Spurious

Q. Are you interested in Facebook?

A. No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort.

Friedrich Kittler interviewed 

What's interesting about Shakespeare is that he's interested in madness as a language. What Shakespeare is saying is [...] that mad people speak in an extraordinary way. And one of the things about mad people is that they seem able to perform being mad as well as as it were being mad or we wonder really what they want us to think they're saying. 

They perplex us [...] Mad people are very important to Shakespeare, because it is as though they enact how perplexing language is, especially when it's as its most intensely poetic.

Adam Phillips, from a South Bank Special on Art and Insanity here.

What's ragged should be left ragged.

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture which God makes. As a man sits quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. - Now, do I believe that this happens? I don't. [...]

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill. / Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Go on, believe! It does no harm!

No cry of torment can be great than the cry of one man. / Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer. / A man is capable of infinite torment therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help. / The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite torment. / The whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul. / The Christian faith - as I see it - is a man's refuge in this ultimate torment. [...]

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched.

Are all men great? No. - Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man! Why should something be bestowed on you that's not bestowed on your neighbour? To what purpose?! If it isn't you wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you experience (other than vanity)? Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of my particular talent.

The thought working its way towards the light.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. / Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning of think about things in a new way. The change is a decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish.

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? - Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!

[...] a man will never be great if he misjudges himself: if he throws dust in his own eyes.

How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life! [...]

The purely corporeal can by uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

[...] Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be. -

I cannot kneel to pray because it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. [...]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.

The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart.

A typical American film, naive and silly, can - for all its silliness and even by means of it - be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film.

Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens - why should I concern myself that the fruits of my labours should not be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in any case be more than clever.

Sometimes you see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway).

The book is full of life - not like a man, but like an ant-heap.

One keeps forgotten to go right down to the foundations. One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down.

'Wisdom is grey'. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.

My thoughts probably move in a far narrower circle than I suspect.

Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes.

Perhaps one day this civilisation will produce a culture. [...]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

[...] the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes or does.

What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.

(For the Preface). It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon - this is what I wish for it - be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. [...]

I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!

Bach said that all his achievements were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength. And someone who, with all this, can also express himself perfectly, simply speaks to us in the language of a great man.

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

A writer far more talented than I would still have only a minor talent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Tradition is not something a man can learn; nor a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. / Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Moore stirred up a philosophical wasps' nest with his paradox; and the only reason the wasps did not duly fly out was that they were too listless.

In the sphere of the mind someone's project cannot usually be continued by anyone else, nor should it be. These thoughts will fertilise the soil for a new sowing.

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

Ambition is the death of thought.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'

For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.

If Christianity is truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.

I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us 'the existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, - life can force this concept on us. [...]

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

God may say to me: 'I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them'.

Wittgenstein, random remarks from his notebooks, from Culture and Value

Interview with Adam Phillips here.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.

My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.

I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

We are struggling with language. / We are engaged in a struggle with language.

Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.

What would it feel like not to have heard of Christ? / Should we feel left alone in the dark? / Do we escape such a feeling simply in the way a child escapes it when he knows there is someone in the room with him.

Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

Working in philosophy [...] is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)

The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. [...] Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumpled. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.

A confession has to be a part of your new life. 

I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express. Actually not as much as that, but by no more than a tenth. That is still worth something. Often my writing is nothing by 'stuttering'.

I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. [...]

Incidentally, when I was in Norway during the year 1913-14 I had some thoughts of my own, or so at least it seems to me now. I mean I have the impression that at the time I brought to life new movements in thinking (but perhaps I am mistaken). Whereas now I seem just to apply old ones.

The delight I take in my thoughts is a delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living?

Don't play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do.

If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed.

The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.

The horrors of hell can be experienced within a single day; that's plenty of time.

The light work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light.

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. [...]

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

I find it important in philosophising to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. [...]

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.

You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.

In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak it; - but not because he is not yet clever enough. / The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in falsehood and reaches out from falsehood towards truth on just one occasion.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e. though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. / One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil. [...]

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. [...]

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level., so that they immediately decline as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. [...]

One might say: 'Genius is talent exercised with courage'.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning, - then it can be put back into circulation.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

You must say something new and yet it must all be old. / In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things - and all the same it must be something new. [...]

As we get old, problems slip from our fingers again, as they used to when we were young. It isn't just that we can't crack them, we cannot even keep hold of them.

Don't demand too much, and don't be afraid that what you demand justly will melt into nothing.

Philosophers use a language that is already deformed as though by shoes that are too tight.

You can't build clouds. And that's why the future you dream of never comes true.

Virtually in the same way as there is a difference between deep and shallow sleep, there are thoughts which occur deep down and thoughts which bustle about on the surface.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophises yearns for.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

My account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it.

some notes of Wittgenstein from Culture and Value

You used to be believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.

Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death.

You are not among those who ended up sick and old, with withered ghostly bodies, resembling death before they've stopped living. Their demise is the fulfilment of their decrepitude. A ruin that dies: is this not deliverance, is it not the death of death? As for you, you departed in vitality. Young, lively, healthy. You death was the death of life. Yet I like to think that you embodied the opposite: the life of death. I don't try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity.

Stray paragraphs from Eduard Leve's Suicide

That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair.  I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does.  I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism.   By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.  Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.  It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity. 

Wendy Brown, interviewed

Will Buckingham's brief review of Spurious.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian on the Not the Booker event hosted by Melville House at The Book Club in Shoreditch last week.

Fleur MacDonald in The Spectator on The White Review and (in passing) the Manifesto of mine that was published there. 

(Apologies for the lack of real content at the blog. This should change soon.)

'Literary Melancholy', a long new interview with me by David Winters is now up at 3:AM. On the Manifesto, the Daniel Davis Wood essay and other things.