Spurious

That's all for now

Well, that's it for Spurious for the time being. This weblog has been up for almost exactly 6 months. I've got a book to finish by December 15th, so I'll post only very intermittently until then.

'Nietzsche has broken me'

Interesting tidbit on Heidegger. Gadamer reports in a Century of Philosophy Heidegger said over and over again in his later years: 'Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht' - 'Nietzsche has broken me'.

Here's another one. Gadamer is speaking.

... I asked him once, 'Why did you leave your posthumous papers to that national archive in Marbach? After all, one can't work properly with your things there at all - they don't have a philosophical library'. 'Yes, yes', he said, 'I know that, of course. I could have left it all to the Freiburg library where I was a professor. But ultimately I found out from my son that they have very deep treasure troves in Marbach where many treasures are buried'. Did there have to be?' I asked. 'No', he replied, 'but my writings aren't all that important now'. 'Apparently not' I said. 'No', he answered, 'what's important to me is that we now arrive at a new direction - that humanity achieve a new kind of solidarity'.

The Holy be my Word

Holderlin, from 'Wie Wenn am Feiertage ...'/ 'As when on a Holiday'

Jetz aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,
Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come.
And what I saw, the holy be my word.

Blanchot complains of the French translation: ‘Et ce que j'ai vis, le Sacré soit ma parole', 'And what I saw, the holy, may it be my word’. Rather: 'le Sacré soit ma parole'. One does not speak the holy, the holy is speech – the poet’s speech. The holy: here it is a name for the immediate. But why is this? Consider Hart's remarks on Blanchot on God:

For Blanchot, who is writing on behalf of literature, "God" stands for any immediate singularity, since that which transcends all concepts and that which falls beneath them are both ineffable. Literature wants precisely what it cannot have, the absolutely singular, and it cannot have it because this singularity is destroyed by the very conceptuality that makes literature possible.

Elegantly put. Desire: lierature's desire to invoke what refuses to call under the generality of the concept. What, then, did the poet see? Perhaps, Blanchot comments, ‘nothing more than the present of this wish, this provoking resolution that gathers in an intimacy of belonging and through an already sacriligeous contact the holy and speech in the space of the extremity of desire’. The poem desires. But what does it desire? That the holy and speech might come together; that one might speak of the absolutely singular. But this is impossible to the extent that the language which the poet is obliged to use remains passes over the singular in favour of the universal. Then the desire of the poem must be without issue. Char: 'Le poème est l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir'.

Can you say what it is impossible to say? It is a question, here, not of rendering the impossible possible (naming it -), but responding to what withdraws from the possibility of signification. And yet the impossible does not lie beyond the possible in the manner of a frontier. Above all, the impossible is not a term. It is not ‘in’ the poem nor anywhere else. It is neither the one nor the other – it is nothing but the relation itself, desire reaching out to what it cannot possess.

Outside

‘Outside language’: outside the language we take to be at our disposal. Words substitute themselves for singular experiences. No: the experiences themselves are already mediated, according to their significance in a system of discourse. But this significance, the sign they are made to bear, the values they are made to reflect, does not exhaust the being of language.

The language of the immediate – this is only a very crude way of invoking the excessiveness of language above signs and values. Language as indication – language which points beyond its letter in the manner of Apollo at Delphi; language as the speech of Pythia which calls for an interpretation which can never have the last word: this is an unsubstitutable experience. Singularity marks itself on the body of language. It is inscribed there.

Exhausted language, frayed language: perhaps it is not a question of the being of language but that experience which prevents language from suggesting any kind of permanence or stability. Language which does not posit. Irresponsible language? Certainly it is spurious (of dubious birth) – its illegitimacy arouses the philosopher’s suspicions: here is a language which will not settle itself into a thesis. A sceptical language (although scepticism is also philosophy). It is never a question of leaving philosophy behind, but of opening in philosophy, as philosophy, the experience which scepticism names.

Maintain this opening in the name of philosophy. In the name, perhaps, of what Kant called critique, or Husserl phenomenology: an awakening or vigilance, an insomnia which awakens us from a world which cannot help but totalise itself, lending itself to a movement of identification. Philosophy, scepticism: these names events in language. Events which find a locus in a certain kind of writing. In literature? – Yes, in a certain experience of literature. In what is called ‘ethics’? This word is too imposing. Write, simply, of the opening to the Other. An opening which is neither good or bad. Which marks itself into the play of language.

Etymologism

Heidegger links the phy- of physis to the pha- of phainesthai (a coming to light) in order to think the ‘first’ beginning of philosophy, to open up aletheia, the element that allowed the Greeks to think without revealing itself to them as the origin of their thinking. Is this not to yield to the temptation of an etymology, a kind of philology which would somehow supplant the demands of philosophy? A demand which is maintained, in Heidegger, when philosophy itself is supposed to safeguard the null ground, das Nichtige grund?

Authority of etymology: the privilege of words and roots of words, a journey upstream to the secret roots to which words are filiated. A dream of a ‘natural’ element of thinking - a secret law which binds our thinking. The sense that in the ‘root’ of a word would lie its proper meaning, and that language itself is the play of such dried up roots which have forgotten their original enrootedness in a natural language. The sense of an ancient day which would have bequeathed to us everything we can or should think: the ‘first’ beginning in accordance with which we, ‘Europe’, the ‘West’ were destined. Of the day from which was first sent those great words according to whose presence the vitality of language can be measured. Of a becoming of language bound to an origin but also to a certain notion of history, of destiny, and to the inner homogeneity of an eschatology.

Beginning and end are linked. History as a kind of regress. The first beginning – the pre-Socratics is bound to our condition at the end of this history. Language is a straying that strays along one parth. Remember, too, Heidegger dreams also of the ‘other’ beginning – of what he calls the Ereignis.

Objection: how else can one construct a genealogy of those concepts which are closest and most commanding (think of Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the words good and bad)? How else might we understand what we are given to think? Besides, etymology, philology, is only one weapon in the philosopher’s armoury.

Counter-objection: the sanctification of language is a great risk – too great as long as one does not retain a kind of scepticism towards language. Scepticism towards the idea of origin as original presence. Scepticism as it would maintain, instead, the immemorial that is at play within language. What does this mean? Renounce the power of words, of a saying whose trace can only be discovered through etymology. Powerless words: no longer confirming the unity of a synthetic language. Strange diachrony that would allow the word to happen in two times – on the one hand, the word of history, whose origin one might trace, which lends itself to philology, to etymology, and on the other, the word which falls outside history, whose origin cannot be traced to an originary presence (even an originary relation between presence and absence, detectable only after the fact, as in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks). To what, then, can one trace it? Scepticism: a distrust in the language which one is nevertheless obliged to trust: limitless suspicion of those who would build the house of being on the shifting sands of language.

Shades

When you speak a kind of substitution occurs. Speak and the words you speak, if they are to be intelligible, are not your words; others have said them and others still will say them; there are always others to say the same, as if, over an infinite expanse of time, it is the same that would be repeated, the same sentences in the same order (however dubious this cosmological hypthesis might be). No escape: then language itself is infinite, everywhere, it is the condition of our experience over which we assert only a borrowed mastery. No exit! It is as if language were a fine, glistening web that had spread over everything, covering our faces and our mouths: impersonal horror. But this is still to evince nostalgia for a true speech, for an uncovered mouth, for an edenic language which would name everything again.

Proceed in another direction. It is a question of what is outside the movement of sense and was outside from the start. But outside with respect to what? With respect to the language that places itself at my disposal. For the most part, language functions. And when it does not? When I lose my power over language? When the capacity to speak, to find a word, fails me? When I fall from my capacity to express myself? Then I am lost in the frozen ocean where words emerge from the obscurity like ice-bergs, drifting, vast and in their stillness, they no longer offer themselves as the means by which I might communicate with others. My words? No one's words, for the ship of meaning has shattered against them and gone under.

Stranded words. Now they are detached even from the possibility of exchange, like coins from an abandoned currency. Yet, like those coins, obscure markers, they become nonsubstitutable, valuable to no one. Who would dare linger in their presence? Only those who have to linger there, for whom speaking, writing, for one reason or another, is no longer possible. But for these powerless speakers, another substitution has occured. Who are they, as they speak, as they fail to speak? Who are they, the ones stranded amid words (and not only words, but sentences, too - tendrils which lead nowhere)? Those who fall beneath the power to appropriate language and thereby outside the world which, through communication, is held in common.

Sisyphus

I admit it: I am completely lost before the massive task of writing the new book. I am too busy at work, for one thing: there are constant administrative tasks and a huge flood of essays to mark. Then there is a low level illness which prevents me from ever assembling any thoughts, or following from one idea to another. Still, these are good days: summer is here, my loud neighbour has moved out, I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour.... But the frustration of falling below the level of work!

The Sisyphean task, every day, to take out my notebook and try and write from what I have written there – it is absurd, work without work, a wheel idly spinning and nothing is done. A list of posts I shall have to write to fill in gaps in the book on my whiteboard: Levinas on illeity, the fragment, Hegel on Heraclitus, and, most bafflingly: exteriority – being (how pretentious!) Then there is W.’s book manuscript on a similar topics to my published book and the one I am writing with which I torment myself with – am I right? Is he right? We can’t both be right! What does it matter who is right? Isn't it philosophy that is at issue - the attempt to do philosophy (whatever that means)?

Doing philosophy? What a luxury! And one you can’t afford! You are a writer, a humble writer, I say to myself, knowing straightaway this is sheer affectation. Still there is the chance of redeeming the first book in the second – this is the ruse: write another book, always another, to erase the mistakes of the last one. But to write another book is to make new mistakes, so the path to yet another book is cleared.

Sisyphean task! Laughter at the great comedy of the academic writer. Who will read the book? What does it matter? It’s exhausting – it exhausts me! Where did I learn that ponderous style? Here I am, at the office. On a Saturday at the beginning of summer. Tomorrow, the Lake District – that is a consolation. Today – is too long; I know nothing will begin, that what failed to begin yesterday and all the other days will fail again today.

The Day of Judgement

Herodotus is said to have called an end to the time of myth and opened the period of history, at least here in the West. This is still an age of myths, as if we belonged to the era Herodotus had already left behind - the time of the epic, of great causes and triumphal victories. The mythical age is not over - it lingers yet in the war without end which opened more than two years ago - itself the continuance of what perhaps the word 'war' cannot reach: an unsettled and impersonal struggle that has long spread across all the nations on the globe. Yes, it is still mythic, this war, for as long as Bush pretends to be the conscience of the world.

And Blair? Who is Blair pretending to be? 'Do you pray together?' Jeremy Paxman asked him of his relationship to Bush in a studio not far from here? 'No we don't pray together, Jeremy', said Blair. Then I remember Alistair Campbell's comment of the PR machinery that surrounds the Prime Minister: 'we don't do God.' What do they do instead? Appeal to the great end which would justify the means: democracy for the Middle East, an end to a destructive regime etc.: a humanitarian cause. Impressive if it were true - but we are too sceptical to believe that and to believe anything from our politicians. There is a strange severing of the populace from their leaders. A dream: the public becomes unpredictable, wayward; apathy gives way to militancy; there is a general refusal of myth.

And the Enlightenment dream that myth will disappear? This is perhaps our hope, and it may be a vain one: the great evil against which we are enlisted to struggle will be exposed as the last shadows of an ancient myth. And the great good? The great humanitarian cause? Wake up, sober up: the broken, humilated body of the Iraqi prisoner refuses to be reappropriated by a mythical humanitarianism. Do not try and justify torture as royal road to happiness for all. This would be to accede to oldest theodicean and cosmodicean myth which survived right up to the concentration camps: everything will be justified, everything will come right in the end.

Is it the absence of myth that we see in the photographs of the tortured bodies of Iraqi prisoners? Will others see it, too? This is the time of the digital camera and the internet. Of technology and the atom bomb. Horrible and wonderful, it could be the new technology which allows us to witness evidence of the tortured and the dead which will finally drive myth from the world. This is naive, hopelessly so - who would counterpose myth and technology in any simple minded way when it was technicians who designed the great places of extermination? And why should one expect the public to believe incidents of torture are anything but exceptional?

Dream of the end of the myth, of a new age in which a utopian future does not justify terror in the present. When every day is as the last day, the day of judgement and no theodicy or cosmodicy could justify a present injustice.

Fat Singers

Conversation with W., who likes it when I whine here at Spurious. I haven’t written for the past few days, I tell him, because I feel a little ill. Write about being ill, he says, I like it when you whine. He reminds me I ripped him off in comparing Cat Power to Josephine the Mouse Singer a few posts ago (he is right of course). Then he reminds me how much we admired the singers at All Tomorrow’s Parties who 1) were fat (or at least plump), 2) swigged wine out of bottles, 3) had tattooes – i.e., the guy from Modest Mouse and the guy from Arab Strap. Both were slightly menacing, too – the guy from Modest Mouse reprimanded people in the crowd for throwing flyers at the band and both were self-deprecating.

Yes, we liked these singers, we felt (as I said at the time) in the presence of greatness as much as we disliked Vincent Gallo. I had already agreed with W. to let myself get obese, but he reminds me that my new hobby of hillwalking is an obstacle to this plan. I tell him I walked 33 miles last weekend and he says, you’re always like that – you throw yourself into something, and then you know how it ends up? In tears, I say. W. and I speak of our vehement dislike of administration and bureaucracy. I speak wistfully about writing a book on ethics next year. I’m tired of commentary, I tell him. But what are you going to say?, he asks me. I don't know.

Icebergs

Once, it was verse that was the highest mark of literature; prose was humdrum, servile, but poetry was so lofty it had to be protected by rules and codes which made of it a monument. The novel, modest beast, was a device to render worlds, to reflect the world back to itself: no longer, like the poem, was it a mantic work, a work of divine inspiration, but a genre which answered the measure of the human being. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I wanted to express my experience of…’ Sober, industrious, the labour to produce a novel is analogous to that of producing things in the world: novelist as craftsworker – and if the novel has been compared to a loose, baggy monster, it is a domesticated beast, which works alongside us in making a world.

To make a world – to confirm an order – to raise great edifices on the earth: without doubt, the novel is a virtuoso’s genre: there are so many ways to celebrate our civilisation and the principles that underlie it. But the world opens itself as against a resisting force: call it earth, this movement of self-occlusion, this withdrawal within the things of which you would write and within writing itself.

Rilke: ‘Earth, is this not what you want, to be reborn invisible in us?’; Char: ‘shifting earth, horrible, exquisite’; Van Gogh: ‘I am attached to the earth’. A difficult thought: a writing which is no longer born of power, be it the power to express oneself, or to articulate a world. A weak writing if the word ‘weak’ didn’t suggest that one measure its non-power according to the measure of power. It is as though the words were made of the clay of the field or the surf on the water – of obdurate rock and the broad sky. But these are only ways of writing about a withdrawal or reserve which can in no way be understood in terms of what we call nature.

Perhaps, then, ‘earth’ is the wrong name for this reserve, suggesting an easy paganism: the sacred groves and wood-nymphs which belong to a seductive archaism. Still, it provides a useful analogy in suggesting what happens when language no longer offers itself as a medium through which the world might be represented: for it is possible to write that language becomes heavy and resistant, that words themselves become like the great blocks of granite which were assembled to make ancient monuments. But the power to utter these great, block-like words fails our writer, and even the power to write.

The power to write? Yes – the freedom to say anything and to say it in any way at all; to say everything and to say it in every way. But what is this anything and everything when compared to the experience I am trying to sketch here? Anything, everything: it is as though the author was the master of the infinite, the demiurge who can make a world. But then, by the same stroke which opens the world to him as what can be rendered on the page, the author is deposed and made to wander the same world as a stranger.

Master of the infinite? The author, now, is a wanderer in an infinite space without abode. But is it the earth in which the author is exiled – the natural realm in which he can still draw joy from the beauty of the foliage, from the birds, beasts and flowers and the great vault of the sky? But our author isn’t even the mad, blind King Lear on the moor. Space without place, time without initiative: what is left to the one who is delivered over to what we cannot call the earth?

I have already written about the fascination which can lay claim to the literary author. Today I imagine it as a half-frozen sea across which great icebergs drift. Only those icebergs are great, frozen words, as simple as ‘and’ or ‘but’, but which are hardened into a grand immensity. Simple words frozen in the distance between the writer and the work and against which the ship of meaning is wrecked and dragged under.

But even this image is too comforting. Think instead of the husks of an exploded star - of the dark, infinitely dense mass which collapses into the black hole into which all sense disappears: the secret centre of the work that unravels from within. Then the sentences of the novel are infinitely stretched as they disappear across the event horizon as one by one they fall into the darkness wherein all light disappears. And the novelist? He is strewn with his sentences like darkness across darkness, a galaxy of dark points upon darkness.