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A Philosophy of the Concrete

Kafka, Inc,

A brand is a promise, says the marketer; the symbols to which it is linked (the logo of Coke, the curved line of Nike ...) advert to the values associated with its products. But isn't anything, thereby, product-like? Not simply the brand mark on the cow's haunch, to stop one herd from getting tangled up with another, but also the insect's markings, which advert to the fact that it is dangerous to eat.

There's nothing, then, that protects the name of a writer like Kafka or Beckett from such branding. You cannot lament the Kafka teeshirt or the book called Beckett Country as qualitatively different from the experience of reading Kafka or Beckett; each time, it is a question of a promise symbolised by Kafka, inc. or Beckett ltd. in which the photographs that stare out from the editions of Calder have the same value as the words inside them. Kafka's mouse-like face rises behind all possible readings. The brand is the photograph, a writer's themes, his concerns - it is present in the details of the prose, its style, just as it is present in the plaque that commemorates his house and in the fat biographies that recount every detail of his life.

Then to write is to brand the white page and to brand oneself; to write is to be your own marketer and public relations company. The book you deliver to the publishing company offers itself to the whole world - it celebrates you, its author, in your power and glory. You are substantialised by what you have produced, by the distinctiveness of the experience promised by your brand. And then there's the question of your brand's relationship with others - of a brand management that sees it linked to other, analogous writers, to the literary critical industry, to the scholarly empire ... 

The Space of Waiting

To say that Beckett and Kafka are not brands like any other risks installing a new set of values and a new kind of branding. Now it is as if Beckett and Kafka belong to that rarefied world of culture which speaks of the essence of the human being, or holds safe those great values that belong to an elite. What must be understood, by contrast, is the way their work and their lives, insofar as they are related to that work, break themselves altogether from the sphere of culture.

Beckett and Kafka promise nothing with respect to edification, to cultural value; if their work is symbolic, it is so in a way that joins it to the post- or pre-cultural ... Contrast them to the author for whom her books concern the richness of human existence, the spread of all the varities of human life. This is impressive; her novels flash back to the world the glory of itself in its massiveness, its complexity; nothing compares to the novel as panorama. Everything that can be seen is made to be seen; everything is granted to the measure of narration; the author is the demigod to whom nothing denies itself. And as such, her name is also a brand, a promise that the world will open itself like a peacock's tail in its colours and splendour.

But what of Beckett, of Kafka? Now it is that the measure denies itself; the world is etiolated and reduced. Blanched characters, bare incident; human existence cramped and confined. Of what is Moran concerned but with the immediacy of his assignment? Of what Joseph K. but the attempt to find who has put him on trial and why; and then to exonerate himself of that and any crime?

Character reduced to silhouette; plot as a tightening of the screws on panicked, crushed individuals: not for nothing have such books been read as bound to the great disasters of the twentieth century: times when human beings could not appeal to rights, to institutions. In which, that is, the world of value was shattered and culture exposed itself to be the lie it always was, as if it was supposed to be part of the ethical edification of its admirers. Bare characters, blanched incident: the nineteenth century novel, in its glories has run aground ... what is left for the survivors of the great calamity?

Nothing to write and no means by which to write, says Beckett to Duthuit; but this does not mean the pen is set down and the notebook untouched. Impossible - this word can no longer be understood modally but as an experience of what both cannot be done and must be; as the imperative that drives a writing along its edge, searching for a place from which to begin.

What is the impossible? Perhaps it can be understood as a suffering so complete there is no one to undergo it; a pain so absolute that it is endured by no one. The writer waits, and then - miracle of miracles - writing is possible. The writing of the impossible becomes possible where the 'merciful surplus of strength' Kafka invokes allows the sufferer to write. Pain subsides for just long enough for writing to begin. And the writer - Kafka, Beckett - can now ring changes on the impossible, giving it the shape of a story and the silhouettes of characters.

But what courage this takes! What magnificence of patience, and then courageousness! First the waiting - Kafka with his pen, his notebook in the early hours of the morning; Beckett at Ussy. To wait - but for what? For suffering to subside just enough. To make a beginnning there where the beginning is impossible. To begin - just that. To have been afforded the chance to begin. And then the beginning itself, when it comes, must be seized upon. A frenzy of activity: write, write: there are not enough hours in the day.

And then, once again, the falling away. Waiting stretches out; the impossible is impossible once more; it is a wall of mountains that no one can cross. How to ascend those peaks? How to climb up again to the plateau? Wait, just wait; weeks and months pass, but you must not give up. The impossible must become your fate; it must wait for yourself in you. Until all you are, as writer, is a waiting that has become intransitive, that has lost its object and any object. Until, as writer you are no one but the open space of waiting.

The World Undone

How could they let themselves trust what they wrote? Molloy is unlike any book. The Trial is utterly unlike the work of Kafka's peers. They were written, and quickly - all at once. At once, as by a single stroke. Out of a storm of which their lives were only a dark precursor. Nights catch fire in Prague. Days burn away at Ussy. The smoke billows up: the work: it is a sign of the work. A signal is sent into the sky, another in a line of signals across our epoch, where one writer begins as he sees a prior signal sent and knows it for what it is.

But what is known? Only that there was a writing of the impossible; that there was a writing of the tain of the mirror that one allowed authors to contentedly represent the world. It is not that their books separate themselves from the world. There are still details, human beings; the usual rules, for the most part, seem to apply. But that the whole book becomes a quivering indication, that it points to itself and what happens in the depths of the 'itself' - to a wandering in the labyrinth, to an obsession with what cannot be said, at least directly.

Now it is the saying of language itself that speaks. The 'that it is', its existence; the fact that it is. Impossible speech, that speaks of the condition of all speech. Impossible, as it is drawn back from the world - the totality of relations that is the world - as it is ordered through discourse. As if discourse had another side. As if it was the outside that spoke, but via discourse, words unsaying themselves, sentences crossing themselves out. Language under erasure, suspended, spun out over nothing ... As though Beckett and Kafka belonged not to themselves, but to the fate of language.

Who are they, Beckett, Kafka? Vortices of language. Whirlwinds who catch up in what they write the unravelling of the world. It is not that they speak in a wild language, in the avant-garde that would shatter the means of speaking. Ordinary language speaks; the same language - banal, everyday, as that we all use. But as it speaks it also suspends the power of reference; at once, it refers to the world - to a fictional world that obeys, roughly speaking, the laws of our own - and as though to what is there before it, as though it were performing the opposite of a cosmogony.

The world undone, unmade. Language even as it speaks that is suspended in its power to refer, to evoke. Language that, even as the text is intelligible, meaningful, also suspends the power of meaning (even if sense, now, is only to be understood in another sense). Lost language, language wandering. Words that do not close upon themselves; sentences that do not end. The murmuring of paragraphs that say nothing. The rustling of a language deprived of itself. Sense unbound from the power of sense. Or that raises it to another power, without the human being. So that the human becomes an adjective, a particular modification of the streaming of sense.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

What fascinates, if it does, in the work of Beckett, of Kafka? What makes it necessary to reread their work? Nothing outside of it, first of all that. No context of which their work is part. It is not their culture they reflect, since they are more than culture, or that they unfold culture from within by means of the opposite of origami, until what is shown is that the inside was only ever a pleat of the outside and that to have lived within was always to have lived without.

Culture cannot be adjusted to fit Beckett or Kafka; it is not the hem that needs widening; the whole garment is shown to have clothed nothing. What was contained by culture now swirls along the edges of a singularity like water around a plughole; what matters is the work, as it draws the book and all of culture towards itself. And this is another kind of disaster: one that, in the wake of religious consolations and old theodicies leaves a sky without stars, the blank night.

Nor is it the 'metaphysic' that Lawrence used to set out before he wrote his novels (that will sometimes overwhelm his characters, his plot, though not as often as one might suppose); it is not that the work of either thinking embodies a system, or a method of inquiry. To read them thus would be to leap over the specificities, the details of which they are made.

Theirs is a philosophy of the concrete, if such a thing is possible. Of the concrete become absolute; of a specificity that expands to enclose the whole world. A metaphysic that speaks by way of the most ordinary words, the words of the everyday. That lets them speak, vague words, ordinary words so as they stand in, proxies, for what cannot settle itself into a name. Now philosophy will speak in the most common words. It is the common words, at last that are allowed to speak.

What fascinates, then, in the work of Beckett, of Kafka? A rose is a rose is a rose, said Stein. And now language is language ... is language, for a third time. For an infinite number of times. This is the meaning of saying: saying as it speaks by way of what is said. That there is communication by way of communication. Communication is itself a thing - or rather, the relation that it is doubles itself up, thickens, and appears as itself. But only by way of the ordinary words of the fiction of Beckett, of Kafka. Only by means of words that usually do the relating. What is the style of Beckett or Kafka other than this? What does it mean except to give body - a certain tone - to communication such that it can double itself up? A philosophy of the concrete (the new empiricism) is accomplished through style.

Style as Thought

It is as though, in the writer, language - the 'there is' of language, of communication - becomes fascinated by itself. As though the writer's style were nothing other than the locus of this experience, joining the experience of the singular, the concrete, to language, which always depends upon the particular and the abstract.

Here, style is not something an author can develop, like a scientist in a laboratory. Style happens; style catches up writing, like a current seizes a boat. Write enough, and it will happen. Write day after day, and it will begin to happen, but only insofar as it also the impossible that you are broken against.

This is why talent is such a distraction - why a facility with words stands in the way of an experience of language. Perhaps it is only the aphasiac, the dyslexic who can experience language. Only those who stammer like Moses or the writer who, as Deleuze says, makes the whole of language stammer. Write, do not fail to write. Or rather: to draw yourself into that space where writing might be possible, even in its impossibility.

(Peculiar, pretentious formulations, but what else will do? How to speak of the condition of speaking? By compelling language to unspeak itself, suspending 'good sense' and 'common sense' ... although perhaps only to give voice to another experience of the common ...)

Perhaps the question of language can only be fated rather than asked. Or perhaps it is not a question at all, but a kind of collapse, as when a house sags into a mineshaft. Perhaps language can only be known by a subsidence of language, or (another metaphor) by the damp on the walls of sense ...

And perhaps there is a kind of philosophising that does not know itself as such; a thinking by way of the concrete, by way of the impossible. Style as thought; style as thinking ...

The Preliminary Flood

The Sphinx Within the Sphinx

The problem with symbolic art, says Hegel, is that its materiality is not adequate to the spiritual content it would attempt to express. But from a Blanchotian perspective, it is for this same reason that symbolic art is interesting, insofar as it points beyond itself not to the Idea that it would reveal via the work's sensuousness, but, as it were, in the other direction: now it is that same sensuousness which affirms itself in its materiality - that is, as a universal empty of content.

From the classical art of the Greeks, where the work's beauty answers to the life and practices of the community (Sittlichkeit); where message has achieved exemplary harmony with medium (the Idea being immanent in the Ideal), back to Egyptian art which presents in its opaque materiality what cannot be rendered formally; from philosophy, understood as the highest form of Absolute Spirit, through religion and to art, and then to the uncertain birth of art as it struggles to free itself from symbolisation: it is a materiality that struggles against form and which fascinates because of this struggle with which Blanchot is concerned.

The Sphinx is Hegel's example of symbolic art. What Blanchot is after, as it were, is the Sphinx inside the Sphinx: a concrete universal - a universal concretised in matter that is voided entirely of what it might represent; a riddle lost in a riddle, that Oedipus does not solve when he answers 'man' to the Sphinx. This 'other' Sphinx attempts to struggle free of what Hegel supposed it to be attempting to represent, burrowing into the darkness of which it is made. It struggles - but this is not a flight into abstraction.

As with Bacon's paintings, it struggles by means of what it might be supposed to represent; as it portrays the human, it also allows the human to become an adjective. The sculpture, the painting, wander in the corridors of matter, turning themselves from that light which would read them in terms of the form that is about to emerge. The form is blurred, and that is the point. Blurred - suspended - arresting the viewer's gaze and drawing it into its darkness.

Do they put out our eyes? Rather, they draw them to what they cannot see, as if the whole of the eye were turned around and we gazed into the darkness of our heads. Or that we saw from our blindspot, blackness flooding outward from our pupils; in some sense, it is the condition of seeing that they allow us to see. The condition - but only if it is likewise an uncondition, revealing insofar as it conceals, losing light in darkness, all the way to the infinite.

The Negative Absolute

For Hegel, the Absolute is to be understood as the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and grants itself to human knowledge. Then the Absolute must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation.

But with Blanchot, the Absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The phenomenal world is doubled; it becomes its own image. The absolute, now, is not the empty beyond Hegel criticised in the work of his precedessors; it is still given as an experience of the world, but of the world turned from the work, work turned aside from work and turned from the human being who would experience it. And turning the human being likewise aside. The 'il', the 'it', names the locus of this experience - the human being is doubled up, and, as double, each of us is joined to the work (no longer the determinable thing, the painting, the sculpture) as the double of ourselves. Joined at the level of a body without determination, as a life rather than the individuated life that was formerly enjoyed.

The work, then, as opposed to the painting, the sculpture. The stuff of which they are made - but not simply marble or paint. Matter as it struggles with form; Heidegger's earth; lost substance, the absolute so negative it flees away from the light, drawing our gaze with it, and putting out our eyes. The Sphinx lost in the Sphinx, Bacon's figures lost in their materiality, in the stuff of which they are made. And, too, showing us how our bland everyday might likewise we doubled - that the image of the world, as it falls outside what is recognisable or useful, comes forward in its mysterious density.

Coming forward, it permits of no disinterest; the viewer is implicated in what unfolds as the work and it means nothing without her. The work is a relation and not a thing; and the viewer is fascinated to the extent that it conveys to her not the living dynamism of what is ordinarily missed in the busyness of our lives, but to a dynamism of dying, of impersonal life - a negation of living immediacy that is never quite resolved, never lifted to a higher level.

Then dialectical movement is in some way stalled; glimmering darkly beneath the fnished work of art is what Blanchot calls the work, which draws the viewer's gaze towards it all the way to fascination. With this word, Blanchot evokes the call of the singularity of the work, of the way in which it joins, in the viewer's experience the excess of materiality over the binarism of matter and form, of the negative absolute as it flees from Idea and Ideal.

If Blanchot's focus is on literature, it is literature become the lowest of arts - a literature made scarcely of words, but of words become things, like the great blocks in the desert. Now all of language is a riddle, and one which cannot be solved as Oedipus does by pointing to himself (the answer: 'man'). The book is ruined in the work. Or the work is the ruin of the book, the desert that eats away the monument; the patience of blasting winds. And Absolute Spirit finds itself made continually to plunge into the past, to its earliest phases. All the way to when the first human beings appeared in the world, and, as they did so, bringing it to double itself, to wander in its own corridors.

The Preliminary Flood

No wonder, then, that the writer attempts to substantialise herself with reference to her books, to what she has made. She takes refuge in the finished even as the future opens uncertainly before her. It is never as an author that she can meet the work. For the work is the sacrifice of authorship, of all authority; it is postcultural, but only as it belongs to a time before culture - to the past as interruption, to the preliminary flood that is always about to return.

For the writer as writer, on the other hand, her position is never established; the books she has written are not yet the work. who is she? No one at all, if identity is to be understand in terms of what can be achieved. And the writer, if this names the one who holds the place of 'no one', of the 'il', the it, as this names the relation to the work in its worklessness, that is, as it cannot be produced or brought to the light.

Then the writer is linked to a past in which she, as the 'il' undergoes the experience of fascination in which she becomes wholly a writer. A past, then, that does not belong to the linear succession of time. A past that returns as the 'to come' which never arrives in time. A past, and a future which fall outside what can be directly narrated. This is what returns in the symbol and in the experience of writing as it is engaged by a materiality that fascinates.

The indefinite and the opaque; the concrete universe or the particular made abstract; the bad infinite of sensuousness; the doubling of the world: these are all names for what is experienced by the writer in her relation to the work. A relation that is without relation in the sense that its terms are each turned from themselves, the 'I' to the 'il', the finished book to the incompleteable work.

Existing wholly as writer, fascinated, the writer does not write a line. Only as she is drawn towards authorship, as she re-emerges into the light, do words appear on the page. Activity is also required if a book is to substitute itself for the work; fascination does not claim the author altogether. The writer, here, is a name for the 'il', the author for the 'I'; the work which fascinates can never be realised in a completable book. But this means the writer as writer can never be done with desire. Writing is a task that is infinite. Fascination always returns to plunge the author into the uncertainty of the work.

The Work is the Measure

The same experience for the reader, to whom the work reaches through the book. But what kind of reader is this? The one drawn to reread a book without knowing why. To be held into the work. To become the double of all readers; to be read, in turn, by the book. And the one who refuses to let go of reading in the hermeneutic move - to demand that account be rendered, to ask the question 'why?' of the work, or 'what?' without letting them resound without answer.

The work is the measure, and it measures through the book, but by way of the book. By way of nothing other than its sentences, its paragraphs. By nothing other than character, than dialogue, than plot. But only as each is drawn to let speak the voice of the work, a narrative voice that cannot be reduced to the details of a story. For there is a hidden recit in even the most imposing novel. The work would speak of itself. The work, and by way of what speaks in the book. This is what fascinates. It is what goes out to meet the reader as the measure of reading. The rising waters of the flood; the annihilation of the world.

Language speaks of itself as the work. Matter speaks in the sculpture, the painting, the piece of music. Of itself, and only itself, without content. Language and matter-form are doubled. That there is language; that there is matter and form - this is what resurges in the work.

Discretion

Can it mean anything to speak of the authenticity of the writer (of the writer/author)? What does it mean to live in conformity with writing? Perhaps the reserve of the work, its withdrawal or discretion might be doubled in her own reserve, her own discretion. She might resist interviews and publicity photographs; she might prevent herself being caught in the scholarly industry, and resist offering her assent to particular interpretations of her work. There must be some kind of withdrawal, some disquiet about emerging as the author - or of privileging the author in the conjunction writer/author that she 'is'.

I think of Blanchot here, of course; but isn't something similar marked in Palace Brothers/Palace Music/Palace Sountracks - the very change of name resisting the stablisation of any particular authorial identity? And what about Smog, that become (Smog) and then plain Bill Callahan? Above all, in the realm of music, Jandek, Jandek above all ...

The writer is also a reader. What might it mean to live in conforming with the doubling of reading (of the reader of the book/the reader of the work) in what Blanchot would call its neutrality (that is, insofar as this doubling cannot be undone, ne uter: neither one nor the other)? Another kind of withdrawal, another discretion. No longer the demand 'why?' or 'what?'' no longer the attempt to render account. No longer the presumption that hermeneutics is a tool rather than a moment in which the book offers itself to meaning even as it plunges, in the same moment, into the work.

Watching Corwood on Jandek, anger at the journalist who presumed to track him down. On a hot afternoon in Houston, she confronts him (that is the word: confront) asking him if he is Jandek. He won't speak of it, he says. He tests her: how does she know his music? She tells him she saw his records in a certain record store. He nods. Yes, he knows the store. And then asks her if she drinks beer, and they go to a bar, and he speaks of everything but Jandek: how beautiful! everything but.

Allergies and food, movies, his job ... but he will not speak of Jandek. And she, the journalist, the one attempting to render account is looking only for this. Long silences when she asks. He won't speak. Let the work speak instead. The work through the records. But the journalist is deaf to the work. She finds his disappearance much more interesting than what he has done. Without realising that disappearance - the refusal to play live (until recently), to be interviewed, to give information about himself - belongs to the work and to the movement of the work.

The Uncommon Reader

The Age of the Epic

The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. But the hero’s name depends upon the song in which he is celebrated. After the feast, the bard comes forward to sing; in the song, the hero lives. Didn’t the heroes of the wars of Homer’s poem know their fate? Hector says that before he dies he will accomplish something great 'whereof even men yet to be born shall hear’. Agamemnon says 'even men yet to be born shall hear' of the shame of the Achaeans' retreat from Troy. The heroes know their reward lies in posterity; their names will resound after they die.

Thus, the hero owes his existence to the telling, the song, to the language in which his deeds are repeated. True, the hero is unique – he has a name, and a unique glory as the bearer of this name that is sung in the great hall. A uniqueness born of the splendour of an act that his name substantialises, and this is the miracle, the surprise of heroism: a name can attach itself to such great deeds.

A human being can be marvellous: this is what the epic celebrates as it repeats the name of the hero, begining the tale again, over and again, embellishing it, transforming it even as it is yet the same tale. Sing of the Pandavas in the forest again! Sing the story of the Rama one more time! Tell us of Krishna’s deeds! It is true, Rama, Krishna, and the Pandava brothers name avatars, or men who can claim divine descent. Perhaps one should think of Heracles and Achilles instead – of Roland and Cid....

The epic is a tale without beginning or end. But the epic ends as a genre as history begins (‘and then darkness fell over India ...). The hero does not belong to history. His time has passed – who now is capable of a deed which flashes out through heaven and earth? Who can lend his acts to the memory of the epic? Yet the hero exists in the tale and this is the condition of his existence: he is alive in the retelling of the tale – alive in the presence he has for the listener in the great hall.

Some say the Trojan and Theban wars were caused by Zeus in order to end the Heroic Age. In the Odyssey, it already seems the Trojan wars already belong to another era. All, even Ulysses, are keen to hear songs of Troy. And isn’t it knowledge of Troy that the Sirens promise to bestow? It is already, with the Odyssey, a time for song. Soon, the hero’s name will be eclipsed by the name of the singer. The bard steps out of obscurity and anonymity to lay claim to Achilles.

Now the act belongs to the bard (the author). Literature begins. Does the singer become a hero in turn? Is it necessary, now, to write rather than act – or to act and then write, recording one’s exploits? Must one create one’s own legend? The novel is on the horizon. Don Quixote and Pancho Santa are about to set off ...

The Age of Humanism

For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.

It is thus a gathering or assembling that, for the Greeks, marked the recitative event; the separation between text and reader that will lead to the unraveling of the self-presence of the recitation, the sundering of poet and audience, is as yet unmarked. With the birth of poetry, of literature, the Muse, the figure of inspiration, is given over to the disseminative effects of history. When literature becomes a delimitable body of writings, the scene of inspiration shifts; it is no longer the Muse who would allow human beings to reveal and receive the truth through the song, nor the God of whom the author would be the answering scribe.

Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would be able to secure the origin of inspiration? This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world.

God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity - but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God.

What, though would it mean for God to be returned to the darkness and forgetting that he has been made to veil? Now comes another turning point in the history of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Isn't it Hölderlin who understands that the absence of the gods must be experienced, and that this experience is itself holy? And isn't it he who understands that poetry, writing, must answer to that experience?

The time of distress, he calls it. Our time, says Hölderlin, bears witness to the absence of the gods, to the ruins of the temple, that Hölderlin develops his invented mythology, which is to say, his construction of an imaginary Europe in line with Herder’s palingenesis. Hölderlin pretends that this Europe exists and that he, the poet, speaks for its community. In so doing, he pretends there is a relationship between poet and audience of the sort he believed Pindar to have enjoyed even as he knows this relationship is impossible.

At the same time, as Constantine comments, this does not constitute an act of deception, since the ‘mythology’ itself is palpably mythological. The appeals for community, for the return of the gods and for a communicable myth are themselves mythological figures. Hölderlin’s mythical Europe is a way of marking its distress; to elect himself as the poet who is bound to its phantasmic community is another way of indicating the way in which we belong to a time of distress.

Itis not, with Hölderlin, that God has been delimited, but the contrary. God is unlimited all the way to dissolution ... God has been torn apart across the sky. 'Is God the unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This rather I believe ...'

But then, another phase. God is forgotten, and so is the forgetting of God. The holy recedes into an indifferent sky. The great era of humanism also recedes. What remains? Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: these innocuous statements reflect the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of inspiration in one's own name.

Is it the time of distress? Rather, the time without distress, where writing is part of the bustle of the world, where novelist, audience and characters occupy the same consensual reality. A final twist: in modernism as the eternally new, that comes at the end only to show there is no end, and that to have nothing to say and no means to say it is the beginning of writing and not the end. Writing is impossible, and for that reason, necessary. Impossible, and carrying with it the test of the impossibility that awaits the uncommon reader.

The Impossibility of Writing

Kafka wrote in bursts, in breaks. For long periods, he knew he could write nothing. So when it came, what he experienced as inspiration, he had to write as much as he could. Then the hours he sets aside for writing every night are not filled with activity. Kafka waits - he spends days and weeks waiting, and then ...?

Some days it is possible to write, but on others ... desolation; non-writing. And it is the same even when he has several books behind him. Nothing is sure for the writer, and the vocation of writing the least sure of all. What does it mean to want to write? Is it to subject writing to your will? Certainly that is part of it. But also, too, to be receptive. To have to wait upon inspiration. To wait for waiting to release you just enough for you to write ...

Wait for the beginning - and when it comes, write as much as you can. Follow the story across the days and nights. For it is too easy to fall from writing! Too easy, and that is the risk! But even when you finish a story, what do you have? Are you a writer yet? Are you still a writer? In a sense, to write is always to be in lieu of writing.

And when you have written? How can you judge the worth of what you have done? There are no stories like The Judgement, none like Josephine; The Trial and The Castle are without precedents. In a sense, what he has written is also an obstacle to Kafka. For how can he gauge his own talent, his competence? True his work is admired by his friends; there is at least that. But compare Kafka's calm prose with theirs; compare the sobriety of Metamorphosis with the gaudily covered review in which it was published. To write without prior criteria, with the great models of writing collapsed - how can Kafka experience his own work except as a failure?

There is no common field that brings together poet, audience and characters within the poems; no Sittlichkeit of which they are part. And so Kafka can write only as he runs up against the impossibility of writing, where the impossible does not name a limit beyond which it would not be possible to act; or the limit itself has become experiencable, and now Kafka is able to write along its edge, writing with a sense of the absolute precariousness of writing, which is why he attempts to complete his stories at one stroke.

The Hemiplegic

First of all, the attempt to find the time to write, to set nights aside. Then there is the waiting in those quiet hours, open to indifferent skies. Then, all too rarely, the merciful excess which grants the strength to begin to write. A sentence set down on the page gives way to another; by a surprising strength, writing is possible. But then, such writing depends upon a prior experience of failure, a sense of have exhausted every means. Until the beginning - that moment when the power to write is granted - must be understood to drag behind it a terrible weight. Or it is an attempt to push that weight just a little ahead of itself, to open a clearing ...

To write is never simply to begin, to cast off into clear waters. The beginning runs up against the past, the eternal return of uncertainty. To begin is only to have pushed the rock, like Sisyphus, to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. The beginning must perpetually be regained; the surplus of strength, with its mercy must rediscover itself in the writer.

Then to writing there belongs a peculiar temporality - a moment of initiative, with everything before it, collapses into weariness. This step forward was no step at all, but the return to the same interval in which nothing can begin. Or it is that the writer moves forward like a hemiplegic - moves and falls, both at once, until movement is indistinguishable from falling.

Absolute Failure

It is not only the 'I' who is the locus of writing. That the 'I', as Blanchot says, becomes 'il', becomes 'it' - that the first person gives way to the impersonal; that the 'there is' of 'there is writing' is like the dummy subject in the phrase 'it is raining.' There's no 'it' to rain; no 'I' to write. There is writing - suffering, dying without subject. There is writing - but who writes in the absence of a writer?

In the active sense of the word (that is, as writing names an activity like any other) a writer does indeed write. There are words on the page. But would the writer be a writer (a literary writer, a modern writer) without the prior experience of absolute failure? An experience that blooms into a beginning, to be sure - but one that is also furled in what is written after that beginning.

Then it is that the 'I' and the 'il' are joined - that the writer who writes (writing as activity) is joined to writing as passion, as silent unaccomplishment (writing as passivity). To write is also to fail to write - how absurd! But to bear this absurdity as writing, and not only as its content. To bear it through every element of writing - through plot and character, through the details of the story and the rhythms of the prose. As though all of writing were magnetised by what it cannot say - not the ineffable, it is not that simple; nor silence, unless this names the thunder that rolls within a writing that endures the test of impossibility ... Cannot say, but cannot not say, as the 'common field' that unites poet, audience and culture gives away to the uncommon experience of the impossible.

Writing, Reading

There is writing. But now that 'there is' redoubled, thickened, as though writing also spoke of itself - as though it lifted itself from that semblance of the world it was supposed to resemble. Or as though that power of resemblance had failed - that the possibility of reference had collapsed, and writing had fallen into itself, lost from all worlds. And this even as words lie on the page, and on page after page. This not despite those pages - the physical evidence of the book, as it substantialises an author - but through them, across them. The trace of the 'il' never substantialised. Of the writer as writer, which is to say, as no one yet.

Who writes? Who reads? In a sense, nothing is lighter than reading. To be born along by a story, to follow the lines on the page - all this answers to the most ordinary of human capacities. Reading is easy, even when the book is difficult, for at least that difficulty has a measure; at least it is judged according to the measure of the possible, instead of carrying the possible away with it. But isn't there a reading that is the correlate of the 'other' writing? Isn't the reader, too, reached as the 'il', as the one without measure?

Perhaps it is possible to say that the reader, too, undergoes a test. Perhaps there is a trial of reading just as there is a trial of writing. This time, the correlate of the author - the writer proud of the work that has made him as real as any other worker - is the cultured reader; the reader who will add the book to the great pile of finished books, who knows nothing of the need to reread, to begin over. This is the reader substantialised by reading, for whom culture is that sacrosanct realm of great names and great books.

But hasn't the reader, too, been lost? Aren't there books which so carry forward the impossibility of writing that it surges forward into the receptive reader? The opposite of resuscitation: not a breathing mouth clamped to your own, but a mouth that sucks out your breath. To read, to die: infinitives detached from substantives. The 'there is reading' that doubles up reading, that lets it wander in itself.

Of course it is always possible to put a book down. To forgo the reading, to leave it behind. But the possible, here, is measured by the 'I can' of the reader. An impossible reading is compelling, fascinating, for it is without an 'I can'. Reading becomes a fate, just as writing that endures and answers to the test of the impossible is also fateful. A fate that is also a trial, a test.

Is this why it is necessary to reread some books and not others - as though by doing so one might come closer to the narrative voice that makes the whole fiction a cluster of indices pointing in the same direction. It is why the books of certain authors seem immeasurably more important than others, as though they bear upon the essential - as though, by following book after book, it becomes clear that they are pressing yet further into the peculiarly fascinating realm when writing gives voice to the impossibility of writing.

This is why the lives of certain authors are likewise fascinating - not simply the books they write, but their correspondence, their notebooks, and in fact the very way they pass from day to day. Nothing is negligible, nothing inconsequential; writing also involves an attitude, an ethos. Writing is not a profession like others. Or rather, if it is treated as such - if the writer consents to appear to the world as an author, resting in the power and glory of his renown, this is to betray the risk that writing also is; the fact that the writer as writer depends on that passivity in which the 'il' takes the place of the 'I', and reveals all subject positions to be usurpations.

The Age of Capital

Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more.

But beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers.

True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with the impossible in writing, in reading, in life ...

The Test of Writing

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

Like so many words in his theoretical lexicon (or at least that lexicon he takes over from ordinary words), Blanchot doubles up the word writing, letting it name a state in which the self finds itself unable to gather its forces together as well as the activity of putting words on the page. Is this why he writes so often of exhaustion and affliction - of those states which likewise set the self back into its incapacity, bringing it face to face with what it cannot do? There are also, it is true, more positive moods ('we should know the disaster by joyful names') - joys, lightnesses - which are also the topic of the récits and the criticism, but these likewise are never simply undergone in the first person.

Each time, the act of writing depends upon what Kafka has called 'a merciful surplus of strength' that returns the writer to the 'I can' that opens the world according to what is possible for a human being. Each time, strength lifts the writer from the quagmire, from those swamplike moods in which the self is not yet gathered together. Moods which, if not uncommon - the everyday itself, says Blanchot, can also be doubled up, giving itself to be experienced as a drifting and vacancy, as that boredom which suspends the relation of the self to itself - are too quickly forgotten, like the night mists that vanish with morning.

These moods, one might think, are also forgotten by the writer who attempts to commit them to narrative; if to write is to draw on the 'merciful surplus of strength' that returns to the writer the capacity to write, then that same ability to be able separates itself from the mood in which nothing is possible, not even memory. Unless that same experience - understood, now, as a test or a trial (but who is tested? who is on trial?) - leaves its mark within memory, one upon which the writer might draw so as to take it up in narration.

Here, of course, the writer will not be aware of what he is doing. The act of writing banishes the exhaustion that relents for a moment to allow him to write - but there is still a way that it might carry with it a cloud of non-action, that it fails in an important way to achieve itself, and marks this non-achievement in the finished work of prose. For a time, for the writer, writing seems activity itself - it is only activity; Kafka writes 'The Judgement' all in one go, in one night, his legs sore from being cramped up beneath his desk; but there is then a falling away; the burst of writing soon ends, leaving the writer as before, waiting for the 'merciful surplus of strength' to catch him on its rising wave.

Then the drama of writing has little to do with personal initiative. Unless initiative - the freedom to write, to create a finished book - is given, not taken; unless it is understood to depend upon a kind of passivity with respect to the task at hand.

The Test of Inspiration

It is in this sense that writing always implies something like a trial or a test. That is, the attunement Blanchot seems to feel is important to the author is already a trial, breaking the writer from the linearity of time. Writing is always set back into this trial, drawing deep upon it even as it seems to leap forward as activity. Certainly, inspiration is that gathering of strength before a creative act; but isn't it also that wandering exile, the banishment from the time of production - of time as a medium of production, and from the self-relation that would allow the self to assume its agency? 

It is in this way that Blanchot recasts the experience of inspiration, which has always involved, in its traditional formulations, elements of passivity and activity. Unique in Blanchot, however, is the way in which the relation between those elements is understood. No one, I think, has set them apart so radically, and no one attempted to think what has been separated thus as part of the unitary movement of writing.

The experience of inspiration has always been concealed by the figure of the Muse, of the god; it was understood as a gift from afar, by which the Poet was called. With Blanchot, it is just such a gift, but one, now, deprived of the assurances of its origin. The modern writer (but this is not Blanchot's term) is not sure what to write, or how; he is not sure that what he has begun is a true beginning, and must entrust himself, instead, to the bare act of writing - an act which also involves non-action as it emerges from the test of inspiration.

Martrydom, Witnessing

In a sense, nothing other is at issue when Homer invokes the Muses than in the passage Kafka writes on the 'merciful surplus of strength'.

What did Homer suppose himself to be doing when he wrote (when he sang)? According to an interesting book by Finkelkraut, which I paraphrase here, he takes himself to be reporting the truth. No, Homer did not see what happened - he was not present at Troy, and many even say he was blind, but the Muses saw everything; they were eyewitnesses to the events. Even though Homer knows what occurred in broad outline, he calls upon the Muses to help him when his expertise fails. There is a point when he sings:

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus -you are gods, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge -tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers.

True enough, the Muses supply him with details he had no means of knowing.

With Kafka, it is no longer a matter of calling on otherworldly assistance. Inspiration, now, draws upon the hidden, unexpected assistance of writing - the way in which suffering can be doubled up as it is experienced, then written. Only to write is also a relief from suffering - it is the merciful surplus that propels writing, that gives it strength, until there is the risk of writing in bad faith, where the figure of the Author usurps the more humble figure of the writer, part of whom is always lost before the act of writing can begin.

This loss gives nothing that the writer can know. If, as is certainly the case, the trial of writing is also a kind of witnessing, a vigilance - what is seen, what is experienced, never belongs to the order of knowledge and not simply because the trial is only undergone by a single individual, affording only a single, limited experience of what happened. Rather, the witness is in lieu of himself; vigilance happens in the absence of self-relation, as an exposure that has not closed itself into an experience. It happens in an event which is without determinacy, without limit, that happens, if it can be said to happen, in the suspension of time understood as a medium of production.

Nothing then is known - at least not directly. There is no Muse to reveal what the writer cannot see. Then the writer, like Homer, is blind; he must be. Blind and without the prospect of seeing what lies ahead of him. Then writing, the act of writing, is a leap in the dark. A leap of a kind of faith, and which keeps memory of that solitary passion, that martyrdom of witnessing that happens upstream of action.

Darkness and Forgetting

Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous in the Odyssey both say the same thing: it was the desire of the gods to grant material for a song that led to the terror of the Trojan wars. Helen first of all (she is speaking of Paris, also, knowing that they were the cause of the war to come): 'On us two Zeus has set a doom of misery, so that in time to come we can be themes of song for men of future generations.' Alcinous claims the gods destroyed Troy and the Acheans 'that there might be a song in the ears of men yet unborn'.

The gods set the Trojan wars in motion to await the poet who would call upon the Muses to retell the events. But why did the gods, who saw everything, want to hear them told again? And what of the Muses, gods among the gods - why, if they were the ones who would give the poet the gift of song would they want to bring about the wars? Divine caprice? Or was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events happening anew in the song?

Whatever the answer, we also find the equivalent in Blanchot's fictions. Claudia says in When The Time Comes, 'No one here wants to belong to a récit [a narrative]'; this phrase is repeated in Waiting for Oblivion. The conclusion (is it a conclusion?) of The Madness of the Day: 'No more récits, never again.' Helen and Alcinous suspect that what has befell them did so for the benefit of the singers in the greater halls - for Homer himself. Blanchot's characters want only to disentangle themselves from linear narration, letting the word récit, like the word writing, double itself up, naming at once a literary genre, and narration in general, and the non-narratable: the event that does not belong to the order of knowable, recountable experience.

No more récits - but why? Because there are no more gods. The Muses were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Some asked how, if this were the case, the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus. Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, darkness, the forgotten.

When there are no gods, it is this darkness that rolls forward in the writer, which bears him. It is the forgotten that, retreating from knowledge, from the measure of knowledge, knows itself in the words of the writer whom it has chosen. Why, once again, did the gods want to give material to Homer's epics?

I think it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy and, with Hesiod's Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves. In one sense, Homer and Hesiod give way to a generation of philosophers who agree that the epic poets have already made the gods all too human. But in another - although this is an experience that will become increasingly closed to philosophy - it is darkness, the forgotten that returns in place of the many gods of Hesiod and the Olympus of Homer.  

The Sleeping Wall

I am getting to know the moods of the damp. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And then, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased? - and if so, by what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them, and it is as though I face the changing surface of the planet Solaris.

Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along - the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it is not running with water as it used to be. For a dehumidifier works night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pin pricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only managed?

The damp and I are companions in the quiet flat. Little happens here; the damp does its work, the wetness of its surface drawn through the filters of the dehumidifier into its transparent collection box, and I try to do mine. I am away a lot, and when I am, I think the damp plunges forward like a dark wave; I can smell it, very thick in the air, when I open the door after the taxi drops me off. Damp, in a wave, welcoming me. Obscure welcome. Thick and brown and wet in the air.

Sometimes I sponge down the walls with a mixture of water and bleach. It needs to be done in the bathroom, too, where black spores of mould are forming. And the wallpaper in the bedroom, too. But these are only symptoms. I touch a cool sponge to the wall as to a fevered brow. Be calm, be still, do not toss and turn. And now I imagine the damp is a dream of the wall, that it is lost in itself somehow, that if the wall were only to open its eyes and see me, then all would be well. But the wall seems to fall into itself. Lost in damp, or damp is what rises up when the wall disappears into coma.

I like to imagine that I could pick the walls up like a Chinese screen and turn them to the sun to dry. To lift up the ceiling and the flat above and let the sun find the wall, and dry it. That would let it live. That would awaken it. As it is, the wall is hunched upon itself and from the sun. It weeps in a corner. Did I take my Visitor, who has damp experts in her family, to the back of the kitchen, to show her the bricks whose surface can be scraped away like paste? It needs rebuilding, she thinks, the whole wall. The mushrooms, which grew last year from the corner of the kitchen ceiling as from a sweating armpit were the giveaway: dry rot, she says, a sure sign.

Her relatives rebuilt wall after wall in London houses. I tell her I want to cover it over instead. A new wall of dark grey rendering, to extend the work I've already had done: perfect. A mesh, and then a layer of concrete above the bricks that are turning to paste ... And now I imagine the wall is like a wounded horse that needs silence and care. The wall and I, and the damp a disease we will have to wait out.

But how long for? Warmer days are approaching, I think, though it was freezing today, and there were a few snowflakes in the air. Warmer days, and the simple honesty of the sun, which will break everything dry. And if I cannot pick up the wall to turn it around, inner to outer, so there are no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, there is still the slow penetration of the sun, slow, and over the whole outer wall, rendered and unrendered. And one day it will be summer, too, in my kitchen.

Not Religious

W. and I on the train drinking our Plymouth gin from plastic cups. 'How come you got more ice than me?' He reaches over and grabs a handful of mine.

W.'s book on the table. 'Cohen' sighs W. 'That's what I should be reading, instead of talking idiocies with you.'

Then he tells me about calculus and God. 'That's why Rosensweig thought God existed. It's all about calculus!' W.'s dad tried to teach him calculus. W. didn't understand a word. 'I wasn't ready.' But W.'s found a website now. He does exercises.

A little later, he says, 'We're not religious. We've got no interest in religion. We're not capable of religious belief.'

Calvino

'Do you like having a Boswell?', I ask W. - 'W. is a fiction. He's not me', says W. 'I have to explain that to people.' - 'Do you like how I give you the best lines?' - 'Yes why do you do that? God, stop writing down everything I say. You're even writing this down, aren't you? It's turning into a fucking Calvino novel!'

Blanche Dubois

We're lost on the campus, both drunk.

There's always a point when you turn when you drink', says W. 'Normally you like me taking the piss out of you, but then you suddenly start getting offended. And then you're absolutely rude. Rude and obnoxious.' - 'It's a sign of friendship' I tell him. 'I'm not like that with anyone else.'

'You're like Blanche Dubois when you drink,' says W., 'maudlin and then vicious.'

W.'s Notebook

'Is it really called a man bag?', I ask W. - 'No. It's just what I call it.' - 'What have you got in there?' He begins to empty it. A book. Hermann Cohen on infinitesimal calculus, in the original. - 'Wow! maths and German!' - 'See, I'm a scholar,' he says. 'Not like you.' A notebook, which he writes in two different directions, following the practice of our friend P.

At the front, the ideas of others; at the back, his ideas. - 'How many ideas have you had?', I ask him. He opens the notebook for me. 'Mmm. Quite a few. Can I copy some out?' W. says I can. 'A book must produce more thought than it itself has', I write. 'The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics', I write. And the best one, 'It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster' - I copy that out, too.