Spurious

Hordes

The clocks had gone forward without my noticing it. I rose at nine, not eight; I thought Popworld was on early. This is a work weekend: four whole days in which to write, following weeks of administration and bureaucracy (and similar weeks to come: the QAA, the audit …) But as with all work weekends, comes a time when you are too tired to work. I read James Lord’s splendid biography of Giacometti instead, which I found in London last weekend with R.M.

I should have gone out last night, I say to myself. That way, awakening, I would still be borne on the memories of the night before. Friends and company are essential to work, I know this now. That’s what Giacometti said to those who claimed his sculpture indicated his more general concern with solitude. Not at all, he said. Of course, he was our many nights with prostitutes. Then friends called at his studio.

What should I write today? A passage on the positive infinite in Hegel and the spurious infinite in Blanchot. A paraphrase of a small section of W.’s book. Finish off that little piece on Gillian Rose. All for the book, which has to be ready very soon. I still don’t have a complete first draft. If I was W., I would spend another year polishing the book, paring it down.

Yes, that’s what I would write, but I’m too tired. I am not in the office yet; the flat is warm but dark; I listen to Beck’s Sea Change, which is much better than I remembered. But my pot plants are shedding leaves, and the kitchen is messy. I haven’t rehung the pictures and mirror I took down when the new wallpaper went up.

New blogs appear. One reminds me of a conversation I have with friends on the phone about the fate of departments of philosophy. ‘So what of Warwick?’ The answer approximates to: ‘it has fallen’, which means the hordes have arrived and taken over. As though I were receiving battle reports like one of the doomed race of men in The Lord of the Rings (what of Rohan?).

I walked to the quayside yesterday, which I never do, and never alone. But I couldn’t write anymore; tired, I thought I’d risk a walk in the outdoors because I was content with what I had done; I was even moved by the introduction to the new book. But I remembered what Beckett said to Van Velde of a new picture of which the artist declared himself proud: ‘there’s no reason to be’.

Horror of philosophy: never a corner in which to hide and do your work. Always the biggest themes: truth, freedom, justice which demand to be spoken of. There’s no refuge. I always dream of escaping to another subject; I spend my time with musicians and with theorists of music and envy the determinacy of their subject matter. With philosophy there’s always too much at stake. And then there’s my miserable hackery: the desire to write, to write and all the while with nothing to say.

Still, the hordes are coming. Polite, well-meaning, they don’t even know they are hordes. They bring with them that facility in speaking, they speak, everything is easy, there’s a framework in which everything is to be done. What was the name of that famous horde member who said to the Chinese: there’s a way of doing philosophy which has sorted out all the basic problems? And then – wonderful irony – the Chinese took to Heidegger instead, or at least that is what I heard.

Plural Speech

But what is called speech in Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. The unknown – but what does this mean? That which breaks with the idea that everything yields itself up to the measure of intelligibility, lending themselves to that great synchronisation through a world or cosmos comes to appear in its seamless continuity.

What does this mean? The relation to the Other is not part of those relations which measure the copresence of things according to the powers and capacities of human intellection. Heidegger voids the substantial subject, presenting instead the ecstatic leap into the future, the stretching out towards death. From where does Dasein leap? There is no ‘there’ understood as a substantial unity. Yet for Blanchot it is as though Dasein has to come to itself such that the leap might be taken, to assemble itself – to be assembled – into that site where existence itself would become possible.

The experience of suffering will always be Blanchot’s model for that experience in which this act of assembling is undone. Suffering should be understood negatively only from that perspective wherein what is most important is to preserve the unity of the self. But there is also a sense, for him, in which the suffering which marks the relation to the Other as it undoes that unity is the condition of hope: as though the interruption accomplished as this relation would permit more than the respiration of the Same as it comes to itself or the labour of identification through which the world presents itself as what is known and knowable.

In this instant (in the suspension it accomplishes), the place I assume gives unto an experience which cannot be gathered into a unity. Who am I? ‘il’: the he or the it: the impersonal ‘subject’ of a detour which will not allow itself to come to term; the suspension of that reflexivity of the self which redoubles that great reflexivity through which the cosmos grants itself to the measure of the Same. ‘il’: not a subject nor the Da-sein which has already and always leapt from its site. ‘il’: the one in contact with the unknown such that the measure of knowing is interrupted. ‘Locus’ of a pathein which cannot be borne by subject or recuperated in what Heidegger calls authentic existing.

Who is the Other? The one I meet in that suffering which turns me from myself. Whose alterity is such that it cannot be grasped in terms of a particular attribute (the Other is not masculine or feminine, not old or young, neither famous nor obscure …) Is this a simple mysticism or theophany: the appearance of the Other as God was said to appear to Moses? But the Other does not appear as to an intact subject; it is not part of that great rushing forward of phenomena which the phenomenologist understands to be met by the rushing of a constituting intentionality. The Other as enigma, as the interruption of phenomenology: concentrated in these formulations is a conception of a relation which may be said to be without relation since it deprives itself of a ‘subject’ term (the ‘I’) and a stable ‘object’ (the presence of the thing alongside other things).

‘il’: ‘place’ of an indefinite suspension, the suffering without term to which nothing appears. The Other is, to this extent, invisible, if visibility is the measure of phenomenon. This means the Other cannot operate as the ‘object’ pole of a relation. A relation without relation: the ‘il’ ‘relates’ to the Other as to the unknown, the outside, the neuter not because it is reducible to, say, another expanse to be worked and transformed into the world, the cosmos, not to a dimension beyond this one – a heavenly place – but to what resists the constituting grasp of consciousness here and now. Here and now the encounter with the Other cannot be grasped. It is marked as a kind of trauma, as the awakening of an impersonal ‘il’, a vigilance without subject. And it is met by what Blanchot calls speech.

With what speech can one associate the ‘il’, a ‘no one’ incapable of speaking? Impossible speech – an address which cannot be traced back to the will of a subject or to an animating consciousness. A speech which erupts to break those signifying practices which allow us to name and speak of things in their absence and to grasp each singularity as a particular which would lie beneath a universal. A speech then which marks the suspension of the speaker and of the theme of the spoken. A speech which, in turn, cannot itself become a theme.

The ‘il’ addresses the Other. There is speech, upstream of the decision to speak (unless speech is understood in terms of the decision of the Other as it were ‘in’ me). Speech which is not met by the Other speaking in turn, as if, here, it were a question of reciprocity of exchange. Blanchot will follow Levinas in claiming the relation with the Other is unilateral and resists symmetry – a resistance which is not that of the master before the slave since the Other is encountered as the one who is vulnerable, as the widow or the orphan, as the proletariat – these expressions to be understood only as they indicate the way the Other solicits not only the speech which would acknowledge the Other’s alterity but also the desire to negate and have done with that alterity.

It is true, for Blanchot, I can become the Other for the one I relate to as the Other, but this breaks with any notion of exchange. What is given in such a criss-crossing of unilateral and dissymmetrical relations, in this redoubled relation without relation in which both parties become ‘il’ and then the Other in turn, is a double interruption. One which is confirmed in those friendships as Blanchot remembers existed between him and Bataille where it is not the content of what is said that is important, but the seriousness of a speech in which each acknowledges the other person as the Other in turn, and both experience, albeit traumatically, which is to say, upstream of conscious individuality, the interruption of the continuity of the cosmos.

Likewise, Blanchot will even allow for such relations to multiply themselves between those who, in demonstrating against injustices, refuse the prevailing authorities and even the measure of power: those who maintain themselves outside the play of those relations which govern the social whole. The community opened thus cannot last or gather itself into a movement of social reform but permits something like a revolution to flash up for a moment. A utopia – but only as long as interruption is permitted its play, leaping from one demonstrator to another. Still, the model of the relation to the Other remains intact: there is nothing mutual or reciprocal with respect to relation in question, not even in its redoubling or multiplication.

Lament

On the 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up from his family home by the French police; he was taken first to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. His daughter writes:

When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.

How is one to understand the echo of the lament in the sobbing of the children?

Plato’s objections to tragic art are ethical; it is said to bear upon a crisis which only the individual can suffer - upon, that is to say, the sphere of the private which Plato always distrusts insofar as it is set again what for him are the interests of the common. Why else does he advocate the distribution of children among members of the polis?

The danger, for Plato, is always that of the attachment to particulars rather than to the whole; the individual soul is always too protean, too unstable; loss of one to whom one is attached threatens instability; if it is to attain harmony this is only by relating itself to the common, to no one and to everyone, to attain that ideal distance which Alcibiades discerns when Socrates refuses his embrace.

Grief, then, is the danger. A danger which pushes forward in tragic art where, and Antigone is the most obvious example, grief is born of ties of kinship. ‘The law presumably says that it is finest to keep as quiet as possible in misfortunes and not be irritated....’ And the law of Plato’s ideal community will be such that it forces apart ties and attachment in order to eliminate the relations which, as Freud knew, were at the seat of tragic drama.

Tragic art calls forth that part of the soul which is ‘far from prudence [phroneseos], and is not a companion and friend for any healthy or true purpose’. And with the child who gre up to write Smothered Words? What becomes of the companion, the friend revealed in Kofman's mourning? One might say: hers is not a private mourning; she mourns not only for her father, but for all those who died.

Yet the ones who died, she reminds us, are emblematised by the figure of the Jew, the one who over and again will have been excluded from our community. ‘Auschwitz’, this ‘senseless breaking of the human race in two’ was, Kofman writes, ‘desired by the anti-Semites and the Nazis so that the Jew would signify repulsion, the Other in all his horror, the abject who must be kept at a distance, expelled, exiled, exterminated’. A distance beyond that which Plato advocates but which permits a different reflection on the polis, on the common.

Kofman, after commenting on Antelme’s The Human Race, will allow herself to write of a new humanism, a new ethics, of a ‘”we”' that is 'always and already undone, destabilised’. Plato sought to expel the tragic poets, more dangerous even than the figure of the tyrant, from the city. Kofman will discern a community who are always so exiled and which reveals itself even amidst grief. The childrens’ ‘oh papa, papa, papa’ lament their father. What kind of friend or companion is born in this lament?

Bereck Kofman was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. 'My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted'.

Infinite violence: it is this dying without measure and without recompense that keeps the child awake in Kofman. A child she would awaken in each of us, insofar as her book never contents itself with a private act of mourning.

The Call Outside

I'm indulging myself in writing some notes on Blanchot and Judaism. This continues from the last posts.

Speech, in this sense, is the promised land where exile fulfils itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself’. To acknowledge the relation to the Outside in the relation to the Other prevents me from taking the Other to be another like myself.

Speech opens the Jew to the promised land in which one might live without that land becoming one’s own. There is no dwelling for the Jew.

To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority and estrangement

are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all “positive value.”

The last phrase, positive value, is to be contrasted with the values which are impugned in nihilism. At the outset of the essay, Blanchot has already claimed the question of what is specific to Judaism receives answers which determine the Jew negatively – as in the case of Simone Weil, in terms of a deficiency with respect to the clarity of Greek thought. He wonders whether this fear to affirm the words which begin with the prefix ‘ex-’ is that of ‘playing into the hands of nihilism and its most vulgar substitute, anti-Semitism’.

It is true that a certain anti-Semitic rhetoric will suspect what they take to be the deracination of the Jews – one which Blanchot will present in terms of a relation to what he calls the origin rather than the beginning, using the former word to refer what separates the Jew from the interiority of any particular state. The origin is what breaks any myths of the place – the same myths, of course, upon which Nazism would draw – returning each time as a call outside, as the experience of an insecurity which disrupts the relation to being in a place, to dwelling.

The call outside, God’s call, breaks not only the relation to the place, but also the mediation which would allow experience to be measured according to the security of this place. To contrast, as Levinas does, Ulysses to Abraham, is to separate one who remains himself throughout his vicissitudes, who seeks only to reach his birthplace and his wife and his son from the one who simply goes outside, who passes into the desert, that ‘between the shores’ which escapes interiority.

The response to the call assembles a people who are joined in a limit-experience, in the border that broadens and becomes desert. Above all, for Blanchot, it maintains ‘that Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating’. And again: ‘Judaism is the sole thought which does not mediate’. How should one understand this? The Writing of the Disaster:

Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is a Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation. Judaism is the sole thought that does not mediate. And that is why Hegel, and Marx, are anti-Judaic, not to say anti-Semitic.

Judaism maintains a point of indifference between the ordinary notions of interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside and the ‘other’ exteriority and the ‘other’ outside. It watches over this difference. 

What is refused with speech is the possibility of what will be called the master and slave dialectic which permits the mediation of the struggle between two self-consciousnesses such that a form of society is possible and eventually even the triumph of a universal state which bestows recognition upon all. Blanchot will grant ‘the dialectical fulfillment is at work, and this is necessary’ even as, alongside the dialectic, there is the relation to the outside which Judaism maintains. ‘My relation with the Other is irreducible to any measure, just as it excludes any mediation and any reference to another relation that would include it’. And it is so because it is also a relation to the outside, to the ‘other’ exteriority.

'Jewish Thought'

A few more notes on the 'other' exteriority. Considering to Pasternak’s question, ‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ Blanchot responds:

I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimating movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.

What does it mean to step outside? Simply to cross a border – to move from one space into another? Blanchot: ‘the Hebrew Abraham invites us not only to pass from one shore to the other, but also to carry ourselves to wherever there is a passage to be made, maintaining this between two shores that is the truth of passage’. To pass, passage: to ‘affirm the world as passage’ as exodus and exile sets the Jew apart from the Christian for whom the here below is scorned and from the Greek who allows this world to be measured by the transcendence of light (‘truth as light, light as measure’). It is by passing beyond the horizon of light that the Jew relates ‘to what is beyond his reach’: to that of which God is a figure.

Abraham takes his family from Sumeria. Where do they pass? Into the desert that is between spaces, between sedentary states. Nomadism, migration brings those who pass in relation with what Blanchot calls ‘the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance’; when Jacob wrestles with the one he will later call an angel, he is said to become the ‘partner’ of ‘the inaccessible outside’. Jacob is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God. And the word Israel, too, will name his progeny.

Israel remains outside. The Jew is the one who maintains a relation to what is unknown, to the foreign even as this prevents the foundation of a state, which is to say, an interiority like any other. This is why Blanchot can affirm what Neher writes: ‘How can one be in Exile and in the Kingdom, at the same time vagabond and established? It is precisely this contradiction that makes the Jewish man a Jew’. The desert is not a dwelling place but the world become passage. 

But what is called speech? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. To speak is to acknowledge the Other as someone who breaks the horizon of Greek thought, who breaks with the measure of light. What does this mean?

Greek, says Levinas, ‘is the term I use to designate, above and beyond the vocabulary, grammar and wisdom with which it originated in Hellas, the manner in which the universality of the West is expressed, or tries to express itself – rising above the local particularism of the quaint, traditional, poetic, or religious’. It would thus include philosophical terms and concepts such as morphe (form) or ousia (substance) which constitute ‘a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility’.

Perhaps the most essential distinguishing feature of the language of Greek philosophy was its equation of truth with an intelligibility of presence. By this I mean an intelligibility that considers truth to be that which is present or copresent, that which can be gathered or synchronised into a totality that we would call the world or cosmos.

Blanchot will often draw a contrast between the cosmos and the disaster, naming with the latter a continuous discourse without the interruption which speech implies. What he calls Jewish thought would expose the desire for continuity it attempts to render everything intelligible and illuminable. Such a desire is predicated upon a model of intelligibility as the attempt to render everything present, to represent everything that has occurred here and now. Truth and presence and conjoined such that its terms can be presented as simultaneous and commensurable.

The acknowledgement of the Other that is called speech cannot be thought in these terms. Blanchot will draw on Levinas’s vocabulary of height and of the dissymmetrical relation whereby the Other is not measured by what I take myself to be (a subject, a citizen, an ego). The relation to the Other is a relation to the unknown, to the outside. Speech affirms the dissymmetry of this relation and hence the elevation of the Other.

The Burrow

The badger of Kafka's 'The Burrow' wants to bury himself so he cannot be found. He constructs a vast system of interconnected tunnels in the earth. Can he escape the predator who awaits him outside?

The inner space protects us from what is outside. We are cosy in our dwellings with our televisions and the internet which present us with a simulacrum of what is happening outside. But the outside, here, remains distant. Outside there are the streets where strangers lurk. We instruct our children not to talk to them and drive them to school in 4 X 4s. What matters is safety, and safety is inside.

But what if the interior defines the outside in such a way that it, too, remains parasitical upon the economy of interiority? Even as it is outside, exteriority, according to the conventional understanding of this word, is interiority’s other and can be measured by a common spatial unit.

What would it mean to think an exteriority that is not so interiorised - an exteriority which is never simply outside the interior? No longer is it a question of what can be withheld by a border which maintains the spatial limits of an inner domain. Think instead of the ‘other’ exteriority, one which is no longer organised by a logic of places, by the topology which would keep everything in its place.

Unfold the ‘other’ exteriority of which interiority is only a series of folds and upon which a whole tradition of interiorisation depends upon. What does this mean? The border which would separate the inside from the outside depends upon another border, a limit internal to the articulation of interiority itself. Less clearly defined, hidden in the inner space itself, is a place of struggle against the ‘other’ exteriority upon which it depends.

How should one think this place? Is this akin to the space between tectonic plates from which lava – a figure for the exteriority in question here - would well? This tempts us to think the ‘other' exteriority spatially, losing precisely what would allow it to remain 'other'. What, then, if we sought to understand the ‘other’ exterior non-spatially? This would mean we are in the position of Descartes trying to understand how non-extended mind comes into contact with extended body. His solution, which satisfied no one, was to claim the pineal gland permitted a mediation of extended body with non-extended thought.

A third alternative: what if the 'other' exteriority were understood to produce interiority? What is the outside if it cannot be so understood – as what, indeed, organises the very economy of spatiality? This drama of interiorisation, its secret struggle, occurs at the heart of interiority. The ‘other’ exterior is not a hidden place but an opening implied in the very interiorisation of the interior. It is ‘there’ as a matter of structure, of constitution. Interiority is inscribed in an exteriority it cannot control. Interiority itself is only a fold of the ‘other’ exteriority.

On this account, the whole complex of tunnels dug by the badger is no more than a series of convoluted pleats. The burrow is only contorsion of the ‘other’ exterior, its invagination. The ‘other’ exterior, then, is ‘within’ what is both inside and outside the burrow. Within both, but also outside both. It is the outside inside. Or rather, it shows there is no interiority which can ever exclude the 'other' exteriority. This means the badger is as exposed as he was outside his burrow. Considered in relation to the ‘other’ exteriority, he is on the plain, in the expanse of the desert, with nothing sheltering him from his enemy.

One might go further. Recalling the novel by Philip K. Dick (Eye in the Sky) whose protagonists are turned inside out, is it not that the badger himself is only an invagination of the inside? That at his heart, too, or perhaps in his stomach, there is an ongoing struggle against the outside (the stomach is an excellent example of a kind of internal frontier against exteriority. It cannot digest itself: it remains inside the body, of the body. It digests what is outside the body and allows itself to be incorporated by the body. But what if the stomach itself was only a pleat of the outside?)

Descartes writes of the idea of the infinite which is included within the finite in such a way that it reveals itself to have originated from without. It is the idea of God. Here we have a glimpse of the way in which the outside inhabits the inside. This is not to be conceived on the model of Ridley Scott’s alien, which, after a period of incubation, bursts through the stomach and into the world. It would be the glistening wall of the stomach inside and out as it is only an involution of a single smooth space.

The infinite inside the finite. This is strange to think. But only if the finite and the infinite are thought oppositionally. Perhaps the finite is only a fold of the infinite.

Caffeine

Caffeine is the greatest temptation when I work but it is also a great hindrance - yesterday's espresso makes me feel tired today; halfway through my workday and I am already drained. How to resist going out to buy an Irn-Bru so that at least some of the afternoon is salvaged? But that would only make me tired this evening. Best to endure these hours instead, but doing what? My friends are also working, but it is a beautiful day ...

A lovely vignette from a little book on Kafka. It is 1922, he is in love with Dora Diamant, a nineteen year old girl from a Hassidic background. Kafka himself has just turned forty, but they are in love and no longer does he seek to remain a distance from her as he did from Felice. 'Felice had talked about furniture; Dora read him the royal verses of Isaiah'.

Kafka was a changed man; he broke with Prague, moved with Dora to Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, into a small apartment where his prized solitude was not possible and never missed. Dora reports how he liked her to stay with him while he write and how, at times, sitting on the sofa she fell asleep when he worked very late.

I transcribe these lines a little sadly, knowing that the idea of creating a weblog to assemble such vignettes is of little use. I will have forgotten I wrote this before a week has ellapsed. I always wondered what it would be to come across pieces I had forgotten writing; this happens often now. When did I write, say, that little piece on Antelme? I have no idea, and even though I can read from the bottom of the post what date I wrote it on, I can remember nothing of the circumstances.

Sometimes, happily, I can incorporate such posts in the book I am writing. The prose of the book is enlivened thereby - a sudden change of pace, of formality, of tone makes the text more fresh, more unexpected; something happens in the text - a leap, an acceleration, a swerve.... Still, more important to me is the silence which surrounds each post: when was it written? On what kind of day? What was it that allowed those words and not others to coalescene? Or even for words to have been formed at all?

The last of these questions is important. Plenty of posts go unfinished. A strength is required to leap from paragraph to paragraph, or even from sentence to sentence. Sometimes words themselves do not come together; a fog descends, nothing can be thought. At others, usually after caffeine, great leaps occur, ideas, half-forgotten, call out to other ideas, a little  swarm is formed. Happiness: one paragraph gives birth to another and the whole post rises shakily into the air like the Wright brothers' aeroplane (that's something Steve wrote to me once of a post I deleted that same day (R.M. didn't like it); does he remember? Have I remembered rightly?)

No caffeine for me. I will have to last until tomorrow morning's coffee. Gradually, over the next hour or two, the withdrawal symptoms will cease from the half cup of green tea I always allow myself at noon, and it will possible to return to the book.

Essential Writers

One-and-a-half hours before I meet friends for a drink and a film, I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

It is six o'clock here in the office. I arrived hungover at ten this morning; I set to work with the aim of finishing a draft of the first chapter of the book, suffice to say this was not possible. Besides me, a pile of CDs. I listen to the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies. And besides me, too, two printed out drafts of lectures W. intends to give. 'It is not because Pascal is unhappy that he writes, he is unhappy because he writes ...'

What did I do today? Any answer I give betrays the feeling that nothing happened today, and that it happened such that this nothing became tangible, ever-present, there in the blank whiteness of the sky. What I do? Nothing happened and I remember the conversation W. and I have when we are in our cups: what does it mean to write as a philosopher? What does it mean for Heidegger to write, or for Blanchot? 'For all that he wrote on boredom,' one of us says, 'Heidegger knew nothing of boredom' - 'By writing on boredom rather than with boredom,' says the other, 'he betrays it.'

Steve's new essay on Auster's Oracle Night sent me out on the street to look for the book in question, not to buy it, but just to look. I found it in one of the two Waterstones. I wanted to confirm what Steve reported of Auster: that he is unafraid to use cliches if only to release himself from that movement of writing which would have been halted if he had paused to rephrase them. That it is writer's block that he would avoid by so writing. Then I remembered placing a star in the margin of Josipovici's article 'Kierkegaard and the Novel'. Here is a part of that passage:

[Johannes de Silentio] can make us feel vividly that he - and we - cannot really understand Abraham, but the implication remains that so long as he goes on writing about Abraham he himself will never be a Knight of Faith. This is Kierkegaard's problem. He cannot remain simply ironical, like his beloved Socrates. Times have changed[....] he is committed to writing in order to make people see the lies they are telling themselves, but so long as he goes on writing he remains in the subjunctive mode and so cuts himself off from the life he most desires.

Life! Kierkegaard is like Kafka in wanting to leave writing behind. Should he stop writing?, Kierkegaard asks himself, should he take Holy Orders? Is this what God wants for him?

One could say that Kierkegaard's personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to take pleasure in the writing process itself, but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith.

W. and I speak of a thinker we admire. 'He is always absolutely serious', says W., 'it's just as Blanchot said about Bataille: something serious is always at issue when he speaks'. I agree, remembering that W. always says the opposite of me. 'You are my id', W. says, 'nothing is ever serious in our conversations'.

Does it change when we drink? I remember what Bataille reports of a drunken reading session with a friend. Drunk, they take it in turns to read aloud from a book. It is as though drinking changes the relation to the book. As though something becomes possible in the act of reading.

W. is an advocate of philosophy as friendship, as face to face contact, intimate groups of discussants, impassioned talk. I remind him of what he already knows: when Blanchot praises the seriousness of Bataille's conversation, he is referring not to the content of what Bataille said, but to the seriousness of speech itself. What does this mean? That there is a way of communicating which interrupts the great circulation of words, which allows there to be felt a contentless declaration, a thundering silence, even a kind of call.

Blanchot had friends whom he never met. He sent short letters to them in a beautiful hand. Asked if he wanted to meet by a friend such as Edmund Jabes, he demurred. Derrida reports a dream where, speaking to Blanchot at the door of his flat, he tries to peer inside to see what is there.

Interruption. This post is growing rather long, so I will note simply that great writers, great thinkers have also sensed those interruptions which divide the facility of writing from itself. Mishima cursed the fact that a rain of words had never stopped falling within him. Bataille needed to break the smoothness of philosophical discourse. Hasn't friendship, philosophical friendship something to do with this interruption?, I want to ask W. I am thinking of Bataille's drunkenness, of Blanchot's retreat, of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms. I am thinking of another kind of boredom and of writing with boredom, rather than making of boredom one theme among others.

The last line of the Josipovici essay follows the last sentence I quote above:

But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call 'essential writers' to distinguish them from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us.

The Sound of the Crowd

What boredom may permit, it may also make impossible: bored, sick of the world, you are too bored to seek out others who are bored (and they are too bored to seek you). You’ve fallen to the bottom of the world, exhausted your strength and lost even your relationship to yourself. Bored, no one is bored in your place. An impersonal attention sees the indifferent sky above the congested streets and the flies who circle until they die in empty rooms. Bored, you watch television to assuage boredom. Never do you dream of leaving the privacy of your dwelling place for the streets, those same streets where others may gather in their boredom  and where flames the trail which might bear you to the future.

And yet boredom can volatilise into a stubborn refusal of constituted powers – those dangerous, spontaneous movements which hover between revolution and surfascism, between the great overturning that would bring a fiery new world into being and the desire for a leader to capitalise upon the excess that has been unleashed.

Surfascism: this was the accusatory word thrown at Bataille after his attempt alongside the Surrealists, to turn French workers away from fascism by drawing on the same forces to which fascism unleashed. Contre-Attaque, as it was called, attempted to turn the enthusiasm of the crowd onto a legitimate target – to awaken that great refusal which was also a refusal of capitalism. It finds its analogue, Blanchot is right to argue, in the Events of May 1968 in Paris.

What is the call that is heard on the streets? What is it that opens me to the future? Already Heidegger points the way with the call of conscience: it calls silently; it awakens me from the anonymity of Das Man, Dasein is called to its authenticity, to resolutely bring itself into relation with its death such that it lifts itself from the others. But the anonymity Dasein departs is a figure for the anonymity of the crowd, of those who cross the threshold that would allow each to become responsive to the Other in a new way; where each shares a response to a kind of speech. Once again, it is a silence, a kind of hole in apparent completeness of the babble of the world.

A silence? But listen closely and you will hear a murmuring - similar, perhaps, to what K. hears on the other end of the telephone line when he seeks to speak to the castle – a thundering silence that cuts through all speech which would reduce the other person to a cultural category. Who awakens? What awakens? Not authentic Dasein, summoned to itself, living each moment as a moment saved from death – the Dasein bound to itself and to being in the relation Heidegger calls mineness [Jemeinigkeit] – but the no-one-in-particular, the anyone-whatsoever who is each member of the crowd. The danger is clear: without the resoluteness, the will to which Heidegger appeals, there will be dissipation, the crowd will fall back into blandness before anything is accomplished; it remains an unruly magma and not yet a Volk.

Still, one would also have to ask what Heidegger himself fears in the same magma. What is the call that is no longer a call to authenticity, to the assumption of finite existence? Perhaps it comes not from Dasein itself, but from others, but others of the crowd. Perhaps the call is what happens when one bored individual has found others, too, who are bored, and that boredom hardens into a refusal. The thematics of mood in Being and Time is subordinated to mineness – to the attempt of Dasein to bring itself to itself, but the indication is there.

When, shortly after Being and Time, Heidegger will write of an anxiety which suspends the relation of Dasein to itself, to its world, but which yet also reveals the condition of Dasein and the world: bare Dasein in its bare transcendence, he is close to a reflection on the relation to being which sees it, from the first, as interrupting the relation of the self with itself. An interruption such that the being-there of Dasein reveals itself as an usurpation. Dasein is no longer, it is true, rooted in itself, cleaving unto itself, but ek-static, futural, it is launched at its death, but this is because of a reaction in it has closed itself to what boredom might reveal: the anonymous crowd as the field in which a kind of circulation occurs such that each takes the place of the Other, as that zone where the great usurpation reveals itself in its ignominy.

Those who are brought into the condition of responding to others out of the same experience of boredom, the same experience of the nullity of the quotidian, the same nihilism hear, witness the relation to a turning over of being and nothingness which outplays nihilism. Who calls me? If I am interpellated, it is only by what calls the ‘il’ forward in me. If I am called, it is by what dissolves me as a consumer, as a vendor, as a client, as a worker. This is the holiday of the crowd, its spontaneous festivity.

The call of conscience and the related notion of witnessing sees several metamorphoses throughout Heidegger’s career. By the mid 1930s and ‘Holderlin and the essence of Poetry’, it has transformed into the call to a Volk to come which resounds through the poem. When Blanchot writes on Holderlin, it is to reveal that the condition of modernity is the impossibility of assembling such a Volk. In Adorno’s words: ‘You can build a temple, but you can’t bring a god down to haunt it’.

Of course in his youth, too, Blanchot himself dreamt of a return to the proper body of the nation. Was this was his moment of surfascism? Perhaps the formerly right-wing monarchist Blanchot was disingenuous when he presumed in The Unavowable Community to speak of his and Bataille’s history in the 1930s as if they were parallel (‘notre historie’ …) Yet when Michael Holland worries there is a return to the same kind of rhetoric in Blanchot’s anonymous writings of May 1968 he passes over the fact that the idea of revolt, of uprising and refusal is no longer linked to a father or a fatherland. Thus Blanchot’s Lenin: the one who calls us to go outside …

But the thematics of the crowd are only a manifestation of what Lenin called spontaneism: an uprising will achieve nothing without organisation. Zizek has recently reminded us of this; recalling the Events of May 1968, Derrida will also voice a similar concern: he disliked ‘vibrating in unision’, he says, and even then, the Events are not yet a politics. Communism remains etiolated unless it joins the call to go outside with a determinate political programme. But the word might name a way of linking the common presence of the crowd with a political party, a spontaneous refusal without limits to the revolutionary fire which would sweep the old world away.

The Critique of Everyday Life

If I have made a discovery through writing here it is only one of what I have always tried to suppress: empty time, unemployment, watching dust motes in the air.  Why did this come to me? Because I write here when I cannot write elsewhere; this is a fallen writing which cannot assemble itself into a whole. Sometimes I fantasise that this same experience of inadequacy, of inadequation, but above all, of what might be called the quotidian might have some strange political force, that boredom and lassitude place strange weapons in our hands.

The quotidian (there’s a bug in Typepad which is preventing me using the word in the title of this post): who would look to it for liberatory force? Is it not what reveals itself in the stagnant provinces of Chekhov’s plays? Or in the pettiness of life in the midst of the vast bureaucracies of which Kafka writes? The quotidian appears to be superficiality itself; it is that experience of nullity that reveals itself in tedium and boredom. Whence the desire to escape from the quotidian through the busyness Heidegger calls Erlebnis, the active seeking of sensation. Heidegger considers the quotidian under the heading of inauthenticity; this is not intended as a moral category, he insists, but this is disingenuous. When he writes of idle curiosity and aimless chatter his tone is unmistakably condemnatory.

There is no question that the quotidian can lapse into the most grave depoliticisation: we watch television by ourselves in the evening, each separated from another in our houses. But the quotidian also contains the potential for a repoliticisation: the streets from which revolutions are born are part of the same ordinary life. ‘The quotidian is not at home in our dwelling places’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is not in offices or churches any more than in libraries or museums. If it is anywhere, it is in the streets’. In the streets: in the essay from which I am quoting, Blanchot is writing of Lefebvre’s studies of the  quotidian and wondering to himself what sense there might be in calling for a critique of quotidian life.

What would such a critique imply? For Lefebvre, the quotidian is an untapped political reserve. The fluidity and contingency of quotidian life is always made to conform to an overall order, a system of purposes, meanings and values. Yet there is always a deviation, always unintended deflections which no longer aim to produce an outcome linked to the social whole. Such purposelessness appear spontaneously in quotidian life. To dream idly, to read, to write: such actions are undertaken for their own sake; they have a dynamism and fluidity which escapes the attempt to bind quotidian actions to what is productive or efficient.

This is why the quotidian is always suspect: it is the breeding ground of ideologies. This is why the secret police keep files on everyone, why Mandelstam’s friends had to memorise poems of which no written copy could exist. An analogous fascination drives the market researcher: what is that determines why it is this product that is purchased and not that one? When politicians use focus groups, it is in order to predict and contain the quotidian: to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups in order to target them by specific methods.

You’ve see someone on the street you half-recognise. Who is it? She resembles your friend, and yet she is an anonymous passerby. Yet in the moment of non-recognition it is as though you caught sight of the anonymity of the quotidian itself. Here is another experience of the image of the Other that would allow the relation to any given human being to become indefinite. I have experienced the nudity of the Other - of the other person who no longer presents herself within the cultural categories which allow me to determine my relations to others. The Other, now, keeps me at a distance, at her distance.

The philosophical suspicion of the quotidian lies in this same anonymity. The quotidian human being is anyone at all. I am Heidegger’s Das Man, never yet myself, always distracted and dilatory, ill-disciplined and irresolute and unaware, above all, of the fact I will die. But Heidegger’s recipe for authenticity betrays something telling: what is feared is the limitlessness of the quotidian, its indefinite expansiveness. After claiming the quotidian is capable of ‘ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity’, Blanchot observes:

Day-to-day indifference is situated on a level at which the question of value is not posed: there is [il y a] the quotidian (without subject, without object), and while there is, the quotidian ‘il’ does not have to be of account; if value nonetheless claims to step in, then ‘il’ is worth ‘nothing' and ‘nothing’ is worth anything through contact with him. To experience quotidianness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is something like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, quotidianness does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique.

Such nihilism (see the posts at Philosophical Conversations) suspends the relation to death what would allow us to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity. It suspends values, meaning and truth. It is experienced as a wearing away of the power to decide, to resolve, to bring oneself into relation to oneself. The ‘il’, the companion is the ‘subject’ of the quotidian, understood as the locus of experience of the il y a.

What does this mean? In his early writings, Levinas writes of the impersonal “il” as the locus of an an exposure, an opening to what Levinas calls existence in general, existence, as he puts it, without existents: the il y a. The il y a is not linked, unlike Heidegger’s “es gibt” according to Levinas, to “the joy of what exists” but to “the phenomenon of impersonal being,” or what he calls in another essay, “horrible neutrality”. If the “I” opens from the “il” , it does not leave it behind; the il y a may always return. If it does so it is as a horrifying eruption of chaos and indeterminacy. But why does the 'il y a' need to be horrifying? Could this ontological insecurity permit the world we share and the others with whom we share it to bring us into relation with what escapes determination?

There is the quotidian : the quotidian is without subject or object; the locus of the experience of the quotidian is the ‘il’: Blanchot presents the quotidian itself as existence without existents, as the il y a and as, here, what is called nihilism. Yet it is not horror he links to the 'il y a' of the everyday, but boredom. It is boredom which plays the role of the Grundstimmung which opens up the quotidian.

There is the quotidian: each in the quotidian exists, through boredom, in relation to what is called the 'il y a' - to the there is of chaos and indeterminacy. Comes the moment of critique when it is such boredom that brings us together: when we respond to the summons of the Other such that it brings forward in each of us what is called the 'il', the impersonal opening. Critique comes as the everyday allows there to awaken the sharing of that great reserve named by the 'il y a'. Thus it is that shared boredom causes there to be born the great movements of rebellion, where each is the passerby and the utopic space of the street bears us towards the future.