no one. An invisible existence. Fortunately there was the university library, a long cycle ride away …

1998-9: trying to write, to finish this or that in order to have any kind of ‘career’ such as they call it … journal rejections (any number of these. W. envies my record), book proposal rejections, nothing published, living in an attic room freezing in the winter and baking in the summer, listening to Smog and Low, the absolute correlates to the mood. Never depression or defeat, just steady melancholy and steady determination. I thought to myself: for all this, your life has a shape, you are struggling for something …

Then 2000-2001, the same, punctuated by a few hours teaching here and there … once I struck gold in teaching Libyans to speak English, it was bliss. Then I taught Russians, happiness itself, we would read Tsvetayeva (they would read her to me) and they would speak of Pushkin. Then the Spaniards – pure delight – I loved these Europeans. All the while the City Council in a mix up over benefits, meaning no money, vast delays, endless queues at the Town Hall.

Through all of this (not to mention years of study): the vast presence of the everyday. It is true, it is only experienceable when you have no specific hope for the future. When you find strange allies in the workplace, readers of Genet and Burroughs, ufologists and part-time artists, depressives and trouble-makers whose magnificent sarcasm would transform mundane office tasks. Pure laughter.

But I always thought to myself: we barely exist. No one notices us, disposable labour, appearing at one end of the warehouse for a week, two weeks, then disappearing and reappearing somewhere else. No one knew us, we hardly knew one another. None of us had any money, no means of transport, we lived in the suburbs where everywhere seemed infinitely far from anything else.

Stagnant days, stagnant lives which did not merge with the great current of life which we knew was flowing somewhere. For there was money, great amounts of money somewhere … great houses and expensive cars. The virile workers, the office managers, full time employees of incredible power. Certain in themselves.

Recall Levinas’s word: embourgeoisment. Is that what we wanted? We felt equivocal. On the one hand: power, money, transport … on the other: we knew it wasn’t for us. That we were dispersed, and would disperse further, barely appearing, near invisible, scattered across the vast plain of the everyday.

I knew that the suburban world I inhabited would spread everywhere and consume the world. There would be nothing else. One day: there would be the workers, the powerful drivers of company cars whom we would scrutinise for depression and suicide attempts (bliss to hear of a nervous breakdown, of a depressive collapse: it fascinated us, for what did they, the full-time workers have to be miserable about: perhaps their lives were not as graced as they seemed) and then the others, casual workers, workers whose work counted for nothing.

On the one side, the great current of life, on the other stagnant waters, an inexhaustible supply of half-labour … There were government initatives, it is true, to get us back to work, or at least into employment, what no one understands is the amount of people on sickness benefit, who have exited before they began, young and old, capable and incapable. That’s where they go (it tempted me once): a life of sickness …

But now I have been allowed to switch sides which means I have no right to speak of the everyday. I barely experience boredom, my old friend, that mood which allows the everyday to become manifest. Nor frustration – the difficulty, say, of affording to travel to an interview, the labour of applying for this or that job.

Embourgoisment: I am one of them, a worker whose work contributes to the whole. In short, an enemy.

Once, between you and I, I delighted in wrecking what I thought as a bourgeois household: champagne socialists, a big house in the UK, a holiday home in the Canary Islands, I was happiest when I had caused absolute misery and watched, fascinated, as the husband had something like a nervous breakdown. All because of me: or so I thought. In the end, this is probably sheer illusion, self-flattery.

I wanted power – wanted to achieve something which refused to disappear from the world. I achieved it, or so I thought. A breakdown (his). Real misery (his - and he was a successful man). I was exultant. This was a long time ago, and unthinkable now: I would never do it. But it will be done to me, and rightly so. For nothing is more disgusting that embourgoisment, or at least so I tell myself today, miserable hypocrite that I have become ...

Insomnia

Slightly ill, a low fever, as it should be, a little resistance, it helps work. Vague noise from next door, again as it should be, never get too comfortable, never rest. For a long time there was, almost every night, the noise of stomping and music and laughter all through the night. My neighbour lived on American time; he did American business; he entertained American clients; when he moved out, his son moved in who worked in nightclubs in town and came back with his friends and partied till dawn.

This was months ago; but I couldn’t write about it then. I knew what I wanted to say: those nights without sleep reminded me of what became of Husserl’s reduction first in Levinas (not Heidegger’s anxiety, but physical pain, insomnia, awareness that there was no escape). No escape. I said to myself: Sleep with earplugs. Spread the mat, the sheets, the duvet on the floor of the lounge, sleep there; the bedroom ceiling is too thin. And if that fails, the bathroom floor. Yet conscious - but is this the word? better: aware, with a kind of impersonal awareness, of the source of every possible noise. No longer was this a flat, but the burrow of Kafka’s story, and what I feared was the Outside …

Genet rented rooms near the station so that he felt he could make a quick getaway. I imagine, rather fancifully, that it is a kind insomnia which propels the great gust of his work. Insomnia? He experienced that unravelling which asked of him to be nothing at all, but then to be everything - to relinquish himself but then to find in his place the power, the non-power to allow his characters to pass through him very quickly. Until he was the site of an immense streaming. Why, then did he abandon first the novel and then the theatre? To lose himself again; to disappear.

Ah, more on Genet another day. Meanwhile, a few days off; I’m travelling ...

Ellipses

Woolf: ‘I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’.

Completion, incompletion. To write sentences trailing off in three little dots to open them in the direction of that future that will allow their meaning to become indefinite, to shimmer. So many of Bataille’s sentences end in this way as they reach for the reader who would pass them on. This is why, he said, he wrote in friendship for his unknown readers.

I learn from a biography that this is what Godard called the viewers of his films. Friendship …: why this word, today? It is a small word, a pathetic one. To want friends – and not an audience. Because the films gather each of us. A film like In Praise of Love breaks across each of us anew. Is reborn for each of us. Why, in the press kit to this film, did they supply a summary of the plot? I barely knew what it was about, it took several viewings, each one pleasurable. And why do I know? Because I read a summary somewhere on the internet, this was my impatience, my laziness.

How many times have I watched the opening scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The field. The man who crosses the field; the woman – the mother – who sits waiting on the fence. For what? For her husband? He is absent; meanwhile, her children slumber. Then – a change – the children are up, there’s a fire in a neighbouring barn. We watch it burn in the rain. We hear a poem, very beautiful. And then: the ringing of the phone. Then another scene, a man’s voice on the phone as the camera tracks round his flat. We see on the wall a poster of Andrei Rublev. We recognise the three angels of the icon and think: this is a story about Tarkovsky. Perhaps, perhaps. But he gives the film to us, Tarkovsky. It trails off in our direction like a sentence which ends not with a full stop but with ellipses …

Do you have complete emotions about the present, or do you have to wait to find them anew in conversation, in recollection, in writing? I never find completion, only a kind of infinite fall, a trailing into an open future. Somewhere, Tarkovsky writes of the day: what happened?, he asks. What emerged? Nothing … a few images stay with you; this was a day like any other; the days, similar, do not fall one upon the other like cards in a pack, but are superimposed, ghosts projected upon ghosts. A routine: I return home in the evening, as it grows dark; I watch the seven o’clock news, I eat; I make a phonecall. Days accrete, but nothing is complete, nothing completes itself. The future, what of the future? Days like these, neither happy nor unhappy. Days through which as through a window something can be seen. But what? Vagueness, formlessness …

None of these emotions can complete itself. By writing, nothing comes to completion. This is a writing which opens the sentence ...

Looking for what? Friendship? But with what? The unknown, the future.

Incapacity

Relief after two days when too much was possible to experience the old incapacity, that inability to begin, vagueness, a day spent doing this and that without focus. When the future is not a distant horizon, but is never farther than this or that obstacle, when it is a matter of negotiation of what is here and now.

Incapacity: really, there is an immense amount to do, too much, it’s overwhelming. But if there were nothing to occupy you, only the expanse of time, an open future which asked continually: what will you do? you would experience much more acutely that vertiginous desire to realise a Great Work, to fill your days with the Great Project that would make the future less indeterminate, less frightening.

Today, there is only the dissipation of projects, minutae, a number of matters which require my attention. Do you remember that scene in Pather Panchali when the impoverished Brahmin tears up the pages of his studies when his daughter died? Dream: tearing all the pages up, throwing it all away, discovering something of much greater importance. And do you remember the scene in Alien Resurrection with the alien-human hybrid, up against the wall of the spaceship, its innards sucked out and dispersed into space? That is a figure for the horrible/joyful experience of the pure future, of the broken horizon, the object of fear and desire ...

End of the Season

Summer nearly over, R.M. here for a last weekend before she starts her job in the city; term starts next week. What happened this summer? 5 84 hour weeks in the office – not to work (R.M. worked, who was here all along) but to drift, reading this and that, writing little, wandering out into town to find snacks. What happened? Deleuze and Guattari, a paper on money and time, a half-written essay on Heraclitus, little work on the new book (untouched since June ...) Vague summer illnesses, incapacities (but these are not unpleasant) ...

The perpetual struggle: to wrest a day of work from the fog. A day of work – one hour of writing takes five hours of surfing and wandering, of reading newspapers and grazing. Temptation to drink coffee – but you’ll pay tomorrow when you are more tired still, with dark rings under the eyes. Or to drink – but there are too many hours between now and bedtime to lose in the haze.

Still stranded before the tasks ahead, you make excuses: too much administration. Secretly, you find it liberating; it allows you to say to yourself after another unproductive day: I've done something. Filled out some forms. Filed a report. Prepared a document in officalese ...

What to do when the administration is done and what is called 'research' is impossible? Post. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete and a review and a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that ...

Now and again, simple contentedness when nothing seems impossible: it is a state which is dangerous because what is born or created is not wrenched from what resists such birth or creation. Never a sense that to make something, to write a line, is to have lost something, to have missed exactly what called for writing. In contentment, everything is possible, especially writing. Vile loquacity. No longer is your misery implicated in the misery of the world. Nor that bitter laughter which arises from a sense of enormous folly.

Today, there is nothing to write, nothing to say. Summer looms behind me. And the future: the plunge towards Christmas, always eventful, sometimes joyful: life, life. In the meantime, the simple desire to mark this day by posting here. To leave a mark whereby I might retrace the path back to the expanse of these weeks in the office with R.M. working alone and together (she at her desk, I at mine). Back through the door to summer ...

Kerans, protagonist of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, scrawls on the wall of a ruined building in the sunken London through which he passes on his way South: TIME ZONE. Where is travelling? Back to that expanse of time unmarked by minutes. To the great past. But I am travelling back North to the measured time of tasks and projects ...

Great Problems

A forlorn W. on the end of the phone today. Should I report what he said? It seems an indiscretion. I’ll say nothing, other than I was surprised at his strange modesty after the conference. Who can help but feel a failure? Ah, but I expect he thinks I luxuriate in it. True enough, I admitted it, and said: ‘I know my problem. I can’t begin anything’; nothing begins here. ‘Well that can be your problem then’, said W.

We had just been talking of those who had been seized by a Great Problem and how much better at philosophy they were than us. I have no problem with this. W. suspects it’s because I think I have a Great Problem. ‘What, the inability to begin?’ I say. He detects a pride in my failure. He thinks I write of my failure far too much. ‘Spurious is just about what a failure you are’, he says. Granted … And then he said, the previous day, that he liked the posts on buffoonery. ‘That’s my concept’, I said. ‘Michel Serres has written a whole book on it’, he said.

Last Days

I say to R.M.: ‘we’ll remember this summer’. Weeks when we had the office and the campus to ourselves. When we took up tennis, inspired by Sharapova. When we worked night and day. When we walked in the Lakes and North Yorkshire, and visited festivals and conferences. Weeks of discounted salads at Boots. Of snacks in the office. Of foccacia and guacamole. Of rice crackers and salsa. Of Ikea furniture and potted shrubs for the yard.

Soon R.M. leaves permanently for a life faraway, outside academia (though she hasn’t finished her dissertation quite yet) and for me the new academic year begins, the descent into winter and short days, the audit and the pass-the-beanbag learn-how-to-teach course. Summer is ending and it is as though a great epoch has come to a close. Or that everything which came to an end in my life ends once again as the door into summer closes behind me.

When I was twenty, I told R.M. as we crossed the field on the way back to my flat, I loved the intervals between work, time reading long novels or wandering streets, times of journeying (leaving and departing) – time to dream because my life had not found its course. And now? The channel has been cut and the river moves swiftly. There is no time, and time between is a haunted time, no longer open, drifting air, but a frightening expanse. The correspondences I used to keep by letter are ending, or have come to an end. Is there time? No time for that great giving of time to which reading and writing belong. There is only work-time, only today and tomorrow.

A confession: last night I retrieved an old ‘literary’ manuscript from its hiding place, looking through it.... I’ve hidden it again. It dreams for me of the gift of a time without minutes, of the ocean into which the river will run and the stars which will flash across its dark surface.

Weariness

R.M. and I worked alongside one another all summer; she is spending a week tying her life up elsewhere (finishing her Ph.D.) and will be back soon (but then she will go again, and for much longer this time). Meanwhile, I am alone in the office as it comes to the end of the long summer teaching break. And alone, no longer bringing us splendid lunches to eat, no longer playing tennis after work and arriving back at the flat late (too late, it always seemed to me), my time is unstructured, I lose all grip on my projects, I'm overwhelmed by work ...

Why am I entrusted with so much bureaucracy? It is unreal to me, or I am too unreal for bureaucracy…. But there’s task after task, all leading up to the quality audit. I’m hopelessly behind, as always. And there’s the project of the new book and a paper which has to be done by October 1st, and then a review article … everything written up to the wire, always half-realised, semi-botched, full of typos and poor grammar.

And the flat? Bare-walled, awaiting lining paper and wallpaper. Slugs die on the repellent at the back door … the shower needs an element and there are holes where the skirting board should be. Damp rises up from the darkness under the house. Ants find their way across the floors.

I read Bataille in the gym – what a contradiction! and feel, as usual, a nostalgia for a life I’ve never led. Bataille sleeps on Balthus’s floor during the war … Bataille reads aloud from Inner Experience in his lover’s flat. Bataille cycles in the fields during wartime. I attempted a kind of chronology of Bataille’s war five hundred posts ago.

How poor this writing compared to Guilty or On Nietzsche! I am one of those weak vessels who is smashed by the work of a great writer. I am so surprised such work exists I cannot muster my critical faculties. It all seems incredible to me that people still write in our world and regard it as important. I read an interview with Samuel Weber in which he speaks of French philosophers who will not let a day go past without going into the study. I still live from that great period when the translations of Bataille and Blanchot began to appear – Inner Experience, The Space of Literature …

Sometimes what I read and what I write seems to stream very far above me. As though what I read and wrote bore no relationship to my life as it is lived. At those times – and tonight is one of those times – a great power of unbelief seizes me. I reread my own book – painful experience! – I turn idly the pages of Bataille. It is always of Bataille that I think since he is the one who protests he is too weary for philosophy, or that philosophy makes him weary. He hasn’t the strength to develop a system of thought. He plunges, and he plunges as he writes, he plunges in a writing which falls away from him. And when you are only capable, like tonight, of writing of what you cannot write, of failing to let writing fall away, of clinging to writing, writing ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ …

New neighbours: lads, more lads, loud music, a roaring car. Gone the quiet old lady. I’ll have to sleep in the lounge for the noise, with earplugs handy (I went and bought a fresh set today). Weariness of a weariness which will not let relinquish myself and plunge into reading and writing …

Polished Books

Conversation with W., who, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, makes sure he is always reading something from outside his disciplinary expertise. A book on mathematics, on infinity, on economics ... This is admirable, and W. is certainly right to insist that this is the least that the authors of Anti-Oedipus would ask from us. But then I'm still sore that W. agreed with me that we ought to be content to write ragged books, to write quickly, on the hoof (his example was Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) and yet is still polishing his book, nearly a year after I submitted mine to the publisher.

Of course, W. was right: my book is a mess, a living afront. I now have my own copy and I'm flayed daily on the hooks of it's typographical errors. W.'s book, proofread by a colleague, is immaculate ...

Day 1,000,000

Weariness: no work today, nothing written, nothing accomplished. I read about Shostakovich whilst R.M. writes the introduction to her thesis.

R.M. is weary too. We are rather like the protagonists of Blanchot’s story ‘The Infinite Conversation'. Weary together, united by a common disarray.

I buy fried beancurd and dipping sauce from the Chinese grocery – R.M.’s favourite. R.M. tells me she feels like the heroine in a Rudyard Kipling story, since she has to go and fill our water bottles downstairs.

Meanwhile, no sign of distant W. on Instant Messenger. Where has he gone? The university is deserted, we are like the suvivors of a vast calamity.

A Shot in the Arm

When you read an author over a long period of time, thinking with that author, writing with her, perhaps your brain changes - or those connections in the brain which can be fixed in various patterns. Thus you become a Heideggerian or a Derridean, a Romanticist or an Americanist; you find yourself in a particular niche and are happy there. Nietzsche wrote many magnificent pages on the vileness of the scholar (see Schopenhauer as Educator in particular) which I do not need to cite here. Moreover, there would be a kind of sadness in doing so, for as Heidegger noted as early as 'The Age of the World Picture', the scholar is disappearing, to be replaced by the man or the woman of research. That is what I am, I suppose: spawn of the Research Assessment Exercise, writer of a pile of articles - that's what we have all become, we who once were scholars.

Still, there is no reason for nostalgia. My point (what was it?) is about those great changes which begin to occur when you encounter for the first time the great force of this thinker or that. I have written before about coming to what is called Continental Philosophy from Analytic philosophy and the difficulties that entailed. Studying for a doctorate in philosophy was initially for me a kind of joke: I couldn't believe anyone could take Bataille or Nietzsche seriously as philosophy - even as I was doing just that. It was Heidegger which opened everything up to me; I still remember summer 1996 and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. I think it was after I finished studying that I first read Derrida (1999?) It was Gasche's Tain of the Mirror which opened that world to me and I was happy enough, for a couple of years to read Derrida and the writers who surround him. And now? The summer of 2004 will be the year I began to read Deleuze and Guattari seriously. I know the connections in my brain are about to change, that I will need to engage with another mountain of texts for of course it's not just Deleuze you have to read, but Hume and Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz, Lucretius and the Stoics, Simondon and Tarde and countless others.

Weariness mixed with joy. A new world opens. No longer a default setting of Heideggerianism or Derrideanism - philosophical instincts need to be retrained. Reawaken not as a Deleuzian or even a Deleuzoguattarian but with their work opening inside you, opening the world to you and allowing you to receive it anew. It suddenly struck me, this desire to change a whole habit of thinking, as I read passages from Massumi's A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. All of a sudden I knew that there was something profoundly right about the passages on the self in the chapter entitled 'Habit'. I've had this book for nine years - why did it strike me with such force today? Because, I think, of the necessity of thinking through the notion of the outside in Blanchot. Of rethinking the history of philosophy through the relationship between the inside and the outside, if I can put it that simply. Of requiring a mobile ontology in order to express the notions which have seemed to force themselves upon me this year (even in these posts: the image of the child, the animal, the one who is set back in me who is the locus of experience, the larval self ...)

Perhaps we have, each of us, a secret autobiography, the story of our engagements and disengagements from particular writers and traditions. I have meant to write a post on my love affair with science fiction, which I read more or less exclusively until I went to university. That fell away as I read the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, and then that taste, too, began to disappear as I encountered, in my final year as an undergraduate, the writings of Pessoa and Beckett, Dagerman and Green, Compton-Burnett and Sarraute: these strange moderns, these mavericks who, only a couple of years earlier, seemed like deformed outgrowths of a great tradition. Alongside those writers, I read popular science and philosophers of science; a love of William Burroughs had supplanted a love for J.G. Ballard, just as a fascination with Thomas Pynchon's work had taken the place of those novels of Philip K. Dick I used to read. Burroughs and Pynchon mean nothing to me now.

What does this matter? I am not telling a story about growing up or the maturation of taste; I am just surprised that I've ended up reading and rereading Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski, Duras, Breton and that whole canon of French writers who are united in foregrounding a certain notion of 'experience'. Of course it's not by chance that these are the writers championed by Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze (there's a book in this, although not one I intend to write ...) nor indeed that the first three have a close relationship to Heidegger and phenomenology.

Please, this is not a personal confession. My secret history will resemble that of many others. I wonder, though, whether anything will come of this new sensibility in the English-speaking world. It is a way of thinking, writing and philosophising without any representation in the media. It is alien to our everyday vocabulary and the vocabulary of intellectuals. It sets us apart from old style scholars and new style researchers. Friends working in the Analytic tradition speak with great fury and loathing of Continental philosophy, scarcely differentiating one thinker from another. Yet at the same time, I wonder if there has ever been a time when so many people are reading philosophy, and not just in the university.

What does it matter? It's Deleuze and Guattari today and until the end of the summer ...

Day 19

Day 19? day 20? I've lost count. Still, after a day out rambling we are back in the office, ready to work.

R.M. in khaki looks rather like a lady explorer from the mid 20th century - an escapee, perhaps, from fascist Italy, or a biologist who lives in the jungle with a small troupe of chimpanzees - the kind of woman who would use the word 'unconscionable'.

Our lunch? Foccacia with garlic and rosemary, guacamole, coconut flavoured Greek yoghurt: an excellent combination. 'The kind of food', R.M. says, 'it's hard to get in the jungle'.

Day 15 1/2

Cuts to the new book. It's already 20,000 words too long! What does this mean? Another book, I think. A third, this time on writing, on the act of writing.

R.M. looks today as I imagine Daisy Buchanan of Fitzgerald's novel to look. She has just gone downstairs to fill a water bottle. We listen to a mixture of Brahms and Low. Meanwhile, outside, a perfect summer evening. And inside? Work, work ...

'Why do you feel the need to document the fall of days in this manner.' - 'Because of the fear of disappearing into the book before it is done. Of being too close or too far to the book. Too close: I lost between sentences and between words. Too far: the book is remote from me. A dead project. Someone else's task.' - '15 days? But what is 15 days?' - 'Days marked in the passage of the book. Undivided from the book.'

Day 15

R.M. and I tired after a superb lunch of foccacia and guacamole. Cultivating a ramshackle feel in the office, listening to Dylan's Basement Tapes. Crumbs everywhere. Should string up hammocks for an afternoon nap.

Day 14

Glory be! Low's boxset A Lifetime of Temporary Relief arrives from Amazon. I'm listening to a demo of I remember as I type (it's a change from Brahms, music of choice here in the office). It's a glorious day outside, but R.M. and I are on Day 14 of the Great Summer of Work. The task before me: writing something as good as the papers my co-panellists have written for an upcoming conference. Impossible, impossible ...

Day 11

Day 11 of the great period of work. A great deal written, but I'm running out of steam. I read James Knowlson's biography of Beckett in between bouts of work. Terribly moving scenes from the last period of Beckett's life - his last trip to Ussy-sur-Marne, the house fifty kilometers from Paris where he went to write, his attempt to finish Stirrings Still, his last trips across the bridge to buy groceries. How many lives I've lived, reading biographies!

Fascinating to learn of the 21-year-old Jerome Lindon, who, after buying into a French publishing house (Les Editions de Minuit, the Resistance press) and becoming its managing director, brought out books by Blanchot, Bataille and Klossowski, as recommeded to him by Jean Paulhan, then the chief secretary at Gallimard. Lindon published Beckett's Trilogy. Later still - and this is tremendously moving - he published a series of Documents and books on torture committed in Algeria by the French military. Some were immensely successful. Lindon went on to publish books which encouraged disobedience and desertion by French military personnel, and added his signature to the 'Manifesto of the 121'. Lindon was fined, and under the threat of imprisonment, but still he continued. Magnificent!

What else? In Knowlson's words, 'Beckett so often worked through friendship. In the course of his career, he wrote a number of dramatic pieces expressly for friends, and tried to write several more. And many of his social or cultural engagements in Pais around this date [1958 - LI] were undertaken to please his friends. He supported them by attending their concerts, performances, or exhibitions.'

One last detail (I'm not sure why this seems important):

One day while he was with the Maquis, his hair literally stood on end with horror as he watched his colleagues savagely clubbing a lamb to death[....] Josette Hayden could remember one occasion being with Beckett on the farm when the Audes discovered a rat and were about to kill it. Beckett rushed to intervene, picking the rat up and running across a field to let it run free into a ditch.

(I'm breaking the rule by reading a biography in the office - they're only permitted in the gym as light reading as I tread the elliptical trainer. But I didn't make it to the gym today. Morbid obesity awaits. They call me the 'salad man' at Boots, where I go to buy discounted food for R.M. and me in the late afternoon. I've just had a Moroccan salad and a tray of Sushi. R.M. gave me some money for snacks, so I bought grapes and peaches.

Day 11 of tennis, too. R.M. doesn't want to be mentioned on the blog anymore, but I will note, this one last time, that she looks today like a 20s beauty staring out from a black-and-white plate in an old book.)

The Doctor Came at Dawn

R. M. is recumbent once again on the ‘floor of dread’. I play her Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn. This doesn’t help.

I see a Darkness

Playing Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's song 'I see a Darkness' very loudly to R.M. in the messy office. No one here, summer evening, piles of paper and books everywhere. Does it get any better than this? 'Play it again', she says ...

Autocritique 2

‘What’s your excuse? What lies do you tell yourself to do what you do?’
‘I tell myself I teach; this is enough.’
‘And when you are not teaching?’
‘I tell myself it is a matter of work - that if I work everyday then something will happen.’
‘This is a cult of spontaneity, an endless excuse to avoid any real labour. Remember what Y. said last summer: “you don’t need to do this.” Somehow, you have swallowed the notion that nothing you can do is of any importance, that it is all ending anyway, that nothing matters except your weak pastiches of Blanchot and your feeble attempt to develop what you call communism, that old dog without teeth.’
‘I tell myself I want to search as the Surrealist searches: unsparingly, awake and asleep, at work and in leisure.’
‘Surrealism! It died a long time ago.’
‘It never began.’
‘It was finished long before you were born. You have none of their courage, their brilliance, worst of all, you work on your own. Where is your society of friends? Your café life?’
‘”The great Surrealism is yet to begin”’
‘Bataille?’
‘Yes. Writing in 1947. And Blanchot writes something similar in 1966.’
‘Foucault said it best in the same year: Breton opened a new category of experience. An extraordinary transformation. But what has this got to do with you?’
‘I too would like to join the real world and the dream.’
‘Idealism!’
‘The opposite of idealism. Except that is what I would like to show.’
‘So show me then. Make me laugh.’

Autocritique 1

‘What did you do this afternoon?’
‘Nothing, went to the gym, read a chunk of Laurie Wilson’s life of Giacometti – very exciting – and glanced through Badiou’s Infinite Thought (roll on Being and Event).’
‘What did you achieve?’
‘Nothing, I feel guilty, there’s no excuse except perhaps I drank too much coffee yesterday. A beautiful day, blue skies, no interruptions ...’
‘What do you think another could have done in your place?’
‘A great deal, it is true, and this is why I feel guilty. That, and this evening will be spent in a trip down to the Quayside ...’
‘You don’t push yourself, you make no attempt to read in French and in German; you haven’t managed to write here on the topics you promised you would write on (what is called popular culture, politics ...)’
‘True, all true ...’
‘You’re getting flabby, you look middle aged, there’s no progress in your work, you repeat yourself ad nauseum.’
‘True, true ...’
‘You have become complacent, content. These are the dangers of domesticity. The best thing that could happen to you would be to lose your job. And worst of all, you are content to divide your voice in two and to chastise yourself in public. This is pitiful.’
'True, too true ...'

Domestic Life

R. M. and I drank coffee yesterday afternoon under a murky sky. I said: I'll feel this tomorrow, and I did, but I now have a complete draft of a new first chapter (an earlier version, made of blogs, was binned). Sensitivity to caffeine means black rings around the eyes, exhaustion, a bleary head. Nothing for it but reading The Fall message board all day (current dramas: Ben leaves and rejoins ...). R. M. is anxious to hear stories of Sharapova, particularly as we were entertaining a mathematician and an ardent advocate of Schiller last night, and couldn't play tennis. 'I'm going to finish off a few blogs instead of working', I tell her. She is already at her desk, thinking about Benjamin and Schmitt and eschatology.

What does it mean when a weblog becomes domestic? Is it like those early albums by Paul McCartney? Or Van Morrison in Woodstock (Tupelo Honey), Bob Dylan with Sara (Self Portrait)? My favourite 'domestic' album: Ease on Down the Road, by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.

Zero Summer

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

Oh All to End

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

Errancy

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

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

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

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

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

Pragmatism

1. K. rings to say he saw my book in the office from which a well known journal is run. It’s ready to be reviewed … how awful. The proofs rot somewhere in a drawer in my office … it’s too unpleasant to be reminded how bad it is. Is? No: was. It died, it was never born…. Horrible fascination: looking through its pages as one would probe a deformed creature preserved in formaldehyde. Unfolding it, this malformed creature, this book of horrors…. And when it is reviewed? Unpleasant prospect … I will have to ask friends to review the book. And if a non-friend reads it?

I haven’t seen a copy of the book itself. I get six free copies. What will I sign it when I send it to my friends? ‘I’m sorry …’ or ‘I apologise in advance …’

To concern myself with the book in this way is absurd. I would say that I felt like Dostoevsky’s underground man, but that is not right. Too much laughter in me. ‘In’ me? Laughter from the outside which laughs at me from inside me. Happiness of a laughter in which every minor concern burns up (the concerns of a provincial academic, very lowly, bereft of ideas, follower of trends …)

2. Conversation with a colleague. He points out that what is terrifying about the powerful Americans around Bush is their pragmatism, their ability to facilitate the plan they held since the 1970s: to impose what they call ‘democracy’ upon the Middle East. This is, of course, a front for the strategic control of oil pipelines (to circumvent the rising demand in India and China). But even if it really is Iran’s turn next, there is another logic, an older one that even now unfolds in America’s great plan for the world.

The powerful in all spheres in the USA have their roots in the American military. Many of the most successful schools are military academies in all but name, and have a special connection with Harvard and Princeton. The powerful in the USA come, often, from Prussian families – from the state which saw an extraordinary militarization under Frederick I (have I got the history right … well, this is all second hand, anyway). And those Prussians saw themselves as new crusaders …

What do they care what the French say or do not say about their plans? Chirac, for the Americans, is only someone with a puny army …

Conversations with a man close to an advisor to the US military in Iraq. The Americans are psychotic, he says, torture, xenophobia, a mad rage focused upon everyone who is non-American. Everyone, even the British. Phantasm of US-style democracy. Until the world is only what reflects the USA back to itself. Doesn’t matter what colour you are – they are pragmatic … as long as you can do something, consume, manufacture, it’s enough. Perhaps the non-pragmatism of our old Europe will save us. Old Europe: the snobberies of Oxbridge say, the slowness of our civil service … we’ll become America’s museum, that new America which will have spread by then across the globe.

Buffoonery

There were two phrases I always wanted to use as a title for a blog. What was the second one? Ah, I’ve forgotten, but the first was something like, ‘all of the attitude and none of the ability’. A good epitaph for me, I think. A writer? But I’ve written nothing (nothing published, that is, and nothing publishable). A philosopher? But I’ve not an idea to call my own (only a vague buffoonery, my only ‘authentic’ property, which is to say my impropriety, an inability to take responsibility for myself as a ‘thinker’ (hilarious thought!))

Buffoonery – is that the word? I think of the singer of Modest Mouse and Arab Strap and a kind of self-division which wouldn’t allow them to contentedly assume the place of a ‘singer’ in a ‘band’. Self-division? No: a division which opens each to the outside, to what is outside. Outside what? The self – the relation to itself that the self ‘is’. Outside, then: the ‘impossible’ relation, the relation without term, which does not bind itself to an object.

Buffoonery: think of Bataille (the impossible was his word), of the fragmentary works which do not allow themselves to come to rest in a thesis. Bataille: the name of the author of the book in pieces, scarcely books – what then to call them? I always meant to write about the fragmentary, about the fragment in literature, but never got round to it. Do not think this would refer to the shattering of the obvious ‘form’ of the ‘continuous’ novel. There is a fragmentariness which is completely continuous, which has the form of continuity. What, then, does it mean to write of the fragmentary? The line a writing traces when it loses and does not find itself again. The line which reverberates as that, in language, which can never be said.

- ‘Vagueness upon vagueness. Why do you suppose a blog is the place to say anything at all? Why do you allow yourself the irresponsibility of writing without calling yourself to account? Why write here and not in an academic journal? Why satisfy yourself with a writing upon which no one can comment?’
- ‘This is the writing of a buffoon, of a buffoonery. A writing which separates itself from the to-be-able which would allow it to settle into the development of an argument.’
- ‘”The writing of a buffoonery!” What pretension! Next you’ll be writing of a ‘quasi-transcendental buffoonery’ …
- (laughter)

Irony: in the first book, Blanchot’s Communism, I trace the way writers like Mishima seek out some great physical activity in order to leave the demand of writing behind. I claim this is a kind of disavowal. But then isn’t the title, Blanchot’s Communism exactly a disavowal? A kind of shame in writing about a writer who writes about writing?

Frayed Time

Fear of the afternoon when you fall below the level of work, of the capacity to work. And then what? Drifting time, the moments lead nowhere, seconds swell into hours, hours into days. You focus on nothing in particular, you notice nothing, no changes. Impersonal attention. The blank, white sky. You can’t say: I can do nothing - you can’t find the words, or any words. Pass an afternoon like this and it is as though you have lived forever. As though the afternoon had happened a million times over and is now worn down and exhausted. Frayed time, time worn down. Space drawn thin over the void.

Empty Time

The time I dislike: the hours when I resolve to leave the office and come home. Hours between the work into which I can disappear. Walk through the field and houses. The wide sky. Round the corner and there is the flat. Is the loud neighbour in? It seems not. It will be quiet. Yes, the flat is dark and quiet. I’ve eaten already. What shall I do? Television. No Simpsons! Well, Friends will do. Then there is the difficult half hour to the News. By eight o’clock or so, I settle myself into some work. Now I am safe until midnight or so when my neighbour comes crashing in. CDs: I have just got Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica and Sophia’s People are Like Seasons. What shall I write about tonight? I have a list of what I need for the second book: criticism of Heidegger’s etymologism, automatic writing, the immediate, the etymology of aletheia in Plato’s Cratylus, Hegel’s reading of Heraclitus. Ah, but am I up to it?

Literary Responsibility?

The repugnant spectacle of Bush and Blair speaking togther, apparently united. Empty utterances; a language which does not communicate so much as sloganise, presenting us with signs which demand our reprobation or approbation. Slogans are the tokens of a ritual, summoning a phantom morality, a system of values which infests thought and against which thought must struggle. A repetition of dictare, the simulacrum of resolve, of decision. But the speech is a mask, and the speakers emptier than the speech. Who speaks? A language of command by those who are frightened of what they do not command. What speaks? The fear of the idol before the hammer. What is the hammer? A belief liberated from the morality to which Blair and Bush appeal but also from the version of the same morality to which the terrorists appeal. The All-Powerful, the All-present: appeals to a power to mend a diremption in the world. To address a lack of meaning and belief.

Believe, instead, in what is common to us: not our 'shared values', nor indeed in the transvaluation of values that would be born from a new creative will. When Levinas opposes ethics to morality, this is not to reinvent morality or values but indicates a way in which one might think the common. The common is returned to us as what is non-given and non-available. But one must go beyond Levinas. Think of Heraclitus, for whom what is common gives itself to us in a kind of listening or awakening. Then think of the poet who, using a different language to the dictare of our leaders, allows there to resound another speech, or speech uttered in accordance with another measure. A literature which disavows the language of slogans and the morality of values. A speech upon which cannot count upon as a force which would allow us to counter force. Heed what is announced in such a speech: a thinking which is no longer permeated by the language of command. (This is only a sketch of what a real blog on this topic would look like.)

Is it necessary to give up on Marx, on Marxism? Rather, one must think Marxism (a specifically political responsibility) and literature (is there a literary responsibility?) together. This is what Blanchot announces in the dossier to his failed project The International Review. An excerpt:

What results from this would seem to be an irreducible difference, not to say a discordance, between political responsibility, which is simultaneously both global and concrete, accepting Marxism as natural and dialectic as a method for truth – and literary responsibility, one which is a response to an exigency which can only take on form in and through literature. This discordance has no need to be reduced at the outset. It is a given; it exists as a problem, not a frivolous problem but one that must be borne with difficulty; one that is all the more difficult in so far as each of its discordant terms requires our absolute commitment, and their discordance, in a sense, is also what are committed to.

Fascination

Admit it: rereading Far from the Madding Crowd, there are scenes of a dazzling brilliance I have not found in the authors I profess to love. Admit that in Washington Square there is a depth of psychology absent in the works with which I surround myself. Admit that Ethan Frome is plain exciting. How can I turn from these riches? It is as though a sickness had crept into me. Who could prefer Blanchot’s When the Time Comes to the dazzling pages of The Portrait of a Lady. But is it a question of preference? There are some books I feel it necessary to read and reread; I have written of this at tedious length here and elsewhere. Perhaps, once upon a time, my taste would have be regarded as a deformation of a natural propensity to read; diagnosis: too much reading, not enough sunlight. It is as though, reading Breton’s Nadja, I had become lost, that I still wonder those streets and others like its noctambulant narrator – as if literature had set a trap for me. For, as was pointed out by Michael Holland, is Nadja not joined in some obscure way to When the Time Comes just as The Last Man may well be bound to Mann’s The Magic Mountain?

It is as though I am led through secret passages in one text to another, that I am lost, not on the streets, but in the underworld. How can I explain this to others? What excuses do I have? I say, shamefacedly: it is a question of politics, but I know this is a ruse. I say: it is a matter of philosophy, but is this, too, not a joke? To assume the mantle of the philosopher is the greatest joke of all, unless one remembers the figure of Eros in Plato’s Symposium, who wanders the lanes. But one knows, too, that the barefoot Eros of whom Diotima speaks is meant to remind us of the barefoot Socrates who comes late to the drinking party because he was on the porch, rapt, communing with his daimon.

No, you are not a philosopher and you are not a distant descendant of that demigod who was born of poverty and plenitude. Are you, instead, a relative of the ‘old mole’, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the ghost tied to a warning, to a time that is out of joint? But it is not the time that is out of joint, but you, reader of obscure texts, purveyor of obscure blogs, who are out of step. Look out of the window: it is the day, the bland, white day. Close your books. Go outside into the space your room closes itself against.

Hearing this inner voice, I laugh. I cannot close the books that open in my memory. I can barely stop typing, even though I say nothing. And I will not be able to stop so long as I am trapped in a reading which calls, in turn for a writing, for a peculiar work of a commentary which barely tears itself from the object with which it is fascinated.

Literature’s Gift

For a long time, the library in the town in which I was unemployed gave me its old copies of the TLS until I had hundreds of them in a box beneath my bed. At night, unable to sleep, I would read and reread them. Gradually, however, they began to repel me. I felt as alien to the writers in its pages as I did to those whose papers I studied in analytic philosophy. Was it my fault? That is what I felt. I cannot be a proper reader, I thought to myself, I must be something else. On reflection, I returned to study for a postgraduate degree in order to have done with this ‘something else’: to discover, in the authors I had begun to love, the simple errors which the analytic philosophers claim to find in the work of continental philosophers.

Alas, I found no cure, and I still have the sickness, although now, perhaps, I nearly have the confidence to say: it is not my fault, but the fault of a culture, this dry and abstract culture in which I find myself. There is, perhaps, another temptation: ashamed of this desire for what is called literature and for a philosophical discourse responsive to literature’s gift, I seek a political mandate for my reading. Is this laughable? I think I seek this mandate because of the simplicity of my desire. Perhaps I should admit that I am not up to writing on politics. But perhaps, again, there is a nobility in binding the aridity of a desire for literature (no: for a writing which some literature would indicate without safeguarding) to the desire to transform the world. A nobility of which I fall far short, listening in contentment to Vaughan William’s setting of Arnold’s 'The Scholar Gypsy' in my office this afternoon.

Insomnia and Reading

Do I like reading fiction anymore? No, let me put this more exactly: is it necessary for me to read fiction? When I can’t sleep (often) I read the fiction of Sarraute (The Use of Speech), Blanchot (The One who was standing near to me) and Des Forets (La Bavard) – all books I have read before. I read Beckett (Company, Texts for Nothing), Pessoa and Cixous (The Book of Promethea). These are books I already know (I have read each of them three or four times). Why these books? I bring a question to them, I know that. I read, and reading ask: why are these books so close to what I would call an absolute writing? I barely know myself what it is I seek. I can only read older books (Nicholas Nickelby last summer, Trollope’s Barchester novels the year before -) when I can sleep. It is in insomnia that I long for the absolute, to read pages written, it would seem, in a movement of writing which understands the risks and the gifts of writing: the fact it does more than tear itself away from things, lifting them to another level (the fictional world), but seems, also, to tear the possibility of fiction apart. It is writing that is affirmed – a movement affirmed in The Unnameable, where, suddenly, the narrator involves the names Molloy, Malone, even Watt, and you know you are caught in a movement which is no longer content to present itself as a fiction, that the text itself responds to another demand. What is it? The demand of writing itself? Ah, that is vague, too vague.

Now I shall indulge in some autobiography. The world of literary books opened to me at university. At first, it was a desire for culture mixed with a vague rebellion against my studies (hard line analytic philosophy, very dry, interesting enough, but limited in range): I would stay home, say, and read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. And so I read what are called the classics of world literature; this was marvelous. Later – a year, two years – it was Musil, Proust, Broch (I had already read Mann’s Magic Mountain because, I think, of a Malcolm Bradbury series on Modernist authors). Then – Beckett, Kafka, Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet). Those were, I think, the last books I read – or at least, to clarify this – the last books I read in a state of complete innocence about what I sought in reading. A new world began to open: Blanchot, Bataille, Cixous and with it, a certainty that it was writing, the movement of writing (whatever this means – as ever I write vaguely and impressionistically) that fascinated me. Writing, as it was dissevered from any desire to represent the world, and was driven, instead, to repeat an affirmation specific to its own operation. A writing where the act of naming was felt to be disquieting, dizzying. I did not read Holderlin, Sade or Lispector as an innocent; I came across them first of all quoted by the authors I now felt to be necessary.

A secret: I would like to be free of reading, of the fascination of reading just as I would like to be freed of the insomnia to which my reading is linked. If it were not for the dreadful nights of insomnia, Kafka said to Janouch, I would not write. Well, if it were not for those not so dreadful nights, I would not read. This is why I long for sleep, for sleep’s repose, and to return to the daylight of those books I read in the first years of my reading of literature.

My Poor Head

I have known, this afternoon, the pleasantness of an insomnia that prevents me from vanishing into my work; I am beside it; writing spreads out to the corners of this room. What have I written? What have I made? Everything is botched, botched, botched, but I write this serenely, without rancour. The hope: everything I have done hitherto is what they call “’prentice work”. Grow older and you learn that the leap beyond such work is barely possible. Admire the patience of the philosopher who writes in the first lines of his book: ‘this book, I hope, will at least be the keystone of a genuine work of philosophy that I shall produce some day’. That is from Leonard Lawlor’s Derrida and Husserl, a magnificent book which contents itself to set out, with great clarity, the nature of the relationship between the two authors of its title. It is part of an admirable sequence of essays and books on contemporary French philosophy. And you know, reading it, that it is such patient work which may permit Lawlor’s ‘genuine work of philosophy’. Once, I read it carefully; the passages I marked and underlined are already forgotten. Instead, I write flashily about the impossibility of writing. This is what makes me much less than a philosopher.

Good Conscience

To write of failure is still to evince a nostalgia for success. Reading a great book, it is as though its movement gives me the capacity to move with its own fleet movement – as if I could write by extending its writing; I feel joined to the work as if mine could be borne on the work's draft. Of course this is ridiculous. Writing, I would be content that my work shine (if it shines at all) with a borrowed light. But I still have what they call ‘stylistic ambition’ and this is my downfall: it is not enough for me to be clear, to serve the ‘object’ of my inquiry; I want to write well.

The dream of writing: I would open a page of my exercise book, smooth down the cool, slightly rough paper, take up my fountain pen, and write a book in a single svelte movement. Instead, I type and retype; rarely does a piece of writing emerge all at once. It is lamentable! Worse when I look back at, say, a blog, which I thought, at the time, was passable. The mistakes! The crude typographical errors! How is it I lack the right critical faculties?

Conversation with W. We should be content to write ragged books. Forget polishing. Get it out there. I know, though, that I want to retain a good conscience: I tell myself I would have preferred not to have written than to have written something bad. But I know, too, that this is a lie, and failure is the condition of my ‘authorship’. I write because what I have already written fails. I publish because I do not want to be alone with my failure.

And the half-finished manuscripts – dare I call them ‘literary’ – which infest my living quarters? I need to be rid of them quickly: they must be published, if only that their failure would allow me once again the fantasy of turning over the blank page, of making a new beginning. But in seeking to revise them for publication I am confronted over and again with the horror: these pages are botched and nothing can be made from them.

Insubstantial Blog

I am hardly here, so this does not count as a blog. Who is writing? I’m not going to play the games of pseudonymity. I agree with Steve: Will Oldham and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy have gone too far.

On my desk, Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Kevin Hart, which I receive from a friend; only 54 pages long, it is an enormous gift. I must find the strength to write about the lovely essays it gathers.

Stolen time; I should be at the gym. What will I do with this hour? It is the late afternoon, a time of the day I’ve never liked. Should I write? But I have nothing to say. Say that then: nothing. But by saying it, it is already undone. Still, this consoles; it gives me the illusion of activity and I have never liked idleness.

At the Threshold

One of the avatars of Vishnu could not, it was said, be killed during the day or the night, either inside or outside. They killed him on the threshold of his house at dusk (or was it dawn?). In the last fortnight, I have become an insomniac – which is to be exiled doubly: from sleep’s repose, and from the waking world; I belong to neither. Then, remembering what Kafka wrote about the merciful surplus, I wonder whether what insomnia prevents it might also make possible: that there might be a writing of insomnia, born of an unexpected strength. But no – here, at the threshold, belonging neither to the day or night, I can’t write a line.

Five Fantasies

Remember Tarkovsky, in planning The Sacrifice, suggested to Sven Nykvist his cinematographer that they spend a year talking, just talking over the project. A year, to have time, a year. (This is a fantasy because I feel the pressure of a publishing contract).

To have time. That’s one dream. And the other: to be obscure. Here I remember the film Bergman made for TV (The Rite) which I haven’t seen for years. A troupe of theatre players are stopped by an official; they are suspected of some crime or another. One of the players (the actress Ingrid Thulin, who died recently) speaks, if I recall, of the innocence of the player’s profession … they simply travel around putting on shows, that’s all, no more. (This is a fantasy because I am tired of writing on ‘major themes’.)

A third fantasy. To be Balthus painting – or Giacometti sculpting. To disappear into the work, into the happiness of working from day to day to day. (This is because the work before me seems too difficult; it requires too much abstract thought.)

Fourth: to work like Fassbinder, making a film every 100 days. How did he do it? He had a company of actors; they loved working together, everything grew out of this community of co-workers. (This is because I work alone.)

Fifth: to learn the lesson the director learnt in Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: forget art (I think the director had set out to make the film O Brother Where Art Thou?) and content yourself in entertaining people. (This is because the audience for an academic book is less than 100. And because I would rather not love books like The Unnameable).

Why Even Bother?

The fear: all I do is push other people’s concepts around. After some study, you gain an overview of the oeuvre of an author, or of a few authors. Then, you’re able to play around with their notions and this is important – you learn how to philosophise in a style; you don’t merely imitate, but allow a system of thought in its twists and turns to permeate you. In so doing, you gain the world – you have great concepts at your disposal, you are able, as it were, to see behind things, to witness the hidden movements behind everything. You can talk and write of nihilism, of being, of nothingness, of saying and the said.

But this is nothing yet; nothing has begun. To comment is not yet to philosophise; to manipulate other people’s ideas is not enough. How to make the next step? Perhaps a sense of urgency is required: you have to take the thought somewhere in response to another demand, and slowly, in the relationship between the demand you place on the thought of others and the thought itself something is born. Heidegger comes to Husserl having already read Brentano’s treatise on Aristotle; Levinas writes On Evasion from a peculiar intuition regarding the experiences of pain and insomnia; Derrida comes to Husserl with a concern with the ideality of the literary object.

And the rest of us? Nietzsche’s typology of the scholar in the third Untimely Meditation is fantastic (I think I’ll copy out parts of it tomorrow). And who, now, can claim an education of the sort afforded by the Ecole Normale? Why bother at all? I remember what Kawabata said after the suicide of Mishima: a writer like that comes along only every two or three hundred years.

My Pantheon

A fine Spring day; a friend is visiting, I have shown him the city in which I live. In the morning, we talk about the way our lives have changed since we studied together. I think to myself: what would it have been to have had Rilke as my sponsor, as he sponsored the Klossowski brothers! The unpleasantness of growing older is that of hearing of the passing of such great creators like Pierre Klossowski and his brother – but also, in recent years, of Robert Bresson, and Blanchot. I remember, some years ago, buying a copy of Le Monde and reading: Duras is dead on a banner on the front page. How is it that these deaths make me feel more alone? There are, thankfully, a few of the old gods left – but where are the new ones? Consolation: there are new gods to discover, and I listen, as I write, to the Angel of Dusk, Rautavaara’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra.

Modesty

I’ve been feasting on the edition of Balthus edited by Jean Clair – the reproductions are very fine, the paintings more dazzling than in any other book I’ve been able to find. And there are some wonderful short essays written by those who knew the painter, including a reminiscence about Balthus’s friendship with Giacometti. How pleasant to read of these chain smokers trying to out do one another in their modesty, getting together at the end of the day to lament their failures. But then Balthus was measuring himself against Piero della Francesca, and Giacometti against the statues of ancient Egypt.

I’ve had to listen to myself talk at some length this weekend and it is unpleasant because I do so as though I had accomplished something. Bored of my own voice, I say to myself: your tragic sense of the retreat of ‘culture’ is, at bottom, phantasmic, for what do you seek? An attitude, a pose to hide the fact that what you think is impossible for our time is only impossible for you.

On the inside covers of the Kierkegaard books I first read many years ago, I had made little calculations about the amount of words their author was writing every day, every week, every month. Seeing them now I am amused because once, perhaps, I thought that hard work might be all that separated me from such a figure. As if, one day, I would step into a place where creation on that level would have been possible for me. Laughter: for I know what has retreated is not ‘culture’ but that sense that a future was open to me as a creator of books, of ideas. Oh to have had the luxury of that modesty through which Balthus and Giacometti measured themselves against the greatest works!

Joy's Gift

Moods pass over you like the weather – they pass, they change and perhaps should not be taken seriously for that reason. But do they pass over you – or are you also that passing, a passing without rest? The melancholy I felt this month has disappeared. Why? There is no ‘why’ here. You receive moods; they arrive without ‘why’ – do not think they have any correlate in the world. Rather, you seek a correlate, you seek a ‘why’ in order to account for what claims you. But the same objection: the world is always disclosed through mood – it is not a question of what is distorted by mood, but what is given: the gift of attention, attentiveness, that is given through mood.

Melancholy’s question: how to remain, how to pass from one day another, and above all, how to pass through the day. It is as though the room is too vast, and you cannot cross it. But then a particular kind of attention is given to you with melancholy. Melancholy’s gift: you are drawn, through melancholy, to certain problems. The great task is not to disappear into the kind of attention, of attentiveness to which melancholy delivers you. To remember that there are other moods and that they will come and go just as you will come and go with them.

I wonder, though. Isn’t there a kind of vigilance, a witnessing which survives from mood to mood? This is an ancient question. Before the Greeks, it was already raised by the Indians – by the philosophers of the Indus Valley. Schopenhauer kept the Upanishads by his bedside table and, rereading him recently, I remembered his notion of the pure will-less subject (the witness). Alas, I do not feel clever enough to write about this today, but I am drawn to ask: what remains from mood to mood? What survives?

If there is no ‘why’, which is to say, no determinate answer, there is a source of possible answers, albeit one which is withdrawn from us, which hides in darkness: the body, always the body, as it is linked to other bodies, as it is bound to so many movements. Is the body a locus through which moods pass? Or is it in some way both the passing and the locus? (I should, here, provide a brief reading of Nietzsche's will to power, but I am busy ...) The body is the movements in question and nothing other than them. – Do not think that the mind has broken from the darkness of the body, opening in its own light. For that light is a light in darkness, a torch beam which does not know its own source. And the beam changes with mood, with the alteration of mood – though what does not change is the beam itself, even as it varies in nature and intensity.

These are vague reflections, but they are written in joy, in a kind of joy. Last night it snowed and the world is bright. Yesterday, rereading Kierkegaard's Repetition, I conceived a heteronym who would write, in my place, another kind of blog, which I began and erased – but not without glimpsing what that blog could be. The writings I have which precede my ‘academic’ papers and books will form the substance of this other blog. They will not do by themselves, but I will form them around a new topic, one which I found strangely pressing in these weeks of melancholy: the Messiah, Messianism.

Writing of this now, I know it is unlikely I will ever finish this 'project', but I feel the joy of a new inception as it arrives as a gift of joy. After this weekend and the book review I must complete, I will at last be able to begin the second book, or at least to begin to work on the draft I have already written. To be capable of this capacity! Joy’s gift: the ability to be able; the future no longer bounds by chains of necessity to the past.

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

The last blog leads me to another series of questions. What is the effect of moving around 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 ----.

The Everyday

I had a revelation at the gym the other day as I exercised on some machine or another and regretted the decision of managers to leave MTV on with the music turned down (I need to hear Toxic, the splendid new Britney single, and I haven't heard Hey Ya enough times ...) I was reading a book about Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and others and came across the notion of the everyday. I thought of the world I go out into in the afternoon full of young mothers and pensioners strolling and shopping, talking on mobile phones, meeting for coffee and so on. How pleasant to walk in a city on a bright afternoon, your attention diffused and falling magnanimously upon everything. You are part of this kingdom, you say to yourself, and all is good.

Exercising on the machine, I wondered whether my career, my life, was an attempt to negate this world of the everyday - the world, in the end, into which the students disappear, until you meet them one day, happily going along with their boyfriend or girlfriend, telling you how they have prospered, looking sunny. I say to myself: you pretend this world does not exist. And I wonder whether the pauperisation of academia isn't responsible for a general resentment of prosperity, and what it might be like to have a car and drive around, to take trips to the countryside, to drive to the supermarket - ah, utopia! Guattari writes somewhere about the great difference having a car made for him; and Duras was a keen driver. And then, listening to Britney and Outkast in the gym, I know that good music reaches the everyday - and that I should admit I enjoy what everyone else enjoys (films, books, TV).

Yes, that was my 'revelation' (I am laughing as I write this). Alas, it was momentary, and by the time I'd left the gym and rushed back to my office, it was too late, I couldn't recover its wisdom. I metamorphosed back into the pathetic being who regrets he can't come into the office tomorrow because of the strike, for what will he do with himself at home? And scowls at himself for watching TV because enjoyment isn't enough.... Later that evening, I read dreamily a book on Heidegger: Ereignis and the last god, the Abendland and the 'other' beginning.... This is the real stuff, I said to myself, as I was given over to the ecstasy of reading.

The everyday: is it there, waiting for me in the calm afternoon? There, despite everything Heidegger writes about the technicization of all relations, about the occlusion of being? How pleasant it would be to disappear into that world! - But this, too, is a dream and an abstraction. My contract has been renewed; because of EC law, in a couple of years I will have to be treated as a permanent member of staff. In other words, I am 'in'. But by the same stroke, the everyday has been closed to me. For a long time, on the fringes of full time work, the everyday, the long afternoon was my milieu even though I feared its openness, its indeterminacy. I didn't want to be stuck there. Now, looking back, I already envy the life I led on the margins. I idealize the everyday all the more I harden into a proper employee.

But that's just it. I should say I know nothing of Lefebvre and de Certeau other than what I read in a primer. My everyday lies beyond the shimmering edge of real employment. It was that place where, once upon a time, you stepped into the streets as you would step into the Styx. Who were you, then,? One of others, browsing shops with others, ambling in the sunshine with others. Which is to say, no one in particular. I desire the everyday because I no longer live there.

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.

The Blazing World

Are you depressed? Do you want to be? 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.

The Judgement

Youth, age. I remember what Bataille writes about the moment of Absolute Knowledge in Hegel: at that point, when it seems everything has been achieved, when the end has come, there is the plunge into non-knowledge, into the abyss. Let’s say you have everything or nearly everything – that, at least, you have a great deal. Let’s say you struggled and now you have what you struggled for (a job, a flat). You pulled yourself out of the mire (unemployment, casual work, rootlessness). What awaits you? – There is comfort in struggle because your situation provides an objective correlate to the discontent you feel. The other night, listening to myself talk to some fellow employees, I was surprised by a paranoia, a bitterness. I thought: truly, I have grown old. This is a gnarled speech. It is the way innocence speaks when it has been twisted out of shape; youth when it has been forced suddenly to grow old. Mostly, I thought: you have no more excuses. There is no threat hanging over you; it is likely your contract will be renewed.

One day you have no excuses, and have to be called to account for what you are, for what you have done. At the threshold, the quivering margin between youth and age, the angel stands with a fiery sword. It is time for your judgement. Cyril Connolly, in his Enemies of Promise, observes that the greatest inhibitor of the writer is the babycarriage in the hallway. There should be no one who depends on you, no one to whom your life is bound as a father is to a son. Why does this sentiment seem so outrageous to me? Remember the tender scenes of family life in Atom Egoyan’s films. Remember the ‘object’ of Gorchakov’s nostalgia: his family, waiting for him in Russia. Remember Tarkovsky’s journals about his son, left behind in Russia. And then the dedication of The Sacrifice: to his son.

Judgement … it is necessary to leave behind the old, vague dreams behind; the daydreams I had when I had time, when I was young, when life opened out ahead of me like a limitless expanse, when I could, I thought, have ended up doing anything at all. Remember the attempts to travel, and the failures. Why? I went abroad, I thought, for good, with a single book, the last book I would read and which would let me leave reading behind. I finished the book. I was in the Mediterranean; the sky was brighter than I thought the sky could be. I thought: this is a mad sky, Van Gogh’s sky. And I wondered what it must have been to have left this sky behind to come to England, like Jean Rhys. I finished the book as I awaited the bus which would carry me deeper into the island. But it was not the end of reading for me.

Judgement: the angel with the sword asks me, how good are you at what you do? And admit, even though I’ve said it before to others many times: not particularly good. I get by. The angel says: can you justify paranoia and bitterness with which you speak about yourself? Can you act as though it were external events which stopped you being what you could be? And I reply: I have had enough chances, enough time. It did not happen; I didn’t complete anything worthwhile.

Fortunately, I have still have laughter in me, and youth. Enough laughter and youth to prevent the angel turning into a demon and chasing me into hell. My world has not evaporated; it is still solid and real. I am not a half-wraith like Gorchakov; I am not a ghoul like the unnamed narrator of Mirror. I think I can say this: I have a sense of what Van Gogh lost in order to paint. Or what Artaud lost in order to think. A sense of what they gave up. Not because I have talent – the opposite, in fact – but because I live securely enough in the world to know what it is not to live securely. To have an idea of what it would be to be touched by madness. And I have a sense now, rereading Levinas’s Proper Names, of what it meant to have been ripped from one’s home, from one’s job, to suffer with ones head bowed. I remember Robert Antelme, whose book I have struggle with – not to read it, it is true, although that had its own difficulties – but to understand why it was that this book took such resonance for those around Antelme. And now I have begun to see it. This robust, laughing man, this lover of food and company lost his place in the world, as others have lost their places. Somehow, he was so strongly rooted in the world, he had lived with such gusto, belief and strength that, writing of his deportation, of the work camp, of the march to Dachau, he was able to testify to the profundity of his loss.

The angel is here and says, no more excuses. What are you going to make of your life, now you have arrived? And I cannot say: I would like to have been Yukio Mishima, would have liked to feel words falling within me like rain, would liked to have been the writer who, as Kawabata said, comes along every two or three hundred years. I cannot say: I would have liked to have been D. H. Lawrence, sitting under a tree in Taos, writing every morning for a few hours, composing novels in a single stroke, poems, travel sketches, and then returning to the others, sweeping the kitchen, cooking food, enjoying company. Or: I wanted to be one of the writers at rue Saint-Benoit, drinking and laughing with Marguerite Duras – a writer among those for whom writing was important, one who debated politics when politics seemed possible, a member of a committee for revolutionary intellectuals, young and drunk with the youth of the world.

Resignation

Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The scenes with the narrator and his wife are barely alive in the screenplay, but in the film…. I have heard the character of the wife, Natalia was added into the film as it was being made. Margarita Terekhova is astonishing. The narrator is guilty. The screenplay tempts us to identify him with Tarkovsky; and we see a poster for Andrei Rublev in the narrator’s flat. But he is someone else (who does the narrator allow Tarkovsky, allow us, to be?). – The narrator is irresponsible, he neglects his son, taunts his wife. He is remiss. We sense his father was similar – at least, his return is greeted as a sudden surprising benediction by his children. Perhaps the reasons for his behaviour do not matter. He seems dislocated – the world is not real enough for him. He is like a ghost.

I think of a book I read many years ago: Peace, by Gene Wolfe. You can find it in the science fiction section of the bookshop. The protagonist is a dead man. You have to work it out; it isn’t easy. Took me three reads to see not only that he is a ghost, but that he had been a murderer, too, and he remembers the murders he committed (though this is not clear to the reader). The same scene in Peace as in Mirror: the protagonist is told he has a limited time to live. It’s all coming to an end. And the same fantastic quality to that scene: it is not real, as it were, and it is not meant to be.

– What does it matter? I am thinking of Mirror's narrator. Thinking of a sense of unreality I experienced today as I walked home from work. And a sense of responsibilities that will open before me one day that I could – could, not would – shirk. My excuse? I imagine it would be similar to the narrator of the film: I’m after something else, I want something else. How indulgent and melodramatic! I read a screenplay many years ago by Bergman – The Touch – I’ve never seen it. I remember the male protagonist breaking up a marriage – why? Resentment? The desire to tear a hole open in the world, to break something open? It is more than resentment. A kind of frustration with the unreality of things, of the absence of affect. Where does it lead? Petulant rage … sabotage … self-indulgence. Smashing up lives. I remembered the same character when I saw the film Liv Ullman made with Bergman’s script: Faithless. And felt a kind of anger at the philanderers who would smash up their lives to escape – to escape what? When I read The Touch, I did so as one who was outside, far outside the world of work. When I saw Faithless, I was on the verge of getting a job, but still outside (it was a short term contract …) Today, remembering both I thought: now I am the bourgeois with the job and the mortgage, I am one who will be able to shirk responsibility. I know I won’t. But what a strange feeling to be part of the world – if I experience the unreality of that world, I do so from a secure place within it (although my current contract runs out in 6 months …)

Natalia. Think of the way she looks at the narrator. They have had a life together, a child. They a share a history, yet what do they share? Now the narrator has turned from her. He gently satirises her account of her new lover, a writer. He is like a ghost, removed from everything. And his son? He is burning things in the yard, poking at them with a stick. Another ghost, a ghost in the making. – I think stupid thoughts as I walk home from work. I wonder whether I am on the non-Leninist far Left, an anarcho-syndicalist of sorts, in favour of revolution ... (I laugh as I write). I remember Bataille: 'I am not even a communist'. The book, the first book, is a farrago. The communism I delineate there? It is will-less, project-less, it can lead nowhere. It is a communism that can only spring up suddenly, spread and then die out. It has no issue. And the second book? It will be more modest, but that is also something to despise. Resignation…. All hopes pinned on the as yet unimagined third book … (more laughter ... this is pitiful.)

The Uselessness of Everything

Surprisingly, I've spent the day in a good mood. Remember them? But you know happy bloggers have nothing to write about, and it's true - this evening I am, dare I say it, content, which means content to write nothing. But I have a second contract with the publishers for a book called, yes, Blanchot's Testimony. I've forgotten the subtitle, but it had something to do with ethics. More than half already done, but that will have to be rewritten. The rest ... well, that's spring and summer sorted out.

I was reading the Moomintroll books over the weekend and recognised myself in the Muskrat who is always scowling about something or other. Hilarious picture of him reading a book called The Uselessness of Everything in Moominpapa's hammock. Wish I had a copy of these marvellous books with me to quote them.

Who?

You write on philosopher X or Y - you are drawn to them; coming to write on them, with them, was not accidental. Beginning to philosophise in this way is an act of faith. An author calls you -. When does it become a question of a problem - when is it a question that draws or implicates you? Think of Heidegger reading Bretano's book on Aristotle. He was 17. It concerned the analogy of being. But for the rest of us, or many of us - well, okay, for me - is it anything as specific as an idea or a problem? A friend asked me once what it was that drove me into philosophy (into doing a Ph.D., in this case). For him, it was a matter of politics, of the political. And for me? I wasn't able to give him a well defined answer. Wasn't it, though, a diffuse disgust at the world outside the academy? Of course the academy itself is disgusting, but there is at least the promise of seriousness....

Then, I read Heidegger: the beginning of philosophising, today at least, occurs through a certain mood - Anxiety, boredom ... a mood brings you into an open space; you are seized by the question - it permeates you; you are suspended. It is Heidegger's version of the reduction, of course - but it is more than that, for the reduction itself is only one way of thinking wonder, thaumazein, to which philosophy was traditionally linked (Plato, Aristotle ...) This gave me the magical sense that it was indeed mood which had brought me to philosophy, that the disgust I mentioned had no particular object ... that it had been a version of anxiety or boredom, pure and simple. Now it was a matter of constantly repeating this same mood - of allowing it to disclose over and again the uncanniness of my existence.

Faith, the promise ... to be brought into philosophy in this way is not to have been solicited by a particular problem. It is to have been led to a discourse where mood itself is granted seriousness. First the faith (this book is important ...) and then you are able to repeat those grounding moods which you thought were entirely negative. Thus you make good on the act of faith, on the promise; your investment is returned, you are pleased at the dignity of your melancholy, at its seriousness. It is elective.

Not only that, but you are now able to declare other works as having a philosophical significance. You have the power of King Midas - the most lugubrious song becomes a doorway; the petulance of the adolescent hides a lofty disposition. The windows to philosophy are everywhere; no one but you knows how to scrub the windows clean and look through. First of all, however, the windows look at you. You are accused. Again and again in Heidegger there is the moment of encounter into which you a brought which gives you the power to look. The god in the temple of 'The Origin of the Work of Art' gives you an outlook; so do the gods of the Parmenides lectures series. Someone has seen you such that you can see otherwise.

Heidegger calls this witnessing. The prototype of this experience is present in Being and Time, in the strange passages on the call of conscience. No one calls you but you. You call yourself by bearing witness to yourself. Witnessed, you are summoned to take responsibility for what you are, to reclaim what is proper to you. In the early Heidegger, it is your own 'voice' that calls you. In the later Heidegger, it is the gods.

Let's say a certain faith in a particular author brings you into philosophy. Like Kierkegaard's Job, you receive everything anew; the suffering was worthwhile ... it was elective; you are chosen; you can comfort the others. But still ... I wonder at this. It is too flattering. Does the claim of suffering, anxiety, boredom, remain too light by the very fact that you can rise up from this mood and talk and write? Is it traumatic and wrenching enough? Does it seize you by your innards, does it reach your heart's depths - does it allow you to break through into the nothing that is the disclosure of being? Ah, there's something seductive and even self-fulfilling about this ...? The circuit between I and I is not broken; I reclaim myself as myself, but something is left out ...

What, though? It is a question of who, not what. Who? - not you, but the others. Not your suffering but the suffering of others. I cannot say it was the suffering of others that drove into philosophy. But was it a sense of suffering that awoke me to the political or ethical charge of philosophy? Was it not this sense that broke that flattering appeal to the authentic, the proper, the self-responsible self? The sense that it was not my existence that was important but what is usurped by that same existence? This is what watches and witnesses me in the others who suffer.

Real Life Intervenes

To use the phrase bloggers use everywhere: ‘real life intervenes’. Well it does. – Real life? A life in the shadows. Academia! The bureaucracy! Paperwork! Documents that have to be filled in with statements vague enough to mean almost anything! And the pile of essays I haven’t begun to mark! No, it’s not so bad – of course it isn’t. Why the expectation that it should be any different? The world is like this. It’s like this everywhere. Was it always like this? I am told it was not. But then I don’t remember any differently. Besides, it could get much worse (I am thinking of the stories on Invisible Adjunct).

So: real life intervenes. But I worked on the paperwork for a new course, and it came to me today exactly what I should teach: philosophy as a spiritual exercise! I am thinking of Pierre Hadot’s study of what philosophy, once upon a time, meant. Alas, I only had the book for a while on interlibrary loan, I’ve forgotten most of it. – A spiritual exercise? A kind of purgation or ascesis through which you withdraw from the determinations which claim you. And wasn’t this what happened when I came up with this course and the supporting paperwork it requires? A little moment of grace. More seriously: I have not made the appeal to the authentic self, the simple affirmation of individual freedom, but an experience that arises from without, from outside. It is a question of community, of friendship – of those openings which permit us to open towards the Other in his or her indetermination and to discover ourselves as we are undetermined in that opening.

This sounds abstract. And as usual, it is unsubstantiated (though I’ve written of it at length, at too much length, and with extraordinary clumsiness, elsewhere). But let me ramble. Indetermination? Perhaps this word is too vague. I would like to link it to style – to the way in which the friend, as it were, is the point of juncture between the determined and the indeterminable. A point? No: a line. A line is traced. That is the style of the friend. Let’s say you visit me. I am bored, occupied with one task or another. Your ‘style’ is the way, when I see you, I am torn from my tasks and from the horizon to which they hold me. A happy moment. Laughter – I don’t disappear, but I become other, despecified, no longer bound to my job. In truth, I never vanish into my tasks. Activation is necessary – awakening. The release of a potential, a power to determine, to act.

Grace, then. In that moment – in the sudden laughter which changes the space between us – I am exposed to your ‘style’, your way of bringing me what unbinds me from myself. Sometimes the moment goes nowhere. I laugh, we have fun, but it is time for work. But then is friendship not the possibility of an ongoing event of this kind? Of the affirmation of a kind of resistance or refusal that belongs to me because I do not belong to any specific determination. ‘Belongs to me’ – but this is an awkward phrase. What would be proper or essential to me is what depropriates or ex-poses me. A curious thought.

The danger: I am making everyone the same. The same refusal, the same depropriation. I think of Giacometti’s sculptures – are they not all exactly alike? But there is the question of style, where this includes gestures, speech, body language…. There is my friend. The future opens. No longer the future of tasks and projects. For a few minutes, for a night out, there is another future. And in that opening, that future, who am I? Is it right to say I am no one in particular? No: it is the fact that the no one in particular is brought into relation with the one that I am. There is a never a pure impersonality, pure indetermination. It is always a question of a relation between the determinate and the indeterminable, between the specific and the unspecifiable. Of course the determinate, the specific, themselves name relations. You talk to me like a boss, I am your employee. You give me orders, I obey. But the friend gives himself in a relation which suspends a determining, specifying set of relations.

But to write of friendship as ab-solute, as absolving, as a ‘relation without relation’ is hyperbolic. But then … as a thought of the suspension of determining relations … why not? Once again, this suspension has a particular ‘style’, a ‘tone’. What is it that brings friends together (I am not writing of just any friendships -)? Could style be said to happen between them? Is it mutually determining in some sense? – The style does not precede the friendship. It is born of the interrelation, of the redoubled ‘relation without relation’ that friendship is. Friendship has a specific character, which is to say, the way it despecifies is specific. The trembling line traced at the edge of the indeterminable is the edge of despecification … the outside the friend brings close to you.

Friendship: this is only one word and it is stretched very thinly here. Are there other words? Well, friendship involves more than one of us. It is an opening to the Other as the unknown. Two friends, two openings. But what about a unilateral opening? This is possible, certainly. For the artwork? For one’s readers? And then what of a space in which there are many of us? A demonstration, say? An art-movement? Think of Surrealism: the surreal was the ‘third term’ in the friendships between its adherents. But what does that mean? It was a ‘space’ where each was despecified by their practices (automatic writing, exquisite corpse, drifting …) and by one another (it was a practice of friendship). Breton was the ‘Pope’ of Surrealism, which is to say, he stood guard over its real demands (and a few phoney ones too -).

Proofreading

You see, it is a struggle to write these jolly autobiographical blogs, just as it was a struggle at Christmas. Why? Because of the mood which passes across me like a dark sky. A difficult day – no work done, not even admin, but everything has to be marked for Monday, and I have a meeting for Friday, for which I have to have several documents prepared. I had intended to go to the gym, too, but I felt too heavy, I go out for a walk and have to sit down – it’s too much. No doubt this is the physiological reaction to reading the proofs of the book – what an unpleasant experience! I am not exaggerating! Will the printers make the changes for which I have requested? If they do not, the book will be shoddy indeed. There are some terrible passages with the kind of mistakes altogether missing in other books from the same publisher. – Yes, this is the reason for my gloom. I await the response of the printers – it will come, I think, this week. And I am still waiting for the outcome of a decision regarding the second book contract. There was a meeting at the publishers today concerning the proposal, which has already met with approval from the external readers. It makes me anxious, because my editor, who is brisk and friendly, is moving to another section. What will happen?

No Excuses

I speak to W. on the phone. ‘Have you read anything?’ he asks; ‘nothing, nothing’. I tell him I have no time – admin, marking, proofs. Then he says ‘I’ll tell you something that will really depress you’, and he recommends the new edition of Angelaki, which has interviews with prominent French thinkers like Badiou and Serres. W. and I find these thinkers frightening. Publishing original articles at 18, studying in subjects other than philosophy and so on. The best bit, W. says, is when Serres advises the interviewer on no account to get a job in a university. The interviewer objects: how is he to make a living otherwise? W. is a great despiser of academia. We talk about a prominent young philosopher. ‘He has a research position’, I say, ‘not like us – well, that’s my latest excuse’. Ah, a research fellowship, the answer to life’s ills -. But no, the philosopher in question works as we work…. There is no excuse.

Before the Net

They showed a season of Tarkovsky’s films when I was nineteen. I was unemployed, and I didn’t know enough to claim the dole. Perhaps my horror of empty days began at that time. Being unable to drive, going on my bike to the parts of the town that were not yet given over to housing developments. That was the year of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, Delius and Butterworth…. It was the year of Tarkovsky, first. I remember Solaris was screened first of all. I was attracted by the beautiful trailer, edited together from Ivan’s Childhood, with music from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (the first classical CD I bought) and by the recommendation of Brian Aldiss (I read science fiction constantly until I was around 20, then, on Aldiss’s advice, began to broaden my reading …). Ah, Solaris! And then – Stalker. My dad was impatient – he watched for a while, snorted and read the paper instead. Mirror was the most important of the films for me, then. It seemed my whole life revolved around it – that Mirror was the secret centre of my life. In the days before the internet, I was alone in this admiration. One day, passing through Covent Garden I heard someone mention Tarkovsky’s name. I spoke to an older woman who was drinking with her daughter. She was recommending Mirror to her, and remembering, I think, seeing Tarkovsky’s production of Boris Godunov staged in London (this was in the late 80s). We spoke for a while like adepts. That’s how it was before websites like Nostalgia.com. I remember reading Char and thinking: I’m sure others must read Char, but where are they?

Seawardspointed

Youth – and if it was marked, like that of Levinas, by revolution and war? If it is torn from dreaming of itself in that way? Then, art would exert a different appeal in a different sense. But is that true? The world when I was growing up was flat, boring, grey. It felt unreal. What a simplistic thing to write! But it did – as though life was going to begin, but not yet. As though everything remained in a pallid winter gloom before the day. These experiences are not interesting because they are unique (my childhood), but because they are typical. But I remember reading the book my teacher had placed on her desk – reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland upside down (she was teaching it to sixth formers – at that time, I was younger). And then there was the page of the textbook on prose that I read which quoted something from Joyce (I remember the word, seawardspointed – I think it must have been from The Portrait of the Artist …) We even did Eliot’s poems ‘Triumphal March’ in class. There, you see, it all began. It took several years to understand that life was in those pages and nowhere else.

Youth Inside Youth

How strange that in writing of it, Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, once my least favourite of his films (which is not to say I did not love it), has become the most important of them for me. This, surely, has a great deal to do with the circumstances of my life, which are not bad – quite the opposite – but have allowed me to pass from someone whose future was still open and undetermined to one whose future is more certain. Perhaps I have become older – not the age that comes merely with the passing of years, but the transformation that comes from moving from one phase of life to another. Does this mean I am wise? It means I do not think of myself as young. Perhaps this is why Kafka’s statements on youth in Janouch’s book are so moving to me. A sense of something lost, a simplicity…. In truth, I was poor and uncertain when I was younger. What would I do? How was I to make my way in the world? Let us say I have made my way. Now, a new mood: the presence of gloom. Not my gloom, you understand, nor even something that touches and depresses me. It is a deep sense of a kind of tragedy in things, of inevitability, of the way of all flesh. How absurd! How clichéd! But when I was young I admired Beckett without in some sense knowing his work. And would that not have been the case for Blanchot’s stories, too? I would have found them too scanty – thinking they cheated in some sense by abstracting so much of the world away.

Youth – it was true that I dreamed, at 18, of the book I would write at 18 – or of the Illuminations I would finish by the time I was 20; or of the Confessions of a Mask I would have written by 22 – or the Buddenbrooks at 25. This dream faded. I also dreamed that when I wrote a book, I would write very many others, quickly. I once asked J.G. Ballard: why has your output decreased? Well, it is all absurd – although youthful disappointments (the disappointments which marked the transition from early youth to later youth, if I can put it that way) allowed me never to regard philosophy, that subject I fell into by chance (I would never dare call myself a philosopher …), as something to which I contribute in a decisive way. I’ve been surprised at each stage that I was capable of making the transition from student to a writer of essays, and from essays to books…. I find myself, then, having stepped from late youth into something else. I am ready for the long afternoon of life, I am resigned….

Nostalghia, then – why this lugubrious film, why now? It is true that as a child I felt as others felt a sense of loss of a more primordial sense when I was joined to the world. I remember my attachment to a toy at preschool age very vividly. Wrenched from that toy I was reminded of the great loss that had occurred at an earlier stage (I should read Winnicott). But as a child, as a youth, one is protected by the very openness of the future. Anything can happen, and that is the joy of childhood – or a childhood lived in relative security, in relative wealth. Do I miss the future? Yes, I think I do. This is why I write so much about the future. And childhood? I do not miss my childhood, but a childhood (remember Deleuze’s distinction). Perhaps it will return. – But even this will not do, for what I miss is buried within childhood itself. A childhood within childhood, if I can put it that way.

As a child I read the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, who would, curiously, refer to the poems of T. S. Eliot in her work – the Four Quartets in particular. Poems I would meet much later, and recognise. When I read Blanchot on childhood – on the children who, playing, exchange places as they play (who is me today? Him, him, him …), I remember Eliot again – the children playing in the trees. But I also remember the boy whom Gorchakov addresses when he sits near a fire, drinking vodka in the abandoned ruins of a monastery. The boy is called Marco.

Gorchakov says in poor Italian, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Marco’, the boy replies, uncertainly. ‘That’s the stuff. Are you happy? …’ ‘What with?’ ‘Everything … life?’ ‘Life … life … of course I am’. Now Gorchakov lies down. There is a book of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems beside him. We hear this poem:

In childhood, cold and fear would make me ill,
Licking my lips and picking the loose skin,
The cool, fresh taste of salt remembering.
But I keep walking, walking, walking still.
To warm myself I sit on the hall stairs,
Then walk, entranced by The Pied Piper’s airs,
Into the river; then, to warm, I sit
On the hall stairs and shiver ever bit.
Mother stands beckoning. She seems so near,
But still I cannot reach her[….]

There’s more, but I’ll stop there. Really, the poem has to be heard. It is in Italian translation, as I recall.

Nostalghia. I like the spelling of this word upon which Tarkovsky insists. How pleasant to know I will never find my way to the heart of this work – or, better, that that heart is infinitely rich and permits of numerous approaches.

Enemies of Promise?

A weekend without work. Falling below work, left behind – this is unpleasant. Is it as though I have left myself behind? But I am not just a worker, one of Arendt’s animal laborans producing himself as I produce the world. It is not a question, ultimately, of work, but of work that addresses itself to worklessness – a strenuous attempt to maintain an opening to an experience in which the worker disappears as worker. Worklessness is not idleness, if idleness names simply a slackening of work. Might one write of holding oneself into the unknown? Of an inspiration that has to be sought through intransigence? A weakness it takes strength to receive? You wait at your desk for inspiration. Nothing comes – intransigence is not guaranteed. It happens by chance; it is in the gift of chance. But you can alter the conditions so you are in a position to receive grace. Sometimes illness helps, sometimes it is a hindrance – the same with drinking and hangovers. Do you remember Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise? The enemy of the young writer was the pram in the hallway, if I recall. How ludicrous! What would Bergman have been without his marriages and children? Or Strindberg? Or Tarkovsky? Save us from ardent young men (for it is men, I think, to whose promise Connolly refers …)

A Lugubrious Ecstasy

An ecststic drunkenness sometimes captures me – the exuberance of the first or the second pint, the first half bottle of wine. Never think drunkenness is a matter of the removal of inhibitions – the ‘I’ is dispersed, the unfifying centre no longer holds; little remains 'of' me – above all, no self-consciousness divides me from what is said and done. This is ecstasy – sheer standing out of oneself, modifying no only the threshold between myself and the world, but all thresholds.

Are there other less joyful ecstasies? Today, hungover, the ugly phrase, lugubrious ecstasy appeals to me; I am thinking of a state in which an attention without subject roams unbidden across the world. True, there is a centre to these affects, but it is one that is born and reborn, ever remaking its thresholds, ever breaking and generating new limits and structures. Sometimes a hangover can be like grace.

Drunkards

Drunkards are so alike. Drink with other drinkers to the end of the night and there is a great camaraderie. Everyone else has left and a few remain. The jollity has gone, the exuberance. Drinking has become a serious business; you must match each other drink for drink. You are the last drinkers, barely coherent, no longer exuberant. Stoic. You have survived the evening. But this is not camaraderie. What do you share? Everything - you have drunk enough to become more or less interchangeable with the others. You are drunkards, all alike. But what you share is what dissipates each of you. You share a kind of dispersal. Tape your conversation and you would hear hesitancies, intermittiencies, inarticulate murmurings … it’s magnificent.

Arrhythmia (2)

Perhaps the distinction between prohibition and transgression is misleading. Doesn’t transgression imply a boundary to be transgressed? But what if the boundary itself is remade in transgression? What if transgression reveals there never was a boundary – never an intact and self-identical kernel marked by a limit over which one would step. To step across the boundary is always to step too far; you cannot enter into the same river once and you cannot return to yourself after transgression. To where, then, do you return? In what direction do you ebb? Back to yourself? No: back to the habits that give you, for a time, the sense of remaining yourself. Or, again – back to a more reassuring rhythm, but one which is ready to dissolve at any moment into arrhythmia. How to think rhythm and arrhythmia together? They are not separate; rhythm is of arrhythmia and cannot separate itself from it. That is why prohibitions are required – but these are secondary formations, just as transgression is an inadequate name for the outbreak of chaos. Do not stabilise the threshold between rhythm and arrhythmia.

Interpellations

I often tried to write of the misanthropy which sometimes chokes me, but I always sound churlish and whiny. I could say: what I really dislike is the one I become for the others - it is the way I am interpellated which appalls me. But this is no good either - it is true that it makes me ill to speak as an expert, a discussant, worst of all as a philosopher - but this is not because what I am, my essence, my core ultimately, secretly, escapes interpellation. If there are only interpellations, if what I am is received from without, from something outside 'me' I rush out to meet - if I am given to myself ecstatically - then nothing escapes; it is a question, always, of a particular determination. But interpellations are gradable according to the indetermination they permit me - according to the degree of rapture they allow. What calls me when I read a book? I am summoned into the book, I live with its characters, I share their concerns. It is the same with television.

But then I know reading some books means more than this: I am drawn to the experience to which the fiction bears witness - to a point towards which the book, in its entirety, seems to point. This is like those films which no longer try to manipulate their audience, allowing a freedom, a play that cannot be rigidly interpreted this or that way, but seems nevertheless to indicate something, to move towards something. I am expressing myself more vaguely than ever! Well, I went to see two 'independent' films recently, both well received, both enjoyable enough. But they interpellated me just as a Hollywood thriller interpellates me: when the characters hug and kiss, a celebratory song rings out on the soundtrack - one of my favourite songs, in fact. When they lie with one another on the bed (I am writing about Lost in Translation), the scene cuts just when the film should have begun with hesitancy, awkwardness, with the impossibility of enduring the relationship as they were. I want to linger with the characters ... I want to feel them dissipate before me as in Antonioni's films, or Tarkovsky's. And I want to dissipate with them ...

Vindication

Bruckner was said to have been misled by those around him who demanded he shorten and edit up his symphonies, recommended that he take extra music lessons and were suspicious of his ‘Wagnerism’. He was a man too prepared to listen to those around him. I have had occasion to remember that this week. I have a pleasant feeling of vindication … I won’t say why, remembering what Kundera says about discretion. My weakness: I float about, listening to everybody, reading this and that, and am pulled in different directions, and then, somehow or other, have to retrieve something from dissipation, exacting what Nietzsche would call my ‘imaginary revenge’. I write ‘something’ rather than ‘myself’ because I know this act of retrieval does not presuppose the self as a stable, enduring entity, but constructs it. Revenge: a name for the ceaseless return of a movement upon itself. Is the vindication I feel a variety of revenge? I tell myself it is not, believing that I feel vindicated about what protects teaching, writing, speaking in the university from the spirit of revenge ...

Tiredness

I have passed a dreary week reading and rereading the proofs of my manuscript. Three times I’ve read it through, and three times marked up the changes that will be necessary. I could complain that the copy-editor has made many unauthorized corrections – how frustrating! – but most of the fault lies with me. There are so many clumsy passages. So many botched sentences, written in great hurry as the deadline for the book approached. This is superficial, though, compared to the real problems of the book. These are so profound I cannot bear to list them here.

It doesn’t matter, however. The book will be lucky to sell 100 copies. This book and the next one (if I get the contract I am seeking) are only workbooks. I received a list of books from Edinburgh University Press today. It made me melancholy not only because there were so many interesting books to read but because I realized that this might be a good time for writers, for writing – that, ultimately, there is no reason for me to feel the apocalypse is imminent. I don’t want to be deprived of that vast unease. Why is it necessary for me to feel the end is nigh? It is just an excuse, another excuse.

Indiscretion

I have little sense of the private, of secrecy. Everything that happens to me happens as though it does so in public. What do I mean? – I am jaded, tired … it is as though I have experienced too much, although this is not true, either. Does it indicate a kind of alienation? No, this is not the word. Ordinary, everyday experience seems to happen at one remove. As though I were anaesthetized.

A second excerpt from Kundera from the same interview:

Does a life rich in experience make your novels autobiographical?

No character in my novels is a self-portrait, nor are any of my characters the portrait of a living person. I don't like disguised autobiogaphies. I hate writers' indiscretions.

For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else's intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it.

Life when one can't hide from the eyes of others - that is hell. Those who have lived in totalitarian countries know it, but that system only brings out, like a magnifying glass, the tendencies of all modern society. The devastation of nature; the decline of thinking and of art; bureaucratization, depersonalization; lack of respect before personal life. Without secrecy, nothing is possible - not love, not friendship.

Nostalgia

I expressed myself too simply on another occasion. Reading these authors from another time, who belonged to a time where literature was still important, worth something, when they had the luxury of judging one book as bad and another author as good, I feel envy and sadness. Reading J. Hillis Miller’s little book On Literature, I enjoyed the passages where he wrote about the change in departments of literature in universities – younger staff, he said – have moved away from books altogether, teaching film studies or cultural studies instead. They are more like social scientists or philosophers. I remember reading somewhere else that English departments in particular are like the avant-garde of the Humanities. Perhaps; I don’t know. Still, if I feel resentful of my time, it is not because I am an outsider, a prophet in the wilderness, but because I am insider, one of those who rarely reads – or who reads more rarely than he watches television. I have a nostalgia for a great period of reading I never enjoyed.

Here is a quotation from an interview with Kundera. I envy him his sense of value.

But isn't it possible that societies experiencing oppression offer more occasions for the writer to discover ''an unknown fragment of existence'' than those that lead peaceful lives?

Perhaps. If you think about Central Europe, what a prodigious laboratory of history! In a period of 60 years, we have lived through the fall of an empire, the rebirth of small nations, democracy, Fascism, the German occupation with its massacres, the Russian occupation with its deportations, the hope of Socialism, Stalinist terror, emigration. . . . I have always been astounded by how people around me comported themselves in this situation.

Man has become enigmatic. He stands as a question. And it is out of that astonishment that the passion to write a novel is born. My skepticism in relation to certain values that are almost totally unassailable is rooted in my Central European experience.

For instance, youth is usually referred to not as a phase but as a value in itself. When they utter this word, politicians always have a silly grin on their faces. But I, when I was young, lived in a period of terror. And it was the young who supported terror, in great numbers, through inexperience, immaturity, their all-or-nothing morality, their lyric sense. The most skeptical of all among my novels is ''Life Is Elsewhere.'' Its subject is youth and poetry. The adventure of poetry during the Stalinist terror. Poetry's smile. The bloody smile of innocence.

Poetry is another of those values unassailable in our society. I was shocked when, in 1950, the great French Communist poet Paul Eluard publicly approved the hanging of his friend, the Prague writer, Zavis Kalandra. When Brezhnev sends tanks to massacre the Afghans, it is terrible, but it is, so to say, normal - it is to be expected. When a great poet praises an execution, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world.

Work!

This morning, I thought: what am I going to say about x and y (topics in practical ethics); I was worried; I reached for one book, then another…. A waste of time. Why do I feel I have to be able to talk about anything, everything, all at once? Remember Zizek’s remarks – he says he was fortunate he didn’t get a job until four years after completing his doctorate. Why? He would have been a dabbler – a bit of Derrida, a pinch of Deleuze, a little Lacan…. Instead, he spent years reading a particular author. I say to myself: get your head down! Work!

Arrythmia

The danger of blogging lies in the very desire to write crafted prose, to muse on various subjects - one becomes too strongly attached to a subject position. How to avoid allowing this to solidify into a habit? How to avoid thinking habitually? But then it is also necessary to compel oneself to do something - to bind oneself to something through an act of will. How, otherwise, is it possible to take some of the day back for myself? 'For myself': no - in order to be more than 'myself', which is to say, to change habits and to alter thought. Yes, to experience alteration as thought, to think in alteration, maintaining, in the return from the other to the same, the opposite of rest and repose. The encounter: it is a question of being moved by another rhythm, to the point of experiencing a kind of dissolution, the breakdown of rhythm.

The Pact

Dissipation now term starts again. Endless administrative tasks distract me from work. How to regain the focus I had over the last few days? The intensity? I speak to W. on the phone, and we agree we are not proper philosophers. So we make a pact: 1) to read for two hours day – starting from the beginning of a book and working patiently to the end and 2) to write for one hour a day in a manner that is concentrated, cumulative, risk-taking. This will have to be done in the evening, as there are too many things to get on with at work. W. says we have to read the books in the original language as well, which is a pain. He also says note-taking doesn’t count as real work. W. is cruel.

Tell me I don't write like that ...

Two articles I’ve written have come online in recent weeks. Both seriously marred by the long process of drafting and redrafting. They now seem clumsy and ungainly. How to write in one creative sweep, as Lawrence did (he didn’t edit his manuscripts, but wrote them cleanly from scratch)? This is what I would like to learn here; it is what freedom from deadlines and academic form is supposed to allow me. Ah, but I’ve already broken one of the rules I set myself: do not write that you cannot think of anything to write. The second rule: do not lapse into autobiography. I must remind myself ceaselessly that this is all supposed to be written under the sign of Bataille, remembering he excluded from Guilty a great deal of material he deemed too ‘autobiographical’. Sometimes I allow myself a third rule – everything is to be about joy, about affirmation (behind Bataille, there is Nietzsche …) But Nietzschean joy is hard, very hard to reach. If I had read The Tempest recently, I would say: I am too much Caliban (heavy footed) and not enough Ariel (or Zarathustra, who strides from peak to peak). Still, can’t Caliban bring himself close to the earth (this is Zarathustra's demand)? Or is Caliban too crushed, too broken for that?

A Struggle for Speech

I like to tell myself we are not capable of sincerity, of the simple lucidity of speech. That we are too late for innocence. But isn’t innocence always too late for itself? It is always tainted by the corruption from which it seeks to differentiate. But this means, too, that corruption is never entirely corrupt, that there is an innocence in corruption, too. Could I write same of sincerity, of unprotected speech? I admit I am disturbed by the lines I quoted from Van Velde, and even from Beckett. They are too naked, too simple. But their speakers won their way to simplicity! Still, I feel a kind of laughter breaking out in even amidst my great admiration for the lines I copied out. A laughter because such speech every rule of discourse. Who could speak like that? Who would dare? Isn’t it impossible, today, speak in that way? But look at the imposture of this word ‘today’ – as if there were ever a time or a place when one could speak with sincerity! As if, once again, it were not a matter of a struggle for speech, to be able to speak!

Empty Rhetoric

From the rhetoric of these blogs, their self-deprecatory – no, masochistic – tones, you might think I would say with Socrates: I know I know nothing. But I am not the wisest man in Greece, as the Oracle proclaimed Socrates when he said that … I know I know something, but that what it is not a great deal. A borrowed knowledge, a few quotes to hide behind … I do not even flatter myself I bear some resemblance to Eros in the Symposium, barefoot child of poverty and plenitude, cousin of the daimon with whom the barefoot Socrates communes, because I am not naked enough, because writing, this writing, pleases me too much. I will not get low enough. I am not poor enough to be Socrates or Eros. How to rid myself with my simplistic infatuation with the beautiful to which this writing so poorly approximates? Of the dream of creating a beautiful work which, like the sun itself, would consume every trace of me? But even this is to avoid the question of why it would be necessary to parade this in front of an audience: you, dear readers.

Because readers are coming; I can see the searches that lead you here. I say to myself: isn’t this like therapy? Isn’t it curative in some sense? Doesn’t it allow me to get to the heart of the matter? But I wonder. To write is also to evade. And to write without owning up to one’s writing – without linking it explicitly to a proper name and to my ‘position’ in the world is to allow myself a certain license. Is it narcissism? Yes – and an irresponsible narcissism at that. But (have you noticed that my blogs pivot around a phoney and contrived statement of this kind, just as surely as Sex and the City always circulates around a question Carrie poses at her laptop …) is this a narcissism that would allow me to fall in love not with myself, but something which distorts, blurs and finally erases my image?

The Work

Work and rest - the same? I fear rest, empty hours, time without stucture. I work to consume rest, to use the day, the open, endless day, as fuel for the work. The dream: there is nothing left but work - or, better, work is the day aflame, with nothing to burn but itself. But the work would work me away, too, until it stood sufficient unto itself, the star, perfectly sufficient. But isn't that to dream of another kind of repose? Of a kind of death, of a life sacrificed to the work that, in the end, does not need me?

Fate

Work is not the opposite of rest. Work and rest are not opposed if they follow one another, if they follow a secure rhythm. And when they don't? Rest becomes worse than idleness. Nothing is possible because everything is possible; the horizon is open. In one sense, it is like being a child, insofar as the future is not determined. But you know you are no longer a child, that you are a certain kind of person, that although everything is possible it is not possible for you as an agent, that is to say, as one who acts in the first person. Yes, anything is possible - but this means you are victim of blind fate, of the god's whims. And work? When you work too hard, the imposture upon which work is based reveals itself. You think you are the author of your actions, that your labours are under your control. But a kind of compulsion takes over - it mocks you, mocks you idea that it is you who are in control. In truth, once again, it is a question of fate, of compulsion, of the gods' whim. Work and rest: the same.

Time without Project

Horror of unemployment: the day is too long, too vast; there will be another day, as long and as vast and on forever. Not having nothing to do, but the feeling that whatever you did could not fill the vastness which beats against you as if asking the question (is it a question?) who are you? No - not a question, but a kind of interrogation: again and again you are made to account for yourself even as you are reminded that in the vast expanse of days you are nothing. No wonder I always try and carve time up into specific projects and tasks, to forestall the moment when I am up against nothing in particular, undetermined time. I fear it ... this is why I fear drifting, reading, writing, wandering. Yesterday, my office wasn't open. I couldn't escape my flat. I felt the same old horror ... I thought books could distract me, but reading Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Blanchot only exacerbated the problem. Then I remembered what someone wrote about Mahler: he was a neurotic, the great existential questions that resound in his work are those of a neurotic. But then I also remembered the pages on anxiety from Heidegger, which disclose the other side of neurosis. But Heidegger provides no solution, because it was not death I dreaded, but time without project.

Lost in books

The snow turned to slush and melted. Someone tried to break in the stairwell at my office, glass everywhere, a big hole in the glass so everything was locked up (there’s no heating there until the 5th, anyway). Town was quiet, nothing open, so I was here all day, reading, reading for ten hours or more (so far). No ideas, nothing. Watched The Sound of Music, Grease, and now What Women Want. Wrote something long on the image in Blanchot, but realised I was repeating myself and damn it the notion of the image, running through Levinas, Sartre and Bergson, was too slippery.

Read The Space of Literature to get clear about the murderously difficult pages on the neuter in The Infinite Conversation. I wanted to write on the ‘background’ in Blanchot’s recits. I would have distinguished between the narrative voice in 1) the epic, 2) the novel (with ‘characters’, self-identical egos, and a carefully realised world), 3) the recit, as adumbrated by Melville’s Moby Dick, Kafka’s The Castle, Breton’s Nadja and fully in evidence in Blanchot’s tales, which are marked by the dissolution of the characters, by a lack of ‘centre’, a ‘background’ which, imposing itself, absorbs the characters, allowing them to disappear. I would have observed that this absorption has the pattern of a repetition, a contentless repetition ...

Encounters

I don’t feel compelled to write ‘personal’ blogs now I’ve returned to the North. Why not? I remember the first pages of Breton’s Nadja, which develop a notion of selfhood that is linked to a frequenting of particular locales and meetings with particular people. – A notion which depends, above all, upon the encounter. Here, in the North, I read; I encounter books; I am surrounded by them. Last night I read chunks of several books by Ingmar Bergman. I underlined passages that seemed important to me; I came across passages I had underlined at another time, that attest to other encounters with the text. Who am I, then? The one who frequents the books of certain authors – and who watches certain films…. I am the locus of certain encounters. No, this is wrong. I think they haunt me, but in truth, I am the one who haunts particular works of art. Who am I? The dream of certain books; the reader, among other readers, whom they awaited. I am the one who lives in the space opened by the book. In the South I am orphaned; I am the one without books; but here in the North there are too many: this is why there is no room for ‘personal’ blogs.

Gubble, Gubble

I face you - but what do I face? For the most part, I know who you are - you are another of me, we belong to the same culture, we carve up the world in the same way. But what about the autistic child? My friend has just visited with his three kids. The middle one, though only three, has been diagnosed with autism. But I remember how my friend, as a child, was strangely removed from the rest of us. He and I were friends, it is true, and perhaps, for a long time, I was his only friend. What did he recognise in me? (Is it a matter of recognition?) Strange that his child, so remote, showed affection for me. And some recognition. I remembered the friendship I had enjoyed with his father, how, moving from another school, I was placed next to the odd kid with whom no one would sit. And I began to enter his world - this is what our friendship was: unilateral, dissymmetrical; there was nothing mutualistic.

Much later, I realised many of friends share a sense of the arbitariness of social and cultural roles, that this is what fascinated me in them. But what about me? Was I a kind of echo chamber for them? Was my passivity an opportunity of sorts for them to articulate a sense of their world - to conquer the world of another? But there is no sense of 'other', I was told this afternoon. Autism is an auto-matism - a return upon the Same, Ulysses saling out to return home. But this is a movement all of us trace. Autism, then, would be an exacerbation of the Same, an ultra-egoism. But that is not it either. For I was also told the autistic recognise one another. What do they recognise? Another opening of the world. Another person who constructs the world in a similar way. In this, they are like the rest of us, too. It is a question of degree. I suppose it is the sense of the construction of the world that is different. They know they have to construct a world. Because it does not precede them as it does for others. They are not the inheritors of the same world as their brothers and sisters. But they know, too, that their world is on the brink of collapse. (Think of the Schizoid child Mannie in Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip.)

Ask yourself this question: how did I become who I am? Is it a question of upbringing, of tradition, culture and so on? No doubt. All of us have to break with tradition in some sense or another; we are not replicants. But let's say you read, or you write. What do you inherit then? What has been given to you? There is something in the rhythm, the sonority of words, their physicality, their heaviness which reaches us 'before' culture. Is it nature? Is it a way in which the beauty and the glory of nature reveals itself to us? A kind of lyricism which resounds through all things? The world-soul of the romantics? No: it is the underside of culture - a kind of rind or crust without form or determinate content. Something like the promise of the dissolution of things. It is not rhythmical - nor is it musical like the spheres of the Pythagoreans. I fancied today that the autistic child is close, terribly close to this dissolution of the world and that that it was this they recognise in others, too. And my friendships, reaching back to my childhood? They began in a sense that the end of the world was near - that though it could not present itself as such, there was a partial apocalypse, a half-uncovering that showed itself all around us. Terror - because it was close. Joy - because we knew, because we possessed a secret knowledge.

The Impossible Journal

Don't reread your journals, notebooks or whatever (we all have them - stories we tell to ourselves, even when we know stories are something like lies - story fragments, bits of dreams, excerpts transcribed from books: our secret histories ...) - remember them in writing. Write from memory. But isn't there something we forget? I should try and relate this to the quotes from Visker's book on the unthought, writing about the unthought, the unthinkable from which we turn in order to write. The unthinkable - that 'merciful surplus' Kafka invokes - which allows writing to transmogrify the private musing, the confessed secret, the whispered story, the imaginary revenge. The unthought: I cannot retrieve it, which is to say, I cannot write of it directly. An indirect writing then? Perhaps all our writing - journals, letters and notes, scattered and carefully preserved - is written in indirection, in a movement bound not to truth, but to errancy. Write to become unknown - write not to know - write to receive (this is inspiration) non-knowledge. Today, I dream of the impossible journal, the journal with no pages and no writing - the journal that is like a flame burning only itself. Purity. The word before the first word. The contentless opening of writing.

The Impossible Work

I like the word, apocalypse just as I like the word, idiot. I used to think that together, they could name a strange new genre I was going to create: the idiot-apocalyptic. Idiotic, because is contacted upon itself, singular, apocalyptic, because this idiocy was the basis of a kind of uncovery. What was uncovered? Not truth - not the way the world is, if we understand the world as something 'out there', subsisting in itself like a giant object. No: a kind of errancy, an experience of that which keeps us from the truth in that traditional sense - which prevents the correspondence that would allow me to describe the world in a series of statements. Those statements are linguistic - they are made of language, and this is what I wanted to note: the fact that language is not translatable, that the way words are embedded in different languages and different idioms is particular, that meaning is contextural.

Of course, this is a commonplace, and no doubt I have expressed this extremely crudely. Still, I wanted to create a book of pure language - a block of writing that aimed at a certain autonomy, that did not seek to refer to anything outside of itself. And, insofar as it aimed in that direction, as it aspired to what I might call an absolute idiom - it was to be revelatory, laying bare language, just language, as it sends us on an infinite detour, as it refuses to present us with a backstop, a place of last resort. It was to be a writing of writing - writing writing writing, as I called it. An apocalypse of language. This was not a youthful folly, alas. I am still at it. Only the book, the work itself, shrinks and shrinks. I am already able to carry it around in a matchbox, like the sculptures Giacometti made before the war. Soon, the work will be made of a simple, unpronouncable word like the Tetragrammaton (I bet I spelt that wrong). Later still, the work will be nothing at all, an enigmatic gesture, a shrug, the Mona Lisa's smile. Then the work will erase itself entirely, and exist unto itself, having collapsed into itself, and separated itself from everything we can see and touch and know. But then it would have already, in disappearing, have drawn everything of our world into itself, and our world, the one we think is real, would be the traces of the work as it vanishes into itself. I think of the way in which, according to some theologies, the universe appeared because God departed, that everything we see is but a trace of his absence.

Am I a buffoon?

Of course as someone pointed out a while ago at another blog, there is something vastly enjoyable in writing masochistic blogs, as I tend to in my 'personal' section. He was quite right, and it was an important point. For a while, though - and perhaps it is still the case - I thought my buffoonery was my saving grace. Where does it come from? A sense of the imminence of the end, of the apocalypse - of absolute futility in the face of everything. And yet this is only a kind of egotism: why should the world be ending now, just when I appeared? You see, I am one of these people who like to think they are up against it, that they live in the last days. This is a kind of desire for revenge - a resentment against the contentedness of everyone around me, of the steady, basic happiness which others enjoy. Knowing this, I try to keep the pages on jouissance in Levinas's Totality and Infinity in mind, in which he writes of the joy of eating, of drinking, of inhabiting the world. And I try to remember Helene Cixous's The Book of Promethea, too - this is a book about love, an act of love.... I will not dare link this feeling of imminent apocalypse a 'philosophical' temperament, although I wonder what it would be do philosophy, whether this is possible, without a 'global' sense of things, without a way in which everything as it were gives itself to be experienced in a particular mood. Or, better, as if the everything - let us call it the world - attunes the incipient philosopher: that one begins to think philosophically when the world is given to me in its fullness.

How vague and empty this sounds! I remember the passages in Heidegger's What is Philosophy? on suffering, Leiden. Philosophy is always a matter of suffering, according to Heidegger. But then the word experience suggests suffering, undergoing, traversal ... is it, then, that the philosopher is attuned to a kind of tragedy in the passing away of things, of transcience? No, this is not it. Might one call tragic that sense in which we become conscious of our distance from nature? This may sound hopelessly abstract, but I think here of the protagonist of Tarkovsky's great film, Nostalghia (he asks us to keep the 'h' in the title). In the opening scenes of this underestimated film, we find a Russian librettist who has been driven by his translator to some church or another. He wanted to see the frescoes, which are famous (or do I misremember?) But he refuses to get out of the car. The translator enters the church. But he, the poet, the librettist, remains in the car. I find this marvellous. The car appears, and this is the opening shot of the film proper, finding its way across a misty moor. The church (are we shown the church) appears to be part of the order of nature, of the natural, in the same way as the moor, as the mist. Peasants pray in the church; the translator, a beautiful woman in grand clothing, cannot kneel. The priest tells her that peasant women come to the church to pray for children. Does she, the translator, want a child? Perhaps we are to understand she is a 'modern' woman - too modern for Tarkovsky. But this is not a simple 'sexism'. Perhaps the poet, who remains in the car, is more aware of the impossibility of entering the church. He is an exile - he knows he is, and not just from Russia. The nostalgia of the title of the film refers, perhaps, to the desire to return to a simpler harmony with nature - a harmony which is now impossible. Yes, we know Tarkovsky is a Christian, we can read the pages in Sculpting in Time which we might 'reactionary'. No doubt. But the film is more complex (all of Tarkovsky is complex - but this is the complexity, which is to say, the richness and the depth of life).

Perhaps I am wandering too far from my topic. And perhaps it is absurd to suggest that philosophy, philosophising, should be linked to a kind of nostalgia - that is born in a sense of diremption. Who am I? An opening of the world. But what is it that opens? Nature? No - a kind of difference from nature. Culture? - No, not culture, either. I wrote before of a naive feeling of apocalypse, of the imminence of the end. Now I will write of an acute awareness of finitude instead. How grand! Is this what one would call 'existentialism': the unbearable revelation that I will die and that no one can die for me: the revelation that I must yet bear if I am to live 'authentically'. No, it is not that, either. I think of another kind of awareness - not of the end of things, but of their endlessness; not of an absolute limit of my life, but the dissolution of the limit. This, however, is still too abstract. It is an awareness of the ways things return, of a sickening repetition, which is unbearable to the extent that I cannot situate myself with respect to it. Sometimes, I wonder whether the music of Smog is is written, played from the experience in which I know I am no longer separate from dread.

Buffoonery, then: is it a matter of a simple masochism? Or a way of affirming the farcical way in which we are claimed and reclaimed by an experience that barely allows us to survive intact? An experience that all but tears us from ourselves? Which returns of itself, which lays claim to us not because it can, but because it must. A kind of fate, then - or what the ancients would call fate. But now look at me: I have transformed my buffoonery into something serious. Or, perhaps, buffoonery is the only response in which the experience in question can be affirmed - and I think here of the humour of Smog, of Samuel Beckett, and even of the joy that fills the tales of Blanchot and Duras. Buffoonery: above all, there is the laughter of Bataille, whose laughter is bound to what he calls death, but I have called dread (how to reread Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety whilst forgetting Heidegger)? I should substantiate these points ... instead, I would like to remember a conversation with W about a writer, X, who had produced a book on a philosopher we both admire. We were drunk, of course, and I said (or was it W?): 'the book is excellent, of course, but did he feel compelled to write it? Was it a matter of life and death?' We were drunk, as I have said, I was given to grandiloquence. But I said it (or was it W?): philosophy demands a kind of buffoonery, a sense that all this - books about books about books, scholarship and conferences - is somehow beside the point. Which is not to say, either, that one can think without writing, or that academia would simple be something to despise. The question is, rather, how to mark ourselves with a lightness, a joy, a laughter, a drunkenness, a buffoonery which affirms the experience in which philosophy might begin today.

The Innocence of Reading

There are great periods of reading - you remember them! What do you remember? A time when you weren't as busy as you are now - a youthful time perhaps, when you didn't know what you were, or, better, when you experienced this non-knowing much more acutely. Imagine: there was a time when your future hadn't hardened into a particular career, when you weren't bound to a particular flat or to a particular town or even to a particular country, when your future was indeterminable. Two memories: listening to the radio one morning in a period of unemployment in my late teens and reading Mishima's Sea of Fertility at 20, at the same age at which the reincarnated protagonist dies: common to both - an experience of the future, the open future. At that time, it was possible to wander the streets without melancholy. To dream of books not yet written. And above all, to read. In one go, the Russians: Anna Karenina then War and Peace, the four great novels of Dostoevsky, Fathers and Sons and Spring Torrents by Turgenev, and others too. Or the complete D.H. Lawrence, every novel, story, poem and letter. Or, one after another, the poetry, plays and prose of Beckett, the filmscripts of Bergman, Strindberg's plays in two volumes.... You get the idea: reading, then, was innocence. I wasn't even sure of my taste. This is why I read everything by Henry Miller, too - but didn't look at his Tropics until recently, when I found them ghastly.

But now - what do I read, now? On one level, a great deal - I am always reading, I read furiously, one book after another. But reading is now bound up with the concrete act of writing - no longer the vague, open ended dream of books without genre, but real essays and real books, which have to be completed to a deadline. Do I read? Am I ever claimed by reading? Or do I claim reading, subordinating my encounter with particular books, particular authors, to my current plan or project. It is even worse with films. I am ashamed ... I watch TV constantly, of course, any old rubbish. I only watch films on TV, or, when I am ill, action thrillers. Hulk, X Men 2 ... now you know what sort of person I have become. Once it was only Tarkovsky, Bresson, Bergman, Antonioni, Kurasawa, Misoguchi ... even Kieslowski was too low for me (I am laughing as I write this). But you see, I watch films to 'relax' - I am like the convicts in Sullivan's Travels, it's laughable. Only recently did I re-watch Tarkovsky's oeuvre (on video! which is to say, I didn't see them) but that was in order to write about them.

Patience

Do you wait for an idea to occur to you before you write it down? Or do you just write in order to let an idea as you occur as you write? Well, you will already know my answer: I write, and if I have ideas (and I'm not sure I do), they arrive through writing. There is merit in forcing oneself to write. I remember a marvellous interview with Will Oldham, where he remembers forcing himself to masturbate daily, as an exercise. This was in the great period when he wrote the first songs to be released under various Palace related monickers. Once upon a time, I forced myself to write 750 words a day. At that time I wanted to be a writer, though I didn't know of what. To somehow write writing itself, as if that were possible. How absurd! How pretentious! But it became clear that I had no gift for writing. And I must admit - although I am ashamed of this - I share Breton's unease (oh, alright - contempt) for the details novelists tend to amass. How stupid! How can forget the details in the opening passages of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove! Or Portrait of a Lady! I am forced to admit that I am simply impatient, and foolish enough to believe in a form of writing that is more 'essential' than other forms. Yes, impatience and foolishness are the sins that prevent me, these days, from reading novels. This, of course, I tell myself in consolation, is because of the claims on my time made by teaching, administration and research. But it is these claims I should learn to resist. Jospovici's The Present awaits me. How can I find the patience, the non-foolishness that would allow me to read, to read, that book?

The First Writer

Taking up once again my reflections on the quotation from Kafka (a few blogs ago). The strength to write – to write something on the page is the strength to bear a weakness and receptivity. The power, the ‘merciful strength’ of writing gives way to reading. I read what I write, I am surprised by ‘my’ words and surprised by the power of writing, the world it opens. I am strong and then weak. I must be strong enough to bear the weakness, and weak enough not to be overwhelmed by strength.

My experience: I kept a journal. And soon – a couple of years – it addressed itself to the theme of writing, no: to writing itself, its uncanniness. Remember Stock on Augustine (a few blogs ago): when it is no longer supposed that my ‘confession’ allows me to rest in God, when I no longer, like Augustine, confess before the God who is my witness and thereby bound together, gathered into an identity, I can experience, I am given over to experience, the dispersal linked to writing.

Deleuze claims he only writes, sits down to write, when he had an idea. Perhaps this is the attitude of the philosopher (but Husserl wrote every day …) The writer is, in this sense, not a philosopher. It is a question of writing in order to discover, of writing blind. Now I think of Sarraute, whom I must write about (later today, perhaps), of Lispector’s The Passion of G.H., of Lawrence’s poems on tortoises (Deleuze admires them – I discovered that the other night), of Cixous’s The Book of Promethea: writings of approach, acts of attention. Writing is a kind of net cast into the future (think of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem in his son’s film Mirror) or a web that bears the wind from the future (think of Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka).

I’m hoping to receive a contract for a book called Blanchot’s Testimony this week. The readers’ reports are favourable. Now it is a matter of my potential editor taking the proposal to a meeting…. The first passages of Blanchot I read were quoted in that dreadful biography of Foucault by James Miller (I picked it up by chance in Reading Library). I copied them into a notebook (writers, would be writers, always keep notebooks). I should add (but what does it matter), it took many years to be able to write ‘about’ Blanchot. Still I recognised what he presented as the experience of writing from the start. Thus my failure as a writer gave birth to my ‘success’ (how laughable!) as a commentator.

Blanchot:

Apparently we read only because what is written is already there, laying itself out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first one to write, the one who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was hardly responding to the demands of a view requiring a reference point and giving it a meaning; rather, he was changing all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less – a subtraction of matter, a hollow in relation to a relief. Then what was it? A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it. And there was no second reader because reading, from now on understood as the vision of a presence immediately visible, that is to say intelligible, was affirmed precisely in order to make this disappearance into the absence of the book possible.

Caliban and Ariel

To write, I am unhappy is already to belie that unhappiness. Can I be unhappy if I can write? And why write of unhappiness – does this confirm it and thereby deepen the same unhappiness? I’m going to quote it again, my favourite passage from Kafka’s Diaries:

I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness -- my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness -- sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?

A surplus of strength: to confess is, as Stock might argue (see my previous blog), to enter into the play, irony, theatrics, or ambiguity that opens when I write. Who am I? I have left a trace; what I have written has form, content. It is not simply a record of my unhappiness, since, when I write, I have, in a sense, left myself behind. Why, then, did I desire to write ‘I am unhappy’? It is a ‘merciful strength’, according to Kafka. Merciful because it lifts me from my unhappiness. Because, it might lift me, in some sense, from myself. I begin to write. Towards what? For whom? I write … and writing itself fascinates me. I can make grief sing; unhappiness becomes lyrical. But there is the danger in the very ease of writing. As you know, I like to write; it is, after all, something to do in the evening. It opens a vista before me, I can look into the distance. I write and I feel pleasant rhythms traverse me, it is sheer relief. But it is also a temptation to complacency.

Writing, as Mishima writes in Sun and Steel, which I was rereading last night, is like a horde of white ants that eat up everything. He remember words pouring through him like rain when he was a very young child. He learnt to speak, to write, before everything, he recalls. In so doing, he loses the world.

Mishima supposes that it is the body, the interior of the body that is lost to writing. He became a bodybuilder, a martial artist; he formed his own militia. In the end, he committed hari-kari, opening himself as if to the blazing sun. This was a way of escaping writing. But on the day he stormed the military headquarters and took a Japanese army General captive, before taking his own life, he delivered the final pages of his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is as though he sought to affirm a strength against strength, to fight the great ease he felt in writing with the ardour and discipline of physical training. Remember how much he wrote – a truly enormous quantity of material, across a variety of genres.

A strength against strength – I prefer Bataille’s attempt to write against discourse itself. ‘Experience is in the first place a struggle against the spell in which useful language holds us’ ('Socratic College', 16). It is as though Bataille would make the white ants devour themselves, to reach that point where there is nothing, just silence, affirming itself without content. Of course it one cannot remain at that point – to reach the summit is to experience decline. Nevertheless, the task is to shatter the forms.

To have that strength! But I have had to learn to write, it did not come easily (I haven’t learnt … I am learning). It is as though there is something tangled in me that prevented me writing in clear prose. A fundamental absence of grace. Which means I am attracted to authors whose work exhibit grace. I am an admirer of the beautiful perhaps because, like Caliban, I envy Ariel. But Bataille and Mishima are both Ariels; the grace and beauty of writing comes easily to them. Witness Bataille’s perfect novella, My Mother, which Mishima praises. All the more extraordinary then are shattered texts like The Impossible, ‘Method of Meditation’, ‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’ where Bataille becomes Caliban. And Mishima? Mishima becomes Caliban only in taking his own life.

Confession

When I was child, I wanted to write a book that would document everything that happened in a day. I would try and fail to remember the most trivial occurrence. Years later, leaving my teens, I kept a diary in which I forced myself to write 750 words a day (why that amount?). I did not reread it until, many years later, I was stranded between teaching contracts and moved back to the house in which I grew up. I discovered the diaries had become notebooks, rather like these blogs, in which I copied out sections of favourite texts. I did not read what they call 'serious' literature until I was around 20 - or rather, I was not fascinated with it, though I had struggled through Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain a couple of years earlier. So the diaries contain excerpts from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, from Stig Dagerman's The Burnt Child, Cioran's A Short History of Decay and others in the Quartet Encounters series, as well as the poetry of Ungaretti, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and others in translation, in that series from Penguin in the 1960s. I read Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Broch's The Sleepwalkers ... and I find long quotes from Kafka's Notebooks, from Rilke's Malte Laurrids Brigge ...

Why am I writing this? Unlike Blanchot who only seems to reminisce about episodes in his life that others have already written about (think of the episode with the lawyer in 'For Friendship', which Robbe-Grillet had discussed in an autobiography, or The Instant of my Death which reprises what others had written about (I've forgotte whom)), I will not restrain myself from writing about myself. How vulgar. But is this what I am doing? Am I confessing? Am, I, in writing about reading, writing about myself?

No one else could write my confession: I testify to experiences to which only I am in a position to testify. Remember the Confessions of Augustine - it is only in the confession to God, the addressee of his book, that the self can assemble itself, can gather itself together. The self becomes an 'I' in the retreat from the 'public' realm. But this retreat is marked by a written confession. Words are essentially public; I testify, but I do so in a language and an idiom that I inherit. For Augustine, it is only with language that memory can appear; the self can only be formed through the use of language, which is to say, when it is open, through language, through speech, to a community. It is only with language and communication that self-consciousness, and an awareness of sinfulness can arise.

The following is excerpted from an article by Joseph Kronick, where he paraphrases Brian Stock's 'The Self and Literary Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,' New Literary History 25 (1994), 842:

Whereas Augustine, Stock argues, granted only a limited role to psychological intentions, the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the increased attention given to questions of reading and writing, "saw the emergence of the modern view that human thinking is chiefly characterized by intentionality." Stock traces a transformation from literary representations of the self that serve as spiritual exercises for the reader as much as for the writer, if not more so, to "the first-person meditation by the self-conscious reader or writer." He implies that with the rise of independent literary techniques and the demise of the "charismatic" authority of the biographical subject, the capacity to portray inwardness is lost.
This would mean, I take it, that inwardness is no longer rendered, as in Augustine, by the placing of the understanding of self in God and thereby limiting the representational capacity of words. The paradox is that once inwardness is characterized by "forces within the individual alone," writing gains independence from oral and devotional traditions at the expense of the authority of the self. Stock concludes, "The historical move from charismatic non-writing into routinely understood literary genres has the long-term effect of depriving the autobiographical mode of its ability to characterize this inwardness without play, irony, theatrics, or philosophical ambiguity. As the ancient theory of imitatio deteriorates, writing turns out to be a mirror image of nothing more substantial than itself." With the greater sophistication of literary techniques comes a destabilizing of the self; which, Stock suggests, is a by-product of nominalism and the "detaching of linguistic intentions from their realist underpinnings."
[...]
Whereas Augustine's inner self is given him by God, we find in later writers that "[t]he self no longer resonates with its own inwardness but with the inner meaning of the texts read, written, and mentally recreated." The inner self is no longer conceived, after the manner of Augustine, as a reflection of God's image, but now emerges in the dialogue with other texts to be represented through literary tropes and schemes. For Augustine's audience, reading the Confessions required that they reflect on their own lives with the view of the creation of the self, but the decline of imitatio leaves the self with nothing more to reflect on than its insubstantial image in writing and reading.

I quote at length because I find the argument so engaging. I write, I confess, but what is it that I confess, and to whom do I make this confession? I have no direct access to inwardness - there is no 'witness' who determines the cohency of the one who 'confesses'. I confess, I bear witness, but to no one in particular. I can no longer rest in God.

It is, perhaps, with that realisation - with the slipping away of the adolescent dream of expressing myself - that dream which has, in a certain sense, taken over the place of God in stabilizing a self - my voice was supplanted as I wrote. Now it seemed appropriate only to write of what I read. To assemble, out of those texts, not a coherent self, but the affirmation of a play, irony, theatrics, or ambiguity to resound in the place where I once thought I could express myself.